Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Dava Newman: By Sea or Space
Season 2010 Episode 2 | 2m 48s | Video has closed captioning.
Dava Newman: By Sea or Space
Aired: 01/07/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers
Season 2010 Episode 2 | 2m 48s | Video has closed captioning.
Dava Newman: By Sea or Space
Aired: 01/07/10
Problems Playing Video? | Closed Captioning
(logo whooshing) (slow upbeat music) - I love to sail.
My partner, Garmo 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.
(thunder roars) And extreme weather conditions.
Things break, everything breaks.
This' 1:00 AM.
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 (chuckles) 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 bilge and pumped over.
So what do you do with no steering, no hydraulics?
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 about 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 ups and running, had our steering back and we made it another thousand 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.
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.
- [Bold voice] It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
(slow upbeat music)