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A Conversation with NASA Mars Team Leader Donna Shirley
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
By Christine M. Ferrara
This is the second in a series of articles about APEX, held January 22-24 in San Diego. Donna Shirley is the APEX keynote speaker for the first day of the show.
Donna Shirley led a NASA team that sent a mission to Mars. But she learned some of her greatest lessons right here on Earth.
Shirley delivers the APEX keynote address at 8:15 a.m. today. Her presentation, "Managing Creativity," focuses on managing teams and how to balance autonomy and authority to overcome obstacles and achieve what may seem like the impossible dream.To illustrate her points, Shirley draws on her experience as leader of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team that built and landed the Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner Rover on the Red Planet in July 1997.
"As I will illustrate with the Mars mission, managing a creative enterprise is hard," Shirley says. "Diverse teams are creative teams, but they are harder to manage than homogenous teams."
Shirley also addresses the cycle that ranges from putting a team together to designing a product. Other points include risk management, production and communication.
Shirley is excited about the opportunity to address a group of engineers. "I want to get them fired up about being creative," she says. "I want to get them pumped up a little bit, and give them some new tools."
Shirley feels her message of diversity is particularly important to product design, pointing to the example of Ford involving women engineers in the design of its minivan. "If your customers are overwhelmingly not like you, you are probably going to overlook something," she says. "So much software is not user-friendly because it was designed by computer jocks. Engineering is dominated by white males, and they really ought to be working harder to get different types of people in there so they don't lose their creative edge."
Managing a team, diverse or not, is hard work, she adds. "Management is a balancing act, which is one of Donna's laws," she says. "None of those nifty little books tell you how to do things quickly, while constantly balancing cost vs. risk vs. schedule vs. what can be done, and so on."
This came into play with the Mars mission, as the team completed the mission for less than 10 percent of what the Viking Mars Project cost 21 years before. "I attribute our success to not trying to do more than we could do," Shirley says. "We worked hard and smart - and had a lot of luck. And we had to get creative. In the process, we proved we could land on Mars for the cost of a movie."
Within the scope of the grind that was the Mars mission, Shirley and her team butted heads with those working on the Pathfinder. "They basically thought we were trying to hitch a ride," she chuckles. "It took two years to convince people that the Rover was useful. There was a lot of confrontation."
As time went on, however, the Pathfinder team eventually accepted the Rover team. "In the end, the Rover was what everyone was interested in," Shirley says.
The Rover team itself was a tight-knit group that worked hard - and played hard. "On any flight project, there's a launch date, and you can't miss it, so there's a lot of drive to get things done and a lot of togetherness," Shirley explains. "There's a camaraderie there since you don't have friends outside because you work so much."
Star StruckShirley's own love affair with space began at an early age. As illustrated in her book, Managing Martians: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman's Lifelong Quest to Get to Mars, Shirley started gazing up at the stars from her home in Oklahoma at the age of 12. She credits science fiction writers such as Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein with fueling her interest in Mars, as well as Mariner 4's flight by the Planet to take pictures.
She began as an engineering major in college, then got burned out and switched to journalism. After graduating, she worked as a spec writer for McDonnell Aircraft Co. in St. Louis. "After a year of that, I discovered I really wanted to be an engineer," Shirley says.
Shirley went back to McDonnell and began working on a Mars proposal. She then decided to go work at the JPL in 1966 because JPL would be in charge of that proposal no matter who won the bid. "It seemed like the best job in the world to work on a mission to land on Mars," she explains.
Her job at JPL as a junior-level engineer was to analyze the tradeoff between a vessel that would land on Mars having a lot of drag, and having it be stable. Shirley also was to determine which shape would do best in such a situation. "The question was how blunt of an object could it be for the most drag and still be stable enough," she says. "It turned out a blunt sphere cone was the configuration that was finally chosen."
Shirley continued to work at JPL until 1998, when she retired because of several underfunded projects coming down the pike that Shirley saw as having a high probability of failure. She now is assistant dean of engineering at the University of Oklahoma.
"Huge overruns are eating into NASA's budget," she says. "Now the chickens are coming home to roost. They are in 'do too much for too little' mode. The missions keep getting bigger and bigger."
Shirley sees commercial expeditions into space as NASA's future. "It's very hard to keep the support of the country unless (regular) people get to play," she says. "There are a lot of opportunities for normal people to get involved in the space business."
Indeed, at the University of Oklahoma, several of her students are hoping to fly on the "Vomit Comit," a spaceship that induces 25 seconds of weightlessness. "Having a broader range of people getting to play in space is very encouraging," Shirley says. "It's inevitable. Space will become like the American West."