- [Narrator] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(air whooshing) (bright music) - I'm an aerospace biomedical engineering professor at MIT.
I teach and do research trying to keep astronauts alive.
So I design space suits for future lunar/Mars missions, which is really fantastic.
I also look at astronaut performance in microgravity, looking into their muscles and bones.
I get to study astronauts and fly cool experiments up into space.
And then it has applications here on Earth.
How do people walk and run and perform, so enhancing locomotion and looking at Earth pathologies as well as space applications.
I just told a little piece of the puzzle, you know, It's good, it's a little scatter brain.
(soft music) (air whooshing) (bright music) I love to sail.
My partner Guillermo and I are avid sailors.
We actually circumnavigated the Earth.
Took 18 months but it's probably the best thing we ever did in our lives.
It's like being on a big, blue desert.
When you're crossing an ocean, you don't see anything, except for the horizon.
Sometimes days or a week goes by when you don't see anyone.
And you experience everything.
You experience some beautiful days of sun, peace, tranquility.
Other times you experience some of the worst weathers that I've ever seen.
(lightning striking) In extreme weather conditions, things break, everything breaks.
It's 1:00 a.m., it was pitch black.
We lost our steering midway across the Pacific.
And of course it was on my shift.
Things always break on my shift.
(bright music) But when day broke, we could see what the problem was, and sure enough, we had a hydraulic leak, and all of our hydraulic fluid had been lost to the build and pumped over.
So what do you do with no staring, no hydraulics?
(bright music) So then I did this really great mixing experiment.
We were crossing the Pacific, so we had left Panama a few weeks earlier, and I had bought five liters of extra virgin olive oil, my favorite.
Turns out extra virgin olive oil and hydraulic fluid, exact same viscosity.
You put 'em together, the mixing is great.
So we pumped our boat full of four liters of extra virgin olive oil.
A day or two later, we were back up and running, had our steering back, and we made it another 1,000 miles to the Marquesas Islands, which is the first rock that we could get to so that we could really fix our hydraulics properly.
That was our Apollo 13.
(bright music) So we went to 33 different nations, Australia and Brazil and Panama and Puerto Rico.
And we really wanted to meet kids who lived there, and maybe do some teaching.
So we offered seminars entitled Exploration by Sea and Space.
Why explore?
Why do we sail around the world?
Why do we wanna go back to the Moon and Mars?
To search for new knowledge.
And I think exploration is really good for the human spirit.
Think about how Apollo, the Moon missions affected humanity.
- [Armstrong] That's one small step for men, one giant leap for mankind.
(bright music) (air whooshing) (bright music) - [Man] Two, one, zero.
- I was five years old when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, but it was really important to me.
- [McCandless] Okay, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now.
- I remember the astronauts coming down the lunar module and landing.
And then the camera zoomed in not to shortly after on the footprint.
What an image to remember, someone loping on the Moon in those space suits and walking on another planet.
- [Cernan] Hippity-hoppity, hippity-hoppity, hippity-hoppity, over hill.
- So I think it really did plant the seeds of my career in aerospace engineering.
(bright music) This is the biosuit, it's a mockup.
So it's our fourth generation mockup.
The most important biosuit design goals are to come up with a completely new way to keep someone alive in a pressure suit.
We wanna provide a lot more locomotion and mobility and want the astronauts to use a lot less energy.
I can move around for you, you can see I have a lot of flexibility, I can move my arms and legs.
When we get to the Moon and Mars, we're gonna be on our knees.
We're gonna be digging, climbing.
So I need it to be really mobile and flexible.
And so that's the advantage of some of our designs.
If you guys do it with me, you can do calisthenics.
The black lines allow me to fully move my arms and legs, but they still keep the structure.
These gold lines, these are where we embed some wearable computing.
They can tell me my heart rate.
We currently collaborate with Buzz Aldrin, how for the past decade, the whole time we've been working on the biosuit he didn't give us a lot of information how it was to be on the Moon.
- [Aldrin] Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon.
- For me, to see a biosuit-inspired space suit on the Moon and Mars would be the ultimate.
It might even bring a tear to my eyes.
After all of that time and effort, really would like to see astronauts performing space walks in our suit.
(soft music) (air whooshing) (bright music) (keyboard clacking) GPS.
Three GPSs.
(chuckles) Backups.
(keyboard clacking) Mars.
It's not too far away, pretty interesting.
We might find evidence of past life.
(keyboard clacking) Good sense of humor, supplies.
A partner, that's the most important thing.
A boat, you need a boat, too.
(giggles) (keyboard clacking) Oh, Magellan.
He is the epitome of the explorer.
(keyboard clacking) (playful music) Fresh food is always great, but it only lasts a week.
So in the second week, you get more into the can, you guys.
The third week is a little scarce, but you get resourceful.
I probably cooked more on our circumnavigation than I had in the previous 40 years.
(chuckles) (keyboard clacking) Say Buzz Aldrin.
Jack Schmidt, I have a whole bunch of 'em.
(chuckles) (playful music) (keyboard clacking) It's really important to have an iPod that's really loaded when you're sailing around the world.
So jazz, blues, almost anything but country and Western.
(playful music) (keyboard clacking) No flags on the Moon.
We're gonna go together, unless we come up with a great United Nations, you know, flag for humanity.
(playful music) (keyboard clacking) Ah, "2001," he got almost everything right, as an engineering scientist.
Kubrick, of course.
(playful music) (keyboard clacking) The NASA administrator said, "When you can't tell "the gender difference between astronauts, "that's a good thing."
(bright music)