Review of Managing Martians

Wynnewood, Oklahoma. Small-town America. Exemplar (one among many) of midwestern values and work ethic: the reasons why companies on either coast are glad to get employees from the middle of the country.

In the middle of the twentieth century, out of this town of 2,500 souls came a tomboy with stars in her eyes.1 Smart and gifted at science, she excelled in most subjects in school, played oboe in the band, worked fairly standard part-time jobs. She earned her private pilot's license in her late teens, won the Miss Wynnewood contest, graduated from Wynnewood High as valedictorian, and went on to major in engineering at the University of Oklahoma. There she learned, as many of us do, that achieving success in the wider world is not such a straightforward proposition.

Prejudice was one of the rocks in the road she had chosen. She met it on her first day of college, when she showed up at her freshman advisor's office to ask what courses an aeronautical engineer should take first. "Girls can't be engineers," he told her bluntly.2 Nor would this be the last time the male-dominated profession of engineering underestimated her.

Nevertheless she persevered, coming by a roundabout route to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. There she held a variety of technical positions, eventually becoming manager of the team that developed the Sojourner rover that went to Mars aboard the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. This book is about her journey to that position, and how she delivered a working rover despite tight budgets and a tighter schedule.

It is a pleasure to read. Ms. Shirley's prose is smooth, accurate and straightforward. She pulls no punches, but neither does she hold any grudges — and, given some of the roadblocks she encountered, many would.

The Mars Pathfinder project was one of the first (if not the first) in the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" design regime imposed by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. It would set a spacecraft down on Mars, and that stationary platform would release a rover to traverse a limited area (about a thousand-meter circle) while examining local rocks with several science instruments. The rover had to weigh in at under 16 kg — and even at that scant weight, the Pathfinder program manager regarded it as extraneous baggage. Until he saw that the rover team had, by dint of inspired engineering and persistent parts procurement, solved all their technical problems. In addition to functionality, the rover had personality. It was helping to sell the whole project to Congress and the public.3

Then came the sudden loss of Mars Observer. The whole exploration scheme was rethought, and Donna Shirley was promoted to manage the multiple teams that would build separate smaller spacecraft launched at roughly two-year intervals. She now also had a role in defining the overall strategy for this series of missions. She used the opportunity to change the relationship between JPL's scientists and engineers, making it more of a customer-supplier relationship. She also restructured the organizations she oversaw, cutting overhead by half and earning public praise from NASA's deputy comptroller.4 The downside was that she had to worry over the troubled (but ultimately successful) Mars Global Surveyor mission.5 She ends her story by informing us that she is writing up her ideas on management and earning a doctorate in that field — meanwhile wondering what she can do to top virtually landing on the Red Planet. She advises us to "Stay tuned." I plan to do that.

Owing to her skill as a writer (and perhaps to the editorial assistance of Danelle Morton, a correspondent for People magazine), the book is remarkably free of errors. I noticed only one possible typo. Page 254: "At certain times, Mars will be just at the point where the spacecraft's projectory and Mars' orbit intersect." This could be a typo, an inadvertent contraction of "projected trajectory". It's equally likely (if not more so) that it's engineering jargon that slipped into the text without being noticed.

1 She says it was Arthur Clarke's The Sands of Mars that put them there.
2 Evidently she remembers the event vividly. She recounts it on page 56, complete with the advisor's name and office number.
3 The public was buying. On July 8, 1997, four days after landing, Pathfinder's Web site got 47 million hits — an Internet record. Even in March 1998, there was strong interest in a final attempt to talk to Pathfinder six months after it had gone silent. Mattel couldn't keep its models in the stores, and any company that had anything to do with the project earned a handsome PR payoff.
4 Other parts of JPL were not impressed. Such changes, after all, meant smaller staffs and lower budgets — anathema to the empire-builder mentality.
5 The loss of Mars Polar Lander came too late to be included in this book.

MANAGING MARTIANS Donna Shirley with Danelle Morton New York: Broadway Books, 1998				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN 0-7679-0241-6	275pp.	SC/BWI	$13.00

MANAGING MARTIANS

Reviewed 2/23/2003