Dava Newman

A cura Rossella Balduit

Dava Newman is a biomedical aerospace engineer and she’s a teacher at Boston MIT. She also worked for the NASA. She was born in the USA in 1964.

In 2019 I went to a Dava’s conference in Treviso with some of my classmates and my teachers. After the conference we met and interviewed Dava.

She told us that along her career she had to face a lot of difficulties, mostly because she was a woman and her work was considered for men.

But Dava had a target and she wanted to reach it.

She got her doctorate in biomedical aerospace engineering and other degrees in technology and politics.

In 2014 she got the role of Deputy Administrator at NASA and she left it in 2017.

Today she’s a teacher but she also collaborates with an Italian company that produces motorcyclist suit, Dainese.

She is working on the Biosuit, a new prototype of space suit that will be used to go into space, directions Mars.

Biosuit is more elastic and comfortable than other space suits and it allows smoother movements.

It’s made with technical fabrics that make it more adherent thanks to a pressure system.

Dava works in a team and she always collaborates with other people.

For us students it is sometimes difficult to get along when we work in a group, so we asked her to some advice.

She told us that working together is important because it implies putting together ideas and the result is better and that to collaborate with others is necessary to listen to what other people have to say.

Dava is one of many women that work in science and she had to work hard to get awards. Women are committed every day to fighting the many prejudices.

Despite this Dava puts a lot of energy and mostly a lot of passion in her work.

Biosuit

What’s Biosuit?

The creation of Biosuit starts from the studies of Arthur Iberall in 1940.

He said that, despite the movement, there are some parts of the body that don’t contract or stretch and need some “non-extension lines” to keep the pressure steady.

This new suit replaces automatic pressurization with mechanical pressurization, without interfering with astronauts’ movement.

Automatic pressure makes the suit heavy and cumbersome, while the mechanical one makes it more elastic and more comfortable.

Biosuit will be used for the first trip to Mars that will take place around 2030.

How is Biosuit made?

Red and black threads that decorate the suit’s prototype represent the “non- extension lines”.

The suit will make with elastic material and it’ll have to guarantee the right load of oxygen, protect from the absence of gravity and solar radiations, but it’ll surely have to be comfortable and practice.