Building for a future in space: interview with Dava Newman and Giu Trotti

Since the dawn of the human race, mankind has looked up at the night sky and wondered ‘what’s out there?’ The ancient Greeks and Romans saw the constellations and wove them into their myths of warring gods.

The native Americans’ creation story is based on the movements of the sky. The past few hundred years brought with them the birth of a new age, an age of science and deeper understanding of the cosmos, the universe, and our place in it. With this greater understanding, mankind started to dream of flying from Earth into the unknown, of walking on distant planets, floating amongst the stars.

We tend to separate science and imagination into hard facts, and whimsical daydreams, but without the merger of the two, space exploration would never have begun.

A certain amount of fantastical thinking is needed to imagine that humans could actually leave planet Earth, a great feat of science and engineering.

For Dava Newman and Gui Trotti, they are continuing mankind’s legacy of dreaming of the heavens, and are at the forefront of discovering new ways to better prepare humans for long-term residency in space. In a recent talk as part of Space Week in UCD, they recounted their experiences of their past decades at NASA and hopes for the future of space travel.

Newman is a former Deputy Administrator of NASA, and currently the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT. Like so many others of her generation, the historic moon landing of 1969 had a profound effect on her.

“I was a little girl at the time, and I watched the moon landing [and it] taught me to think big, go to moons and explore.”

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