David Murray

dmurray@greatfallstribune.com

Dava Newman delivered her message to a group of wide-eyed grade-school kids seated in rows before her at the ExplorationWorks Science Center in Helena. It was as much a recruitment pitch as it was an informative lecture.

“That’s what I’m counting on all you guys for,” Newman told the children before her. “To be my Martian astronauts of the future. Come work at NASA. Study hard; study everything you like. We need scientists and engineers and mathematicians, but guess what? We need artists, we need designers, we need historians. We need everyone to study all the disciplines to get us to Mars and beyond.”

Among the 50 fresh faces starring up at Newman – and among the hundreds more she’s visited within the preceding year – there’s a good chance that at least a few will take up the engineer’s challenge, inspired to become the first generation of human interplanetary travelers, just as Newman was inspired by the Apollo moon missions 40 years earlier.

“I think in your lifetimes we’ll have people living on Earth and we’ll have people living on Mars,” she said. “You are my Martian generation.”

The room sat in silence, parents and students alike mesmerized by the possibilities.

It’s been less than a year since Congress confirmed Newman as deputy administrator of NASA. Newman grew up in Helena, graduating from Capital High School in 1982 before launching her prestigious career as an aerospace biomedical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The state’s most famous aerospace engineer returned to Montana for a brief visit home during the first half of March. Newman carved out a few private moments with family and friends, but progress toward a manned mission to Mars is locked into an aggressive timeline – leaving little time for rest or relaxation.

“The reason astronauts are going to Mars is to search for life, to live there and to eventually become interplanetary, and we expect to have boots on Mars in the 2030s,” Newman said.

It’s been 11 months since the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to confirm Newman as the space agency’s deputy administrator. Since then, the Helena Capital High School graduate has been on a continuous assignment as “NASA’s biggest cheerleader” to expand public awareness and support for what can arguably be described as the greatest journey of exploration in human history.

Spacesuit prototype donated to Montana museum

In Helena, Newman detailed some of the major advances NASA has recently achieved, and outlined plans for the near future.

The space agency operates 28 Earth observing satellites, continuously monitoring the Earth’s weather, mapping terrain, measuring soil moisture content and monitoring natural disasters and the effects of climate change.

“Our earth science research is world class and very important,” Newman said. “It’s a huge part of our portfolio.”

However, most of the science being done in preparation for a mission to Mars takes place aboard the International Space Station.

This micro-gravity laboratory orbits the Earth 16 times a day at a distance of roughly 220 miles above the planet’s surface. It can be easily seen passing overhead as a bright point of light that moves steadily across the night sky. In fact, NASA maintains a website, spotthestation.nasa.gov, for people interested in learning when the space station will next pass across their line of sight.

“You can definitely tell when it passes overhead because it’s so close,” Newman said. “It’s the brightest star in the night sky.”

Including its 16 solar panels, the space station occupies an area roughly equal to a football field, but the habitable space is much smaller, about the size of one-and-a-half jumbo jet bodies. The station has been continuously occupied by a rotating crew of six for more than 15 years, and is expected to remain operational until 2024.

Only days before Newman’s visit to Montana, U.S. Space Station Commander Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart, Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth following 342 days in space. Their yearlong stay has been the focus of a major study on the human health effects of long-duration space flights.

The human body is not adapted to a weightless environment. Without gravity’s persistent downward tug, bones and muscles begin to waste away. For every month in space, astronauts lose around 2 percent of their bone mass, and crews must spend at least two hours a day exercising to keep from becoming frail.

However, the most troubling physical aspects of space flight relate to the behavior of fluids in space. Digestion, circulation and the ability of the body to fight infection are all negatively impacted by weightlessness.

“Essentially all your bodily processes work differently without gravity.” Newman said.

An odd side-effect of weightlessness is that the human body stretches in a zero-gravity environment. Upon his return to Earth, Kelly temporarily measured 2 inches taller than his identical twin, retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.

The information collected during Kelly and Kornienko’s year in space is being used to determine what it will take to keep astronauts healthy during a mission to Mars that could last longer than three years.

Unlike the early decades of NASA, when space exploration was characterized as a “race” between the U.S. and Soviet Union, current space science is very much an international collaborative effort. Five major partners operate the International Space Station: the U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency.

Since the retirement of the space shuttle fleet in 2011, the United States has relied heavily upon the Russians for “launch access services,” the rockets and spacecraft required to move cargo and astronauts back and forth to the International Space Station.

This, according to Newman, is only a brief intermediary step toward the goal of greater involvement by private industry in space research. NASA has already formalized contracts with private companies such as SpaceX and Orbital ATK for support services.

“They’re resupplying the space station. We don’t do that anymore,” Newman said. “Private industry now has skin in the game. Sure, we’re doing the seed funding now, but when they become commercially viable and our investments end, then our NASA budget goes further toward deep-space exploration.”

“Pharmaceuticals, material science – these are ripe areas to really break through in terms of being commercially viable,” she continued. “We’re really looking forward to the commercialization of low-earth orbit.”

In little more than two years, NASA expects to make the first unmanned launch of its Space Launch System, now under development. The SLS will be the largest and most powerful rocket NASA has ever built.

Montana to Mars: Newman guides NASA effort

Standing taller than the Statue of Liberty, the SLS will be able to carry more than three times the mass that the space shuttle did, and will have 15 percent more lift capacity than the current generation of Saturn V rockets. The SLS will be a vital component necessary to deliver humans and cargo into deep space.

Exploration Mission I (EM-1), using the SLS and topped by the new Orion spacecraft, is already scheduled for 2018. That first unmanned flight will send the SLS to an orbit beyond the moon, then bring it back to Earth to test the system’s performance prior to a manned mission.

“Right now we're on budget for EM-1 and we’re putting our contractors’ feet to the fire,” Newman said. “We’re making all the milestones, we’re passing all the tests, we’re right on schedule. If we’re fully funded, then I think we’ll make the first crewed Exploration II mission sometime in 2021.”

That mission is expected to take a crew of four into deep space, out beyond the orbit of the moon, farther from Earth than humans have ever ventured. Following that, NASA is planning a new deep-space mission about once every year, leading up to a manned mission to Mars sometime in the mid-2030s.

All this begs the question: Why? Is all the investment and human energy really worth it? Why are we compelled to go to Mars when so many other compelling issues of environmental degradation and human health remain here on Earth?

“That’s the same question that was debated in Europe more than 500 years ago,” Newman responded, referring to a time when North and South America seemed equally far away and mysterious. “That’s the question that is always asked of exploration.”

She pointed out that NASA’s annual budget of around $19 billion a year amounts to less than one-half of 1 percent of the total national budget, and that the potential benefits in scientific research and human understanding are enormous.

“Are we alone in the universe? Are there other habitable planets? We want the answers to those questions,” she said. “That’s why we are so interested in going to Mars, and to me, every investment in scientific discovery and exploration is well worth it.”