Rachel Lance

So the biggest obstacle with both of these worlds is the engineering of products and devices in order to measure the things we even want to ask the questions about.

So working in the hyperbaric chamber, the limitations on what I'm doing and what I'm building, it works for both environments.

And that's why working with the Navy, we collaborated frequently with NASA.

We were talking frequently with people building the high altitude breathing systems for jets, things like that.

And that's why in Chamber Divers, I even included the story of a high altitude research pioneer named Randy Lovelace.

He built a breathing system and tested on himself by kind of stealing a plane a little bit and jumping out of it.

Obviously.

So there is huge overlap here in the hostility of the environments that we're working in and in the fact that the body is undergoing pressure differentials.

So high altitude fighter pilots and astronauts all have to worry about decompression sickness because they are going from higher pressure to lower pressure.

So our research has huge overlap there.

They have to worry about their breathing systems.

They have to worry about their carbon dioxide levels in the spaceship, which is now an enclosed environment, a lot like a hyperbaric chamber.

And we actually hold our conferences together a lot of the times because the two environments, while wildly dissimilar in the pressures that we're facing, are united in the challenges.

Constantly.

It's a constant concern for me.

When I worked for the Navy, which was just short of nine years,

I'll use this as an example.

The government is not known for its lack of bureaucracy.

So working for the government had this incredibly unique experience where I was in this big bureaucracy and I would have to write memos for things that seemed ridiculous to me to justify, like,

Oh, why do you need stainless steel?