Donna Shirley Interview (page: 4 / 7) Mars Exploration Program	Print Interview

How did you first become interested in management?

Donna Shirley: When Laura was born, I thought, "What do I want to do? How do I want to contribute?" And I decided I would be a manager. In engineering organizations, engineers get promoted to be managers. Some of them can do it and some of them can't. Engineers are not carefully selected for their people skills. They're carefully selected for their engineering skills. In fact, a lot of them take engineering so they won't have to deal with people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's catch as catch can when you promote engineers to managers. And so, I was looking at the people I was working for and I was saying, "Hey, I can do at least a good a job as these guys do." So, I decided to be a manager because you have to make a decision as to whether to try to stay up with your technology, particularly when technology is changing so fast, or to go into management. And so, I decided I would go into management. So, I laid out a plan: and this is how fast I was going to try to progress and these were the kind of jobs I wanted, and this was the job progression. And, I laid it all out by the time that Laura graduated from college, this is where I'd be, 'cause I needed the money to get her into college, and so on, and laid it all out. And, I've been tracking along very well with that plan.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

But now, Laura graduates from college next year, and I've done everything I've set out to do. Now what do I do? I mean, I don't want to manage JPL, it's very political. NASA and everything having to do with Washington, DC is incredibly political. It's getting more and more political, and less and less about getting the job done, more and more about personalities, and things that are going to get people elected. It's not anywhere near as much fun as it was.

I would like to take all this management skill that I've learned and apply it to environmental issues. How do we provide the support for families in this country? How do we regain a sense of community instead of dividing ourselves up into a thousand little Bosnias?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I'm interested in leaving a world where my grandchildren -- I hope I have some -- are going to be able to thrive, instead of leaving a world where my generation has despoiled the planet, has fragmented into warring factions, has engendered hate and xenophobia, and all of these sorts of things, and then has pulled in and said, "We're not going to explore. We're just going to sit here and stew in our own juices." And to say, "We're going to spend all our money," -- throw money at problems that aren't solvable by just money, that have to have other kinds of solutions applied to them.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

There's got to be a niche where I can make a difference. I haven't found it yet, but that's what I'm looking for.

It sounds like you feel responsible for this earth. Where do those values come from?

Donna Shirley: It was part of my upbringing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My family was always very concerned with the environment, way before it was popular to do that. I mean, we have Native American background. I'm a very small, part Choctaw and Chickasaw and Cherokee. And, one of the things about the Native Americans was, my ancestors came over the Trail of Tears. Their land was taken away from them progressively, and finally they were deprived of everything and driven in a very hellish way into Oklahoma, and then thrown there and they had to survive. And, they did survive and became farmers and prosperous farmers and so on. But, they had their allegiance to the land.

It was the land that gave them their ability to survive. They had land and it was taken from them; they were moved out of their environment. All my ancestors are pioneers. So I think it's in the genes somewhere. We used to take family vacation to national parks. All the time I've been at JPL I've been backpacking and skiing, and doing outdoor pursuits. You can see how the environment ought to be, and then you look at what people are doing to it. When I first started backpacking in the '60s, you'd go out and there wouldn't anybody there. Now people have to camp away from certain areas, because they've been so trampled over. There's just too many people.

We've got to control our population. Between now and 2025, the population of the world is projected to go from 6 billion people to 8.5 billion people. That's a 25 percent increase, at a time when we're already destroying all our forests. We're destroying all the habitats for animals. When we destroy the rain forest, the source of future drugs isn't there, because we're not finding new organisms that counter bacteria. We're feeding our animals antibiotics, so that they grow and are healthy, then we eat them and we become resistant to antibiotics. Now you have these new strains of horrible diseases that we don't have any antibiotics for, when we're busily destroying the habitats which are the source of future antibiotics. We're self-destructing. That seems to me a very bad place to leave for my daughter.

Maybe we should go to Mars.

Donna Shirley: I get a lot of that. Some people say, "We need to develop space travel, so if we destroy this plant and make it uninhabitable, we can flee to other planets." If you think we can trash this planet and flee to other planets, that's nuts. The amount of resources it takes to send people to other planet, so they can survive and thrive there, requires a strong economy. And that requires an ecologically sound world.

We can't destroy this planet and jump off to the next one, it's just nonsense. We have to take care of this one and then we'll have the economic strength and the capability to go to other planets. I think we will anyway, just because that's the kind of monkey creatures we are.

What do you think it is about Mars that so transfixed the entire population? I don't know a person who wasn't looking at your pictures from Mars.

Donna Shirley: John Nobel Wilfred from the New York Times was giving a talk at a seminar and he said, he thinks it's the same reason we make up imaginary playmates when we're kids. We want there to be somebody out there. We want somebody to play with, so we want to go find them. That's the fascination. Like in the movie, Contact, they were looking for signals from advanced civilizations. That's the fascination. Maybe we're going to find life there, new places to live.

There's the deep ocean frontier and the space frontier, and that's all that's left. Of course the frontier of the human spirit, the frontier of our ability to survive with each other and not destroy our planet is a big frontier.

Mars is the closest planet to us in the solar system. Physically, Venus is a little closer. But you can melt lead on the surface of Venus, it's like 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface of Venus. Venus had a run-away greenhouse effect. As a matter of fact, it was by exploring Venus that we learned about greenhouse effects. Now we're watching out for what we might be doing to the earth. Could we turn it into Venus? We might be able to.

Mars, which is 50 million miles farther from the sun than we are, is cold. Even thousands of years ago, civilizations always had a name for Mars. It was always a god of some sort. It was thought to be war-like by most cultures, because it was red. People have been fascinated with planets because they don't act like other stars and Mars kind of stood out because it was red.

In the late 1800s, Percival Lowell built a telescope at Flagstaff, Arizona. He believed he could see canals on Mars. He was a very good communicator, like Carl Sagan. He wrote three books about Mars, all based on the idea that there were these ancient civilizations on Mars, bringing water down from the Poles to irrigate their crops and so on.

Then all the science fiction writers said we could live on Mars. They also wrote about Venus, but Venus was always viewed as this hot, muggy, unpleasant place, and Mars was somehow really neat. We had his John Carter of Mars and Arthur C. Clarke and Heinlein, and Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs all saw Mars as the place where they could think about otherness. They could think about cultures and races other than our own, that might be just out there, almost within reach.

I think that's part of the fascination, it's so reachable. Until 1965, everybody believed that Lowell's Mars was right, that there were conditions that would support life as we know it. In 1965, Mariner 4 flew by Mars and killed all the Martians. It took pictures that showed that Mars was much more like the moon. It was cratered, with almost no atmosphere. Between 1965 and about 1988, there was no Mars science fiction.

There was this huge amount of Mars science fiction up to 1965, and then there's a big gap. But, the scientists kept wanting to know about it. Could our planet turn into a deep freeze? Could our planet turn into hell? We need to understand all of these planets.

So we kept going back to Mars with our robots. In 1971 we orbited, and all of a sudden, Mars wasn't a dead planet. It had this giant volcano that was bigger than any volcano in the solar system. It's as big as the state of Missouri, and 90,000 feet high. It's three times as high as Mount Everest. There's a canyon that's five miles deep, 3,000 miles long; it would stretch all the way across the United States. There's been some sort of violent activity. Mars was a living planet at one time, unlike the moon which was always dead. So, then people said, "There's all of this volcanic activity, that's how life got started on earth." We could see places where water had been on Mars. So we said, "Hot dog, maybe there's life on Mars!" Not John Carter of Mars and Dejathorus, but maybe bacteria.

So we sent Viking. Viking landed, scooped up the top 10 centimeters of dirt and tested it. You'd put the dirt into some chicken soup and if there's bacteria in there it will eat the chicken soup and grow and give off gas, as many of us do after a good meal. Well, they didn't get that. No life. Viking had even killed off the bacterial Martians. In the meantime, they were going to explore Mars from orbit, because we wanted to understand the climate. What happened on Mars to make it the way it is?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mars Observer was launched in '92 and it was a failure. But, in the meantime, we started thinking about, "Okay, life lives on earth in many places where we wouldn't have believed that it would have lived." So, scientifically, we found life at the bottom of the ocean, living off of just the gases coming out of vents. No light, but there it is. We found life down in the Columbia River basalts, several kilometers down, just living off of rock and heat - life in Antarctica, in frozen, frigid conditions, inside rocks. So, anywhere there's liquid water on earth, there's life. So, we said, "Gee, you know, maybe there's life on Mars."

[ Key to Success ] Vision

The culmination was this meteorite that we know came from Mars. In 1996, some people led by Dave McKay from JSC thought they found evidence of chemistry inside this meteorite that was indicative of past life. [That caused] enormous controversy! People are fascinated with the idea that there might be life out there, so now we've changed the Mars Exploration Program from looking for climate and resources to -- yes -- looking for life. Maybe it's because of what John Nobel Wilfred said, that we want imaginary playmates, we don't want to be alone in the universe.

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