VIDEO: Working as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, David Van Buren usually spends his time designing and building instruments for space telescopes or robots that will explore other worlds in our Solar System. But for the last month, Van Buren and a group of his colleagues at JPL have been working on a project that is truly unexplored terrain for them: making a ventilator to help patients sick with COVID-19. While Van Buren had some previous experience in medical engineering, he’d never designed a ventilator before. But he and his co-workers at JPL are used to making things they don’t have any experience making. In fact, they’re used to making things that no one has experience making.
“When a scientist comes to us and says they want to go to a moon of Jupiter and drill into the ice and see what’s underneath, that’s something that’s never been done before,” Van Buren tells The Verge.