Donna Shirley Interview (page: 2 / 7) Mars Exploration Program	Print Interview

You've said math was not your strong point and you just had to sweat it out. I think that's really interesting, because a lot of us would say, since engineering involves math, I can't do that.

Donna Shirley: You can, but you have to want to do it. I had this passion for flying and building airplanes and space stuff. It was just a matter of grinding it through. It wasn't that I couldn't do the math, it was just a lot of work, it was really hard.

Most people, they say, "This is hard, therefore, I won't do it." I think that's a big mistake, because your whole life you're going to run into things that are hard and you're going to have to do them. If you haven't ever learned how to do things that are hard, you won't be able to do it. So if you have a passion, you do what you have to do.

What did your parents think about your wanting to be an engineer? Were they shocked or dismayed by that?

Donna Shirley: My father wanted me to be a doctor. But when I said "I don't want to work as hard as you do," he said, "Fine." My parents were always very supportive. It was expected that we would go to college and do well professionally.

All four of my grandparents had gone to college. In those days that was unusual. My mother's father was a minister, who had a doctorate in theology. My father was an M.D. and his father had a degree in business. His mother and my mother's mother had gone to finishing school type things. It was a very well educated family, and it was just expected that you would be well educated.

My mother had five brothers, and except for the oldest who was kind of the ne'er-do-well of the family, the rest of them all went to college and got degrees in engineering, or medicine and things like that. It de rigeur in the family to do that.

Were there teachers who encouraged or mentored you?

Donna Shirley: Not really. Teachers did not really understand girls who wanted to be pilots, and engineers. In our small town, while most of the teachers were very dedicated and interested in the kids, there weren't any who could imagine aspirations like wanting to be a bush pilot or something like that. They could imagine being a doctor, or a lawyer, but when you said engineer, people couldn't really relate to that.

But in general, no one was negative. They were all supportive. They all liked the fact that I was smart and did well in school. They always like kids who do well in school. Although, I was a terrible smart-aleck. I was always mouthing off about something or other.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The best teacher I had was my high school senior English teacher, who really taught us to love literature and be good at writing and things. Which came in very handy, because a lot of engineers can't communicate, and that was one of the things that helped me become a good communicator was taking this inspiring English class. And then in college I took Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and a few things like that, which was fairly unusual for engineers. So, having some sort of literary background turned out to be really helpful.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

When I got my degree, I became a spec writer for a while and then I went into aerodynamics. My first job in aerodynamics at McDonnell Aircraft was a blunt, sphere cone shape, kind of like a Chinese peasant hat. And that is a shape that has a lot of drag, because it's fairly flat, but it also is fairly stable and won't tumble and turn over when you're coming into an atmosphere. And for landing on Mars, what you want to do is use the atmosphere to slow down. And then you have a heat shield on it, so that it keeps the thing from burning up. And I worked on the design of those. In 1976 when Viking landed on Mars, it used that design that I'd worked on back in the '60s. Pathfinder also used that design, and all of our future Mars missions. So I was involved with Mars for a long time.

Of your accomplishments at NASA, what are you proudest of?

Donna Shirley: The project that I felt the most pride about, before the Mars Project, was Mariner 10. That was a mission to Venus and Mercury in 1973 and '74. I had a job which was known as Mission Analyst. I walked into my boss's office on the first day of the job and I said, "What is a Mission Analyst? What does a Mission Analyst do?" And he said, "It's customary to define your own job." So I went out and found whatever needed doing. What I ended up doing was kind of being the communicator between the scientists and the engineers.

The scientists are the customers, they're the people who are going to bring back the data and learn about the universe and the planets and how they work. The engineers are the people who build the devices to get them the data. And a lot of people talk about "scientists at JPL" when they're really talking about engineers. That's one of my big hobby-horse; I try to point out the difference. Engineers build things and scientists use the data to figure out what nature is.

My job was to say, "If you want to take these pictures, what do we have to do on the spacecraft? How does the trajectory have to work? How do we have to operate the spacecraft?" I would try to get it defined, so that what the scientists wanted was something that could actually be done.

There were seven different science experiments, and they all needed something different. So I spent a lot of time adjudicating between the scientists, and using some communication techniques that would let them actually figure out that, "Oh, I don't really want this, I really want that. There were some funny little mathematical things we did called value functions. They were equations, but they weren't really equations. If you say to me, I want to take a picture of the moon as we fly away from the earth.

It sounds like risk taking has been a big part of your life. You don't shy away from that.

Donna Shirley: Risk taking is necessary if you're going to accomplish something. If you're investing and you want to invest in a nice safe investment, you don't make a very high rate of return. On the other hand, if you throw your money away on Ponzi schemes, you're crazy. So my whole career has been about balancing risk. There's a whole management technique called risk management. It's used all the time in my business and a lot of businesses. If you have an investment portfolio, for example, you may have some risky, high return stocks and some stable ones, and you try to have a portfolio that covers you no matter what happens. It's the same thing in the engineering business.

If you're trying a brand new piece of technology and you want to get a better performance or a lower cost, you have to do a lot of testing, analyze it, so you really understand that technology and what its weaknesses are. You have to make sure that the rest of the system can accommodate that new piece of technology.

That's why space missions are so expensive, because they're controlling risk. When you load a bunch of stuff in a rocket and shoot it off, your chance of failure is very high. Your first costs may be low, but the chance of failure is very high. Managing risk is key to any of these high-tech endeavors. I've spent a whole career doing that kind of thing.

I've heard you quote Helen Keller about that.

Donna Shirley: Let's see if I can remember it. "Security is mostly an illusion, and not often do the children of men experience it. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Helen Keller, of course, was deaf and blind and she went deaf and blind as a result of disease, as a small child. And, her mentor came in and worked with her, and got her to be able to speak by relating back to just a few words that she knew when she was a child, like "water." And, Helen Keller went on to be, you know, a very successful person, a lecturer, a communicator. If anybody knows about taking risk and being brave, it's Helen Keller. And also, the point is, that the safer you try to be and if you cut yourself off from experiencing life and doing what you want to do because you're trying to be safe, then you're missing out.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

I think that's absolutely right. If you try to be safe, you won't get to do the things you want to do. A partner and I teach a class at JPL called Managing Creativity. We end up with daring to be creative. An awful lot of people stifle their creativity because they're afraid. We work on that in class. "What's keeping you from being more creative?" They get some insight into why they're stuck where they are, or why they're doing things the way they're doing them, or why they're not very effective. It's only a 16-hour class, but we've had people say "I'm not doing what I want to do," and change careers. We've really had a lot of good results with it.

If you're not doing what you want to do, first of all figure out what you want to do. Find your passion, and then see what's keeping you from doing it. And if it's a belief, like, "I can't do it," or "Somebody won't like it if I do it," you need to identify that belief and where it comes from and ask yourself, "Do I really want to have that belief?"

Some people spend their whole lives avoiding risk, so they don't get the pleasure out of life that they could get. Maybe they get a different kind of pleasure than I get, but I'm one of these people who wants to be out there making a contribution, doing something nobody's done before. That's an inherently daring kind of thing.

On the other hand, in today's culture we have a lot of risk-taking for the sake of risk-taking. Where are all these extreme sports coming from? It would be interesting to do a study about the enormous popularity of things like bungee jumping and jumping out of airplanes on surf boards. Why is our culture seeking these kinds of sports? If you're in a state of war, or depression, you don't need to go out and seek life-threatening experiences. Maybe human beings need a certain level of risk just to feel good about themselves.

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