(audience applauds)

(upbeat music)

Hello, good morning.

Wired, cross with design, cross with skywalkers,

out of this world.

We're thrilled to be here.

So let's take a journey from Earth to Mars

if you'll allow us.

Imagine all the world leaders in the United Nations

looking out the window and seeing Spaceship Earth.

Coined by Buckminster Fuller, the Renaissance engineer,

designer, architect.

He had the pleasure to have him as an adviser

for his lunar-based colony.

Bucky's vision was that we'd make different decisions,

important decisions, if we saw the world, the Earth,

as our own blue dot, our own own space ship,

and if we could see war, famine, hunger, and celebration,

and music, but we would see it very holistically.

We would see Earth in its entirety.

This morning was a beautiful sunrise,

but maybe not as beautiful as Earth rise from moon.

I'm a rocket scientist, an engineer,

and I have the great job to work with great students.

And our goal is simply to design

the world's best space suit, so we can get people to Mars.

It's been a great collaboration

that I'd like to tell you about.

Have to understand the current space suit.

It's fantastic, it's an engineering marvel,

it keeps you alive, gives you oxygen,

scrubs out your carbon dioxide,

gives you the pressure that you need to survive

in the vacuum of space.

Beautiful, wonderful, but it's kind of big and bulky

and heavy, so we have some great design challenges

just waiting for us.

We've been working on 'em for a couple decades.

45 years ago, the Apollo suit,

again, a phenomenal

engineering feat. (audience laugh)

But couldn't get a lot of science done.

One-sixth gravity of the moon.

So you're really light, you're low,

but just can't reach down there to get my scientific pack.

(audience laughs)

We'd like a little bit better locomotion.

This bunny hop, we'd like to give you natural motion.

So a little hard to get our exploring done.

Again, great for 45 years ago, but we can do better.

That's our challenge.

The current suit today, this is astronaut Cady Coleman

going for a training run underwater,

in NASA's neutral buoyancy lab,

the world's largest swimming pool at 6.2 million gallons.

So you dress up, it's 140 kilos, that's close to 300 pounds,

gas pressurized, and you're really fighting,

and you have to move to move the suit.

So you're wasting probably 75% of your oxygen

just to move the suit.

I'm gonna introduce you to three different design concepts,

so three suits.

First, the Gravity Loading Countermeasure Suit,

kinda called The Blue Suit.

So the pushups are great,

when you're really in a microgravity environment,

we're flying on the NASA plane.

This is a compression garment,

so it's loading from the shoulders down to your feet,

compressing you, recompressing you,

'cause you actually grow a couple centimeters

when you get into the weightless environment.

You have a lot of muscle loss, 30% muscle atrophy.

That's the good news.

The bad news is the bones,

one to 2% bone mineral density loss, per month.

Now who wants to go six months on station?

We have a one-year mission coming up.

So our designs for these compression garments,

this is an exercise countermeasure inside the vehicle.

But to really help the astronaut stay healthy and well,

and you have to do this in parallel

with exercise, you know rowing and on a treadmill.

To the left you see a little fellow.

We're using our same design technologies,

the materials and the design,

for little folks with motor control disease

right here on Earth.

This little fellow has cerebral palsy.

Can we help his daily activities?

Just help him step, help him walk, help his motor control

just be a little bit better,

so he can enjoy just daily activities

of being a fun little six-year-old.

We're working on it, we still have a way to go.

Second suit I wanna tell you about is

a suit within a suit, if you will.

So developed and designed the technology

for the current systems,

for the current gas-pressurized suits.

Again, they're fantastic, but they're so big,

they're oversized and there's a lot of injuries.

Matter of fact, we have, from the shuttle and station,

astronaut's 25 shoulder surgeries,

injuries from training, going underwater,

doing all of that training twelve hours of training

for one hour of space flight.

So what was the design innovation?

How could we help?

Well, maybe we could map,

maybe we could map the human motion.

Where are those injuries potentially gonna take place?

And then could we do something about solving it?

So we've come up with a suit within a suit

that I'll show you part of. (laughs)

Called The Octopus.

I'm wearing it.

And we've developed these pressure sensors

so that we can get that map, if you will.

So these red sensors all over, these little sensors here,

see why we call it the octopus?

It can straps on, so as I move,

and as I make contact with the suit,

then these pressure sensors are giving me that map,

and they're showing me what the force is.

How do we do it?

Well, these are actually micro-fluidic channel,

you push on 'em, you get very high resolution

pressure sensing kinda over the whole body.

It's a collaboration with Rob Woods Lab

at Harvard University.

So this is a great MIT and Harvard collaboration.

How does it work?

So we did strap it on the subject,

put him in the NASA Mark III suit.

This is down at Johnson's Space Center in Houston.

And let's take it for a roll.

Trying to get maximum mobility,

and trying measure, again, how I'm moving,

and then how I'm going about moving the suit,

and how much energy is all that taking me.

Maybe, like I said, maybe I'm wasting a lot of energy

just trying to move the suit.

You see some sensors on the outside of the suit,

'cause we're also measuring the outside motion.

Better than the Apollo suits,

mm, but, we still have a long way to go.

Oh, the students love that.

They call that the reverse Macarena.

(audience laughs)

So it's wired, you guys, no one's afraid of data here,

so this is from six different sensors.

And what's showing is,

as I make contact with these different points,

then it goes along.

So we can see here's maybe where injury is.

This is what the force is.

So we can really quantify now, for the first time,

it's kind of our eyes inside the suit.

So real high point here on the forearm, underneath the arm,

'cause I have to move the arm of the suit up.

Now I reach across.

And so there's a point right here of pressure.

Move over here.

So, again, just kind of really looking at the detailed

and this map, and what the pressure levels are,

and will they cause injury or not.

And then the final phase of this design

is actually how can we do something about it?

This is actually a collaboration with Gui,

this is their latest prototype.

Gui working with Dianese,

and industrial designer Michal Krajcik from Poland.

So how can we actually protect?

It's an active system, it's kinda like airbag technology,

but you're wearing it and protecting your shoulders.

It still gives you all the mobility you need.

But it's really wonderful three dimensional materials,

that, again, it sizes.

I need about four centimeters

to take up the room in the suit.

But someone else might just need one millimeter.

So it's all very custom fit.

And we're hoping that this can dissipate the energy.

And we'll be testing this in the NASA suit coming up

in early 2015.

Moving onto the third suit, the Biosesuit, which you see here.

We have a mock-up to show you,

and I'd like to tell you a little bit about that.

Design-wise we thought clean sheet design.

All these gas pressurized suits,

it's all that we've ever done,

it's all that we've ever known for NASA,

and the Russian program.

Everyone has been in a gas-pressurized 140,

close to 300 pound suit for microgravity.

It just won't cut it when we get to Mars.

Why Mars?

It's challenging (laughs), it's pretty far away,

but it does make sense, in the future,

to send humans and rovers to Mars.

We have five current missions to Mars right now.

Their rovers, our vehicles,

three of them are on the surface,

getting us a whole bunch of scientific data on Mars.

We just landed last week in an orbit of Mars,

MAVEN, from NASA, and the Indian space agency

is now orbiting Mars, too.

So we know a lot about Mars, the radiation,

and the environment, and how to work on Mars.

And it is challenging.

Olympus Mons is right here in the middle,

second highest volcano known in the solar system,

three times Mount Everest.

So for all you climbers out there,

there's still more challenges in the solar system.

(Audience laughs)

And Valles Marineris, the grand valley of Mars,

Grand Canyon, naw, Valles Marineris is ten times the length

of the Grand Canyon.

So we have some extreme exploration to do.

How do we think we're gonna do it?

Well, the Biosesuit then says,

we're not gonna go with the gas-pressurized system.

We still need to pressurize you, it's the pressure layer,

so it's mechanical counterpressure.

I'm gonna squeeze you, it is literally a second skin suit.

So we're gonna put the pressure directly on your skin.

We have to create a third of an atmosphere.

So we'll create a third of an atmosphere,

and then how to we do that.

We actually do that through both the material properties

and the design.

If I'm really interested in how do I get

maximum flexibility, how I'm gonna repel up this mountain,

Olympus Mons.

How can I have maximum flexibility and not be restricted?

Well, we look at the body, we study the body.

And, matter of fact, for an aerospace engineer,

I know way too much about the skin.

So as you're moving, if you drew little circles

all over your skin, and moved around,

those little circles would turn elliptical,

like the animation plane.

So there's two red lines, those bisecting diameters,

from the circle to the ellipse, they pivot,

but they don not extend, they're very special

little bisecting diameters.

If I connect all those red dots,

it's really just the mathematics, we actually get this suit,

so the black lines here on this suit.

So if we do that, again, we're looking at the basis

of kind of second skin, and it's kind of a soft exoskeleton.

If we can do that, I can have enough structure of the suit,

but I can get you maximum mobility.

So that's the power (mumbles) and then the materials,

we're always looking for advanced materials as well,

to get us the pressure production.

So we've hit our targets, just recently,

using some shape memory alloy, some active materials,

in concert with the design and the patterning.

And then lately, we also have a brand new helmet

to introduce you to.

So introducing Gui, my partner and soulmate,

tell you about the new Biosesuit helmet.

Hey, guys.

(audience applauds) Good to be here.

It's wonderful to work with this lady, let me tell ya'.

And the latest part of the

Biosesuit is working on this helmet.

We're spending a lot of time trying to make it lighter.

I mean, Dava is the leader designer

constantly make it lighter and thinner.

So this suit eventually probably be as thick as our skin.

The idea is to make this helmet as mobiles

and visible as possible.

The changes are great compared to

what the NASA present suit is.

In this one, you move your head with it.

We increased the visibility,

because we wanna do exploration,

or you wanna work with your hands.

We still have visors to add, as you see in the image.

We have a bar where actually we'll attach tools,

such as videos, equipment, scientific equipment, and so on.

So I've been working on this thing for about 35 years,

in the space business, since I was student.

I became injected by the virus of space.

And as an architect and designer,

basically has veered my life totally to another world,

where I thought I was going

And this started literally in 1969, arriving in Houston,

a few weeks before the Apollo landed on the moon.

And since then, as an architect, I wanted to work on space.

I was down the street, I went to NASA,

and eventually got involved in the lunar bases,

and many of the designs that you see up here.

We were working at the time on glorious projects

of very large space stations, where we had colonies,

and lower orbit colonies on the moon.

It's taken a long time,

but today we have an incredibly laboratory in space.

This is our space station, this is a place where

astronauts work every day of the year.

We have six to nine astronauts constantly there

experimenting, living, learning.

This thing is about over 100 yards long,

it's longer than a football field.

So I had the privilege of spending about 10 years

working in the interior of this hardware,

looking at really the human factors,

how humans would live here,

how humans will eat, sleep,

and all of the habitation aspects of it,

you know, the human factors.

I mean, you're designing for an environment

that you don't know anything about.

So we've spent a lot of time flying on this NASA plane,

the Vomit Comet, as we call it.

(laughs)

And then a lot of time underwater.

So spend in neutral buoyancy.

This is a galley.

The space station is designed with these modules.

So we have about three-and-a-half of these modules

to pack food, to store it, to freeze it,

to refrigerate it, to prepare it.

So we went all the way from the design of the packaging,

how do you actually store these things.

And in space, you don't have,

particularly, without gravity, you don't have convection.

So really creating an oven, the oven was a beautiful design

to make it work, the beginning of really

injection heating and so on.

So spent tremendous amount of time really working

on full-scale prototypes, actually building these things,

and testing them with astronauts.

And the other part that I'll show you today

is the sleeping quarters,

where spent time designing the sleeping bag

that restrains you and holds you.

We talked a lot with astronauts

about how they would like to sleep.

And some of them just float around,

and the sleep right here and wake up over there,

over the roof.

And you can travel, because the air pushes you around.

In SkyLab, the first space station,

people would sleep this way, because there was only three.

Now it would be difficult with too many guys hanging around.

So we worked on this space, creating the most private space,

we took care of acoustics, lighting, communication, safety.

So this is your personal space.

So what is next after the space station?

We're talking about probably 2025 is when the space station,

basically the life of the space station.

But the next step would be to go to Mars.

That's why we're working on the suits and so on.

But before we go to Mars,

we have to learn our lessons.

Mars is about a year away from here,

a year there and a year back.

So you need to design systems that are totally reliable

where they will last.

You can repair them, but you cannot exchange them

you cannot ask for help.

So, therefore, the lunar surface is really the place to go

to test and learn about how we might live one day in Mars

and starting to live on the moon.

There are many reasons to go to the moon.

The moon really has a lot of oxygen, believe it or not,

contained in the soil, a lot of metals, a lot of glass,

a lot of materials that we can use

both for construction of vehicles on the moon,

or to make an atmosphere, to create propellant,

oxygen is our propellant to go to Mars.

So maybe it becomes a propellant depot.

The challenge of the moon, obviously, is that

you have a reduced gravity.

So in many ways, it helps you.

But, on the other hand, when I was working with

Bucky Fuller, actually, spent time thinking about

how we anchor these things to

the soil and the rock

on the moon, the forces were so great.

So we're working on a lot of different geometries,

of how to make these inflatables.

And inflatables are really the way to go.

We're working right now in inflatables

and actually we'll fly inflatables to the space station

as additional modules.

So it's really cool, the development of the new fabrics,

the new materials that allow us to do this.

So the vision now is actually to, instead of actually build

a stationary base, if exploration needs mobility.

I mean, to explore it means that you're gonna be

running around the moon, and exploring these mountains

or Mars, on these canyons, and picking up samples.

So we're looking at the potential,

and this is the proposal that we're making to NASA

to actually explore the moon with these rovers.

This is an early rover that pull a program that it give 'em

a huge range away from their module.

But our proposal right now is to have these vehicles,

two of these, that would take four astronauts each,

so you have a crew of eight guys traveling on this kinda

Winnebago of the moon.

Has that manipular arm that can actually pick things up

and bring 'em in.

And so we can experiment without having to go out.

You could go out if you need to.

And so this has an incredible suspensions system.

Not gonna bore you with all the engineering.

But if you look at this thing from the top,

it has all the air and water, and water tanks.

So with this manipulator, you can actually exchange 'em

as crews exchange the--

It's just like taking a cruise,

crews would go in, crews would go on out.

And it has the solar panels, and the radiators,

and all these things.

And the interior basically is four work stations

where you live and work.

And it has to house all of our needs,

you know, the hygiene, you name it, food and so on,

the same as a space station.

The Scorpions actually have this nomadic structure,

inflatable structure, that would expand and contract.

So when they're camping, and the two of them come together,

they can mate and actually have this tunnel,

this environment, that will serve as a workshop

or a laboratory, or a place to play.

So this is really our now the proposal,

the idea of actually mobility on the moon,

and maybe that's the way we should go to Mars.

So we're using the Antarctic as an analog right now

for some of these planetary missions.

There's already a base in the Arctic and

some in the Antarctic.

I had the pleasure and privilege to work in the South Pole.

We won a competition, a national competition,

for the design of the of the South Pole station.

And the reason why I think we won it

is because we're really thinking space,

we're really thinking isolation,

we're really thinking about extreme environments,

people living in a very dangerous environment.

It's really strange when you land there

and the plane leaves.

They can't turn the engines off, because it freezes,

it won't come on again.

And so you're left there with your bags

and this thing leaves.

So what we learned, really is to design for the environment.

We're looking at aerodynamics, the wind,

in the South Pole blows always from the same place.

So this becomes like a vehicle.

This is actually what was built.

But we use that as a great analog,

there's a lot of experimentation going on there.

And then wanna leave you with a last story

that is our own story that we circumnavigated the planet

on our sailboat.

And basically to teach children,

to teach children about technology and exploration,

and this is the route we took.

Basically went around the world from Boston to the equator,

and then just went around and as close as we could

to the tropical areas of the planet.

We met really some fantastic people.

We had a couple of projects that we work with.

In terms of creating maps,

we asked all the kids to make maps

and it was really wonderful for you graphic designers,

because the maps always place themselves

in the center of the Earth, and in the front of it.

So we have this fantastic collection of kids' maps,

where it's like a picture of the earth,

taking from all the different spots.

The other one was oral history,

where we asked kids to ask the same questions to their

friends, their parents, their grandparents,

and people in their community.

So like what is the technology that most influenced you?

And it was really beautiful to see the differences,

just in the three generations.

So we have a beautiful collection of that.

So, anyway, we were supported by NASA on this project.

And we basically had thes video conferences

that we had in every place

where we could do it around the planet,

with high schools, local high schools,

then we connected high school in the United States,

in many different states, and then an astronaut at NASA.

So we had three-way conversations

and it was really wonderful to see the conversations,

anywhere from what jeans you wore, to what music you heard,

and in addition to all the science and technology.

It was a great trip, we survived, so we're back.

We wanted to leave you just with one image,

again, from all of our exploring, off planet, back to Earth,

it always comes back to the human condition

and the human spirit.

Thank you for your attention.

Thank you.

(audience applauds) (upbeat music)

(electronic tone)