Where did you grow up?

Donna Shirley: I was raised in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, population 2,500. The primary industry in the town was farming and there was a small refinery. My father was one of the two town doctors. He was a small town general practitioner who always had to get up at two in the morning and go deliver babies out in the country and things like that. When he suggested that I become a doctor, I remembered how he never got to sleep through the night and I decided to be an engineer.

I always wanted to fly airplanes, from the time I was very small. And when I was six, a friend of mine, a girlfriend, and I had this plan. She was going to be a nurse and I was going to be a bush pilot and we were going to fly into the outback and rescue people. And that was our objective. So, I built model airplanes and hung them from the ceiling and had a lot of books about airplanes. And then, when I was 10, we went to my uncle's graduation from medical school and on the program it said, aeronautical engineering. I asked my mother what that was and she said, "Oh, that's people who build airplanes." I said, "That's what I want to be." And so, that's when I decided that I was going to be an aeronautic engineer.

When I was 12 or so I started reading science fiction. And, I read Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and Heinlein's books about Mars, and just got completely fascinated with the idea of Mars and going into space and space travel. And so, when I got to college, there really wasn't a space program. I got to college in 1958 and that was the year that Explorer One was orbited, following Sputnik. And so, you really couldn't specialize in space, nobody knew how to do it. And so, I ended up still working on airplanes.

Were you encouraged to be a good student, and were you a good student in school?

Donna Shirley: I was a very good student. I was very definitely encouraged, in fact, that was expected. Fortunately, I was pretty bright, so it was relatively easy. I was valedictorian of my senior class, all 49 of us. It was actually a handicap, because when I got to college, at the University of Oklahoma, I was all of a sudden in with the big city kids, and I was not very well prepared, because our small town couldn't afford a chemistry lab, for instance.

When I was in college, most of the kids had had chemistry lab in high school and I never had. So I was really in trouble my first semester. I nearly flunked out, but I pulled it out. I'd never learned to study, because it was very easy. I had a pretty high IQ and high school was quite easy. College was a terrible shock, especially engineering school which is really tough.

Was there resistance to women studying engineering at that time?

Donna Shirley: There was a fellow named Mr. Brady, and he was my advisor when I first came to college. So, I strolled in very confidentially and said, "Okay, I'm here to sign up for my engineering courses." And he said, "What are you doing here?" And I said, "Well, I'm here to enroll in engineering." He said, "Girls can't be engineers." And so I said, "Well, yes I can." And so he said, "All right." I said, "What classes should I take?" And he said, "Well, here's the requirements and then you can take anything you want, and just bring it back and I'll sign it."

I signed up for 19 hours. The normal load was 15, but I wanted to take flying. And so, I signed up for this flying class, in addition to a fairly heavy course load. And plus, I'm good at taking multiple choice tests, which was the entrance exam for school. And so, they put me in advanced chemistry and calculus and all these advanced classes, and I was woefully unprepared for them. So, with the heavy course load, flying took a lot of time. So, I really didn't do very well for at least the first eight weeks. And in fact, I was flunking and my parents came up and, oh my gosh, you know, "Can we get you a tutor? What can we do?" So I went home over Christmas and just studied the whole time, and pulled out a B average that semester. But it was pretty hairy.

What was behind your passion for flying?

Donna Shirley: When I was a little kid I had model airplanes hanging from my ceiling and all that. My father gave me flying lessons for my 15th birthday. I went up to Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, which was the big town, seven miles north - it was 5,000 people, instead of 2,500. It had this little airfield, and I took flying lessons.

You have to be 16 to solo. So, I had to wait till I was 16 and then I flew by myself. We flew these little wooden fabric planes, in fact, some of them didn't have an automatic starter, so somebody had to go out and flip the propeller to get them started. They didn't have radios and they didn't have any instruments, so I was flying around just like one of those early barnstormers in these little planes.

In college they had a flying club. We flew Aronca Champs, so we were called the Air Knockers. We went on flying trips, we would fly to the University of Illinois for example, and there'd be contests to see who could land the most accurately and who could drop a sack out of the window and hit a target, who could navigate around a course the most accurately. They were really fun. We went to flying meets and really had a good time. I had this really intense period from 15 to 21 when flying was my whole passion, and I flew all the time. I got a flight instructor's rating and a multi-engine rating and a C plane rating, and I soloed in a glider and everything.

When I graduated from college, I went to work in St. Louis and when my father stopped paying for it, I couldn't afford to fly anymore. When I moved to Los Angeles I could have picked it up again, because I wasn't quite so poverty stricken, but in Oklahoma you could fly out in the wide open spaces, and that was really the free, out there kind of flying that I wanted to do. In big cities it's all controlled air space with a lot of radios and everything, and I really didn't enjoy it. In Los Angeles you have to drive a couple of hours to get to a place where it's interesting to fly. So when I went to California I took up sailing and skiing. I still have a lot of aerodynamic activities, but I'm not flying anymore.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Although you seem incredibly positive and confident, there must have been obstacles that really gave you pause?

Donna Shirley: There are an enormous number of obstacles in anybody's life, particularly when you're trying to do something that nobody's done before. Being a woman in a primarily male field was very difficult sometimes. When I first came to JPL, I got a lot of kidding about being a girl, but JPL is kind of the place where excellence is premier. It's all about doing the work and proving yourself.

I was 35 when I had my daughter, and I stayed away from work for six weeks. Then I went back to work half-time, because I was nursing her. I would feed her, take her to the baby-sitter, dash in and work in the afternoon for four hours. I knew if I worked in the morning I would never get out of there, so I'd work in the afternoon, dash home, feed her again, and it worked just fine. When she was 10 months old, I weaned her to a cup and was ready to go back to work full time. We had a really good baby-sitter situation. I had been a manager before I took off, but when I went back I wasn't getting any really good jobs, just a little job here and there, and not a lot of responsibility.

I said to my boss, I said, "What's going on here? Why aren't I getting any good assignments?" He said, "I don't know. I can't figure it out. I'll go talk to the people who have the money and have the projects and see what's going on." And he came back and he said, "Well," he said, "What's the matter is that they all assume that you are now fulfilled as a mother, and don't want a responsible job." And I said, "Good Lord," so we went in and informed these people that, "Yes, I'm not fulfilled as a mother, I do want a responsible job," and so on. And, it wasn't that these guys were against me or anything like that, or anti-female or anything, in fact they were friends of mine. But, it just never occurred to them. They were from the Depression Era, you know, they grew up during the Depression Era, World War II, and their picture of women was, okay, you stay home and take care of your kids and that's how you become fulfilled. And, it never occurred to them that that wasn't my picture.

Once I enlightened them they were fine, and then I could get a job. There are all kinds of unquestioned expectations. You have to say, "Here's what I want." A lot of times things just fall down when you do that. You also run into people who don't like you for one reason or another, people who don't like your style. I have a terrible reputation as a pushy broad, and some people don't like that, but they don't like pushy men either. You shouldn't make the assumption that it's because you're a woman.

You must have had quite a time balancing motherhood with your extremely demanding career.

Donna Shirley: Yes, and the thing that allowed me to become successful in my career was having high quality child care. When I first had my daughter, my secretary had a blood disease. She couldn't work in a stressful environment, but she wasn't incapacitated. She said, "I'd love to take care of your daughter." She took care of Laura in her home and she's a wonderful mother, so I was very comfortable having that relationship. Then she got well and wanted to go back to work, and we were struggling to find that quality of loving care. The Director of JPL, Bruce Murray, decided to start an Advisory Counsel for Women at JPL, to address employee issues.

JPL and Cal Tech invested a small amount of money and started this child care center. Laura was one of the first denizens of the child care center; she started when she was two-and-a-half. They're only two blocks away, so even nursing mothers can go down at lunch and feed the kids, or take breaks during the day. They have a van that goes back and forth. Or people can walk, and get a little exercise. But it's very handy. If a child gets sick, a father can go pick up the child and take her home. You see the fathers in there, just like the mothers, picking up the kids and doing projects at the school.

Child care is extremely important in empowering people to work, particularly when you're trying to get welfare mothers to go to work. They can't go to work if they don't have someone to take care of their children. I think it's incumbent on the government to finance child care for women getting off of welfare, and they're almost all mothers.

Have there been sacrifices in your own family situation because of your work? It's very difficult to have it all.

Donna Shirley: The idea that you have to have it all is really tough. To have it all, you have to have a husband or a mate who is very supportive of what you're doing. I was from a generation where that really wasn't true.

The men my age were not used to having high powered working women, and my marriage didn't survive. My husband was born during the Depression and went through World War II and his mother worked. It was very interesting because his mother worked all her life and kept up the house and everything like that, but she was a textile worker. You know, she was not a powerful professional kind of a person. And so, his model was that women are supposed to do the housework and all that sort of stuff, and men are the breadwinners, even though he knew when we met. I mean, we didn't get married till I was 34 and we had talked about it and we'd worked it all out. And, when it really came down to it, it was just too much against his upbringing and beliefs. I didn't handle it well either.

Did he want you to be home more?

Donna Shirley: He wasn't sure what he wanted. I was doing all the housework, and he really didn't help with the housework. The relationship just went bad. We were both operating on belief systems from childhood and we were not communicating well. We worked on it, but we never could get over the different paradigms that we were operating under, so we ended up getting divorced, which was hard on Laura.

If I hadn't had the Child Educational Center as a support structure, I probably wouldn't have been as successful in my career as I am. I knew she was well taken care of. She was close, I could go pick her up if she was sick, I could go visit here. In fact, I taught science at her nursery school three days a week for a couple of years. They'd slide down the slide yelling, "Gravity!" And we did leverage experiments, and we did solids, liquids and gases for three and four year-olds. It was really fun.

I felt like I was spending adequate time with her, maybe not as much as I should have, but it was workable. What came apart was the relationship with my husband. I see a lot of remarkable couples, who are obviously both extremely successful and supportive of each other, so it's possible. In the generation younger than me I see a lot more men accept women working and being successful. I think the situation is actually a lot better now than it was for me, but in any marriage you have to work like crazy. If you neglect it, it's going to fall apart.

Was there any moral dilemma about resuming your career, when Laura was very small?

Donna Shirley: Of course there was a moral dilemma. You know that cartoon Sally Forth? She was having a baby at the same time that I was having a baby, so I had all her cartoons posted on my door at work. There was one cartoon where a woman has just turned her child over to a day care person and the child's screaming, and the day care person's waving and the woman is going away with this crinkly little smile and she says, "And my mother said I would feel so guilty," but she's actually kind of relieved.

What I was not cut out to do was to spend full time with a very small child. I mean, it wasn't that I didn't love her and all that, but I just had been in an adult world with a lot of stimulation and a lot of mental stimulation for so long that I couldn't make the transition. I stayed home for six weeks and nearly went bananas just taking care of this little child. And so, it was really much better for me to have someone who really likes taking care of small children. I mean, I like small children, but not all the time. And so, it just worked out better. I mean, I think if I hadn't gone back to work I would have been resentful and probably a terrible mother.

She turned out well, in spite of my shortcomings as a mother. She's a living example that the way I did it can really work. She's successful in college, in spite of being an attention deficit disorder child, which was really tough for her.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

What were the specific goals of Pathfinder and Sojourner and how were they realized?

Donna Shirley: Pathfinder and Sojourner had really different goals. The way Pathfinder got started was, Mars Observer was going to launch in 1992 and the scientists said, "We're going to be orbiting, we're going to be looking down at the planet with this great complement of instruments. We need something on the ground to validate what we see from orbit." In particular, the weather people said, "Boy, if we had little weather stations all around the planet, and by looking down and comparing with the ground, we can make models that we can use to check out earth models of weather."

The Martian climate is much simpler than earth climate, because earth's is driven by all the water we have. We don't know how to model it, and so they thought if we could model the Martian climate and the Martian atmosphere we could do a better job on earth. So the weather people really wanted this little network. They called it MESUR, Mars Environmental Survey - SUR.

Before we put 20 weather stations on Mars, we'd better figure out how much it's going to cost. The last time we landed on Mars was Viking. That was, in today's dollars, $3.6 billion. Obviously, you can't afford to spend billions of dollars doing this, because we were now in the better, faster, cheaper age. Without the Cold War there's no driver for the big missions. Because the big missions were to flex our missiles and show they were bigger than the Russian's missiles. It was part of, "Hey, I can bomb you if I want to."

So now we have to prove we can land on Mars cheaply. So they started this project called, MESUR Pathfinder, to do one landing on Mars to prove that you could do it cheaply. The Project Manager of MESUR was Tony Spear, who's the Deputy Project Manager of Magellan, which orbited Venus and looked at it with radar. Tony had been looking at how to do really cheap missions.

They put Tony in charge of this MESUR project, which also put him in charge of Pathfinder. And they said, "We've got a new program called Discovery and we'll make Pathfinder the first Discovery mission. You have to build your spacecraft and everything, and all your instruments and everything for $150 million." That was in fiscal year '92 dollars, which turned out for Pathfinder to be $171 million in real year dollars.

So that was where Tony was focused: got to land on Mars cheaply. In the meantime, the funding for MESUR disappeared. So, all that was left was Pathfinder, and it wasn't clear what it was pathfinding for. For a long time I was the Manager of Automation and Robotics at JPL and we were working on rovers. Then I was the manager of a study to do a big rover that was going to explore Mars and gather samples. It was going to be the size of a pickup truck. It could go 100 kilometers, collect samples and bring them back to earth.

We had costed out the mission somewhere between 5 and $10 billion, and when the Cold War ended, that was that. In fact, in 1989 George Bush said, 'We're going back to the moon to stay and then on to Mars." So, all the human exploration people down at Johnson Space Center said, "Hot dog, we're going to start this big human exploration program."

That turned out to be costing hundreds of billions of dollars. The Democratic Congress said to George Bush, "No you're not going back to the moon or to Mars," and cut all the funding for the human program and accidentally cut out all the funding for the robotic Mars program too.

Here we are, no money, and we realize there's no way we're going to send big rovers to Mars. We had been building one-eighth scale models of big rovers, to try out the technology. So we said, "This is probably the biggest thing we'll be able to fly to Mars." By that time we were completely out of money, so I went off to work on Cassini, the big mission to Saturn. I was the Project Engineer. That job was to make sure that the spacecraft, and the operations, and the instruments and the science could all work together.

After about 15 months, Charles Alechi, who's one of the top managers at JPL said, "I think that we should fly small rovers to Mars." He'd seen the technology that my group had developed and he said, "Let's do a demonstration to show that you can build a really small rover -- only seven kilograms, which is less than 20 pounds -- and that can really do science.

He hired a guy named Lonnie Lane, who is a real cowboy, known for being able to do crazy things that nobody else can do. Lonnie put together this demonstration in just a few months of a $2 million rover, named Rocky IV, who could do some science: carry instruments, peck on a rock, and all kinds of things.

So, at that point they said, "Hey, we'd like to fly this rover to Mars." Now, all this time the technology people at NASA and the science people at NASA are in two different offices. So, the science people would say, "Okay, we're going to go out and get science." The technology people would develop technology, and they'd say, "Why don't you guys use our technology?" The science people would say, "Well, but it's never flown. We can't take the risk of flying it." So, all this technology would just kind of sit there and never be flown. And, the technology people were really sick of it. They said, "Okay, we're going to pay to fly this rover to Mars, so we can qualify it. And then, in the future science won't be able to say that small rovers don't work."

The logical place to fly it was to hitch a ride on Pathfinder, but Pathfinder was a science mission. And they said, "We don't need no stinkin' technology. We've only got a little bit of money to do this job with, and if you bring along this rover it's going to make our job harder." The total would be almost $250 million, when you count the launch vehicle. The scientists said, "You can't spend $250 million of science money and not do any science, that's ridiculous." So they said, "You've got to fly some science instruments. How about a good camera? We need a weather station?

We needed something to measure rocks because Viking was never able to see what the rocks were made out of. So, the Germans said, "We'll give you -- we'll donate an alpha proton x-ray spectrometer, which measures the elemental composition of rocks, the chemistry of rocks, if you'll fly it." Free instrument, how can you turn that down? Unfortunately, it had to get to a rock.

When Viking landed, it had a little scoop that could reach out and touch some things that looked like rocks, but mostly they would just crumble, because they were dirt clods. They couldn't really do anything with it. So how do we get this spectrometer to a rock? "Hey, I've got this rover." "No, no, no, we don't want that rover. That rover's too big, and expensive, and heavy, and it's just going to cause us trouble. How about an arm?"

Some scientists did an analysis that said the odds of being able to get the spectrometer to rocks with an arm are not very good. If you land in a place that doesn't have a lot of rocks, you can't reach it. Tony commissioned designing a very small rover on a string, on a tether, so it would get all its power and brains back on the lander. It turned out it would cost quite a bit of money and really wouldn't do much. Finally, Tony accepted that he would fly the rover if we would carry the spectrometer. It took years, but we finally got that deal worked out. It was a barter system. We said, "We'll pay all the costs to integrate the spectrometer and you pay the cost to integrate the rover into the lander," and it worked out about the same.

So, that's how Sojourner got to go to Mars. And, after a while the press got so interested in Sojourner, I mean, this cute little rover -- "Oh, my gosh, it's so cute," -- that it was really a big selling point for the project. And, kept the project from getting a lot of flack because we had this great little rover, and 'Wow! Rover's never been on Mars before!" So, the rover turned out to be an asset to the project.

We spent $171 million for the spacecraft and 25 for the rover and 55 for the launch vehicle, so a total of $265 million, which is about the same price as the movie, Waterworld. Matt Golenbach, the project scientist says, "It was cheaper than Titanic and had a happier ending."

We landed on Mars and our Outreach Manager, Shek Jiara, who is in charge of educational programs and getting the information out to the public about Mars said, "We're going to get a lot of Web hits." So our Web master set up a bunch of mirror sites. We have our server and then people started to say, "We'll host a site that will mirror what's on your server." Pretty soon all the commercial people, like Sun and SGI and DEC, all started to get interested. Everybody's clamoring to mirror our site.

By the time we landed on Mars, we were capable of handling 60 million hits. And, we needed every bit of it because it turned out on the 8th of July we got 47 million hits. So, Pathfinder was the defining moment for the Internet. And, somebody wrote a little article they said that -- I think it was in the New York Times -- that the Pearl Harbor speech by Franklin Roosevelt was the defining moment for radio. Landing on the moon was the defining moment for television. And Pathfinder was the defining moment for the Internet.

The Nagano Olympics have now exceeded the number of hits that Pathfinder got, but for the first really big event, Pathfinder was just an order of magnitude more than anybody else. Of course, Nagano was weeks long.

What did it feel like when you guys landed successfully?

Donna Shirley: It was great, it was absolutely great. We have video tape of the team jumping up and down and screaming and hugging each other. And, that was another thing that people really identified with Pathfinder because people were willing to show emotion and were willing to jump up and down and they weren't very -- they weren't wearing suits and ties. They just looked like real people.

A lot of that was a reflection of Tony Spear, who's a very emotional kind of a guy. He's a very charismatic kind of leader. His ability to tightly control budgets and schedules and everything is not strong, but boy, he can get a team around him and really get them fired up, and that's what he was good at. So when this team landed on Mars it was great.

I was disappointed in a way because I had 25 years of experience communicating with the media and all that sort of stuff, so I was the one that was out in front of the TV cameras. My boss and I, Norm Haynes, were doing that, so that the reporters wouldn't be in bothering the people flying the mission. So, I'm out in front of CNN cameras and all I can see is this little monitor and it's a really hot, bright July 4th day, and so I can't see very well. And the anchor's saying, "What's going on? What's going on? I can't see what's going on! Get me a sunshade! And so I'd see them jumping up and down and I'd say, "Well, they must have made it." And, then we'd hear something on the earphones. So, I was experiencing this kind of vicariously, but I mean, it was just an incredibly emotional moment.

Then we had trouble with the rover. You know, mothers love all their children equally, but the littlest one is kind of your pet. So, I was still very fond of the rover and the rover was having trouble getting off the petal. There's this petal with solar rays on it and the air bags were bunched up and blocking the ramp that the rover had to get off. So they had to pick up the petal and pull the air bags in some more and then put it down.

Then we were having problems communicating between the lander and the rover. It turned out the sun went down before we could get the rover off. So I had to spend a whole night wondering, what's going to happen? The next day, they fired up and the rover got off. It was really something.

The lander camera could take pictures of the ramp the rover was coming down. And, there was a young scientist named Justin Mackie, who had figured out how to program the camera to turn, so that it would catch the rover as it was doing things. So, it would make a little -- like a jerky movie. And so, the camera -- the first picture comes back and there's just the ramp sitting there. And I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, the rover didn't get up," or whatever. And then, the next picture and then all of a sudden you see the ramp bend and then the rover comes into view. And then -- so there's six images for it to get down on the ground. And, this guy from Mission Control, Art Thompson says, "Six wheels on soil." And it was just the greatest experience, it was a terrific, really terrific high.

Scientists often say they learn from failure, and it seems to me that this rover was a great success. What have you learned that will apply to the future rovers?

Donna Shirley: Every time we do a mission we have things that fail, no question. Mars Observer's failure had a huge impact. We had not lost a complete mission for 27 years. It was a shock and it forced them to reevaluate some of the things they'd done.

For instance, the belief system was, "Contractors build earth orbiting spacecraft, so just buy an earth orbiting spacecraft and ship it to Mars." It turned out that the conditions are very different. That was one thing that led to the failure. Also they said, "You can carry lots and lots of instruments." We said, "No, we really can't." They said, "Oh, sure you can," and we overran the budget because the instruments were too big. So you learn something from everything.

Out of the ashes of Mars Observer rose the Mars Exploration Program. Instead of doing one giant orgy of exploration every 20 years, we'd better do it every 26 months, when the planets line up right. We'll do two, so if we lose one, it's not such a big trauma.

Mars Global Surveyor was the first one of the Mars Observer replacements. Pathfinder happened to be going at the same time, so we had an orbiter and a lander. Now, from Pathfinder we learned that it's possible to use air bags to land on planets, but it also turned out that they were much heavier than we originally thought. We're being forced into smaller and smaller launch vehicles, so we can launch less and less mass. For the '98 lander, we're using retro-rockets, like Viking used, because they don't weigh as much.

So we learn something even from our successes. The air bags were incredibly successful. Now if we ever want to go someplace that's really rugged, we can go back and use the air bags. We'll have to use the bigger launch vehicles and that's the way it is.

From the rover we learned that small rovers really can operate. Nobody believed this, but the microelectronics revolution over the last 20 years has enabled very small computers, very small sensors, charge-coupled device cameras and things like that. We used a lot of commercial stuff in the rover because we could. Viking cost so much because they had to invent everything. Because 20 years ago there weren't small computers, there weren't good sensors, nobody knew how to build a mass spectrometer that would fly to Mars and so on. Now we can take advantage of the technology that's been developed by the military and the commercial technology. That's how we were able to do Pathfinder and the rover so cheaply.

There's still a problem because these technologies are not designed for space. We were lucky Pathfinder flew during a low solar cycle, low sun spot time. Now we're going into a high solar cycle and there's a lot more radiation and charged particles around. Are commercial parts qualified for this harder environment? Probably not, so do we use commercial parts and if so how do we protect them? There are always new challenges.

But we learned that small rovers work, they can do useful science, they can carry instruments. It's possible for a fairly stupid robot to really do something. The rover has about the same intelligence as a bug. When a bug comes up to a rock, it doesn't say, "This is a rock, I will now look over here and go around this rock." The bug keeps bumping into it until it gets around it. That's kind of the way the rover works, except that we don't have to touch the rock, because the rover has laser light stripers in front that stripe light out onto the ground. It has cameras and it has a computer brain. So the cameras look at the stripes and if the stripes are nice and flat and straight, the computer interprets that as, okay, you can move ahead, it's safe. If the stripes wrinkle, then the computer knows there's a rock, and then it's programmed to turn and keep going until it can no longer see this obstacle. Then it will turn around it and go back in the direction it was told to go in the first place, very simple intelligence.

If the rover tilts suddenly, or tilts past a certain degree it stops. Our first Mars traffic accident was when Sojourner was backing up to Yogi, the big rock. It's really difficult to calculate exactly how many turns of the wheels you need, because you slip a little bit in the dirt. Jack Morrison, the operator, backed up a little too much, and one of the rover's wheels went up on the rock. As soon as the wheel gets too tilted, the rover knows to stop.

We were stuck with this wheel on the rock. And then, we had a communication problem with the lander, between the lander and the earth. And so, we couldn't get commands into the rover because the rover only talks to the lander, and the lander talks to the earth. So, we sent commands to the rover, "Okay, move forward a little bit," but they didn't get there. So, here's the rover, wheels stuck on the rock, and they were trying to take -- they'd just finished taking one panorama called the "Gallery Panorama," and now they were going to take the "Presidential Panorama." This was going to be better. More colors, you know, better resolution. Here's the rover, with the wheel up on the rock. And, I'm saying, "You can't send a picture to the President with a rover with her wheels stuck up on the rock!" And the guys were kidding me because they say, "See, it's a male rover after all."

Fortunately they were having enough communication problems rushing to get this picture for the President. By the time they actually took a picture of that area the rover was already down and they'd gotten the communication problems worked out. So it was a nice decorous picture of the rover in the big panorama that everybody sees.

Another thing we learned was that operating on Mars with solar power is really difficult. For one thing it's a 24 hour and 37 minute day, so you're in night a lot of the time. That means you have to have batteries. Batteries don't like cold weather and it's very cold on Mars. So there's all kinds of problems with how you power the thing and keep it warm.

There's another thing we discovered. The rover had a little a solar cell that was covered with a cover. So, once a day we'd move the cover off the solar cell and measure the difference between the power coming from the clean cell and the dirty cells that had dust falling on them. We discovered that the solar panel was degraded by .2 percent per day just from dust filtering out of the atmosphere and falling on this solar array. So we don't know how to make a mission on Mars last more than 90 days, just because of the amount of dust falling. We don't know how to design little brooms to clean off solar arrays and we don't know if it's because of the static electricity that's generated. So there's a whole new challenge that we have to solve for the next set of missions.

You learn things. That's the whole idea of the program. You learn something from this mission, you apply it to the next mission. That's how risk management is done. It's a gradual process of building up your knowledge, instead of trying to do everything at once.

When will we be able to go visit Mars?

Donna Shirley: That's a tough problem. When can people go to Mars? It's a matter of money. Right now the entire NASA budget is being cut every year. It's just not seen as important. It doesn't have the kind of political constituency that gets votes. Even people who support the space program have other issues. And there's this belief that a lot of money is going into space.

It's a very small amount of money, compared to the money being spent for welfare, for instance. The military budget has declined, but the military space program is much bigger than the NASA space program. Even the commercial space program has now surpassed NASA in the amount of money that it spends. NASA's budget is about $12 billion now, down from around 14 at the peak. That's a pretty trivial amount of money as government budgets go.

The Mars program is about $200 million a year, so it's about the cost of producing one major movie per year, or less than a dollar a person, in the country per year. But people still say, "That's a lot of money, why should we be going into space?" So we don't have the political support to really thrive.

The second problem is that the space station is running over budget, costing a lot of money. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that the cost of it was underestimated, which is very common in these big programs. Either you just don't estimate it right, or somebody gets real optimistic and says, "I think I can do this," and they forget all the things that they can't do. In some cases they just plain fib. I mean, "buy-in" is a time honored government contracting problem.

Anyway, the space station is having budget problems and it's taking all the money. In fact, we just lost $50 million out of our program to be transferred into the space station. The second problem is working with the Russians. It was a foreign policy decision. When the Soviet Union collapsed you've got all these scientists and engineers and if you don't want them building nuclear weapons for Iran, or Iraq, or the North Koreans or somebody, you better put them to work.

We paid for the Russians to build one module of the space station, and they said they would build another on their own money. Well, the Russian economy is in a shambles. There are incredible problems over there. They're not paying the workers, and the workers aren't getting the job done. So the module that we paid them to build is fine. The module that they're building on their own nickel keeps slipping, because people aren't getting paid.

It was a perfectly rational foreign policy decision, but the schedule for the space station keeps slipping. If we're going to build the module ourselves because the Russians aren't going to make it, that's going to cost more money.

Also, a lot of decisions are typically made to keep the first costs down, that is to keep the capital cost down, the up front money, which means that it may not be as cheap to operate as if you designed in the operations things now. It's just like, if you buy a car and you put all the environmental protection pollution control equipment on it, it's going to cost more. So a lot of people are out there buying sports utility vehicles, great big ego gratification gas hogs that don't have good pollution control equipment. They won't pay the extra $100 or $200 to put in the pollution control equipment, so somebody gets to spend a lot of money cleaning that out of the air. People don't think about the operations costs.

If the space station is up there and working, you need it to train and test people for a three-year trip to Mars. It's a year to get to Mars roughly, and two years to get back. Now we've had people stay in space for a year. Shannon Lucid was up for six months and came down and walked off the shuttle and within a few weeks she was fine. Others have had to be carried off. We now know that people can survive in space for up to a year, but we don't know about three years. We don't know what's going to happen.

So you need the space station so people can go up and practice living in space for three years, before you ship them off to Mars. It would be very embarrassing to get them to Mars and discover on the way back that they get completely incapacitated.

In order to get the costs down it's going to be a lot cheaper to take modules of the space station and make another one and send that off to Mars than it is to invent it from scratch, so we need the station for that. So the station's in the way of us going to Mars. At some point the station will get built, it will be operated, we'll have the technology and we'll know about the people and then a budget wedge will open up so we can start to design the systems to take us to Mars. Even if the NASA budget doesn't get cut anymore, that's 20 years down the road.

Do you believe the opportunities you've had would have been possible in other countries? Do you feel like America makes your life possible?

Donna Shirley: The United States is at the forefront of giving opportunities to women, I don't think there's any question about that. Although it's interesting that other countries have had a female chief executive, and the U.S. hasn't even come close. I think we're very conflicted in this country. We have the current division between radical right and radical left, and centrist people. I'm a centrist person myself.

Our university system is certainly superior, as evidenced by the fact that so many kids from other countries come here to go to school. I just go an honorary doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, right in the middle of the country, and there were 106 flags carried in the ceremony. There's 106 different countries represented by the students at the University of Oklahoma. Our higher education system is the envy of the world. The kind of education we get here is really key to people being successful in these high-tech fields. That's why our economy is so strong; it's based on our education system.

But our lower education system is crumbling and we've got to do something about it. We could build our whole economy around foreign students, but that's probably not a smart thing to do. We've got to get to the kids who are in grade school and high school.

The second thing I think of is the culture of entrepreneurship, of freedom. "Hey, you can do what you want to do." I think that Horatio Alger's spirit is very much alive in this country. Right now it seems to be reflected solely in money making that seems to be the value that's valued above all others. It's good to have billions and billions of dollars in personal wealth, and people admire that. It's good to be a sports star and get paid millions and millions of dollars a year, and people admire that. Those are the kind of people...people look up to.

I don't particularly think that's necessarily a good thing, but that's the way it is. But on the other hand, that same spirit also says people can go out and accomplish things, and people admire that. They don't try to tear you down. In general, people like that. I think that's another big opportunity.

The feminist movement, the women's movement in this country, has been very powerful for people like me. The whole language, the whole environment, has changed so much in the last 35 years while I've been doing this stuff. I mean, when I first came to JPL it was de rigeur for everybody to smoke cigars. And, we literally had our meetings in cigar smoke-filled rooms, and that was a very macho thing. You know, you lit up your cigar and all this sort of stuff. And, there was just a lot of macho around the Cold War. The Cold Warriors were very macho. And now, you know, Vietnam and the '70s and the women's movement and everything, there's just a whole different climate about the opportunities for women. Aerospace is still one of the weaker places in opportunities for women, but Silicon Valley...I mean, they are so desperate for talent that they don't care what sex you are. You just go in and do it.

So I think I've gotten a lot of support out of the changing climate in this country. We're on the forefront of that, I don't think anywhere else in the world has as positive a climate for women, even Europe, Australia, New Zealand, especially Japan. Those places have very well developed economies, but they still don't have the same equality that we and Canada do. I'm a Senior Fellow at the UCLA School of Public Policy this year and Kim Campbell is another one of the Fellows. She's the former Prime Minister of Canada. So Canada is even more forward looking than we are, they've had a woman prime minister.

You mentioned Antarctica a while ago. What's your interest there?

Donna Shirley: Well, I would like to take one of the expeditions to Antarctica before it melts. The ice shelves are falling off. It's really interesting that people aren't relating that to global climate change. Now there are cruise ships that go down there. I'm on their Advisory Council of the Planetary Society, which is sponsoring a trip to Antarctica.

But more germane to what I'm doing, the dry alleys in Antarctica are the best earthly analog for conditions on Mars. So a lot of scientists, Chris McKay from Ames Research Center, in particular, are going to the dry alleys of Antarctica and doing experiments to see how things really operate down there. . There's a lake in one of the dry valleys called, Lake Vostok, which has been covered with ice for thousands of years.

The moon of Jupiter called Europa is completely covered with ice, and looks like it may have a liquid ocean underneath, because you can see where things have melted, and then shifted, and then gotten back into position. One of my colleagues, Joan Horvath, is running a little study to look at going and drilling down through the ice in Lake Vostok and simulating a mission to Europa that would drill down through the ice and see what's under there.

Now, there are problems, because Lake Vostok has been developing its own ecology for thousands and thousands of years. So if we penetrate that ice barrier, are we going to introduce organisms down there that would be deadly to the ecology? Of course, the drug companies are extremely interested, because if there's a whole new ecology down there, there may be things that would be useful as the basis of drugs and antibiotics. Right now there's a lot of...of going back and forth. How do we do this? How do we protect the lake? How do we finance it?

Finally, the stations in Antarctica, like nuclear submarines, are great metaphors and models for human habitats on Mars. If somebody has spent years down at the Pole in this terrible climate, living with a few other people and surviving and making that work, maybe they're excellent candidates for Martian colonists. So the human element of it comes into play too. So we think Antarctica's a fascinating place for exploring Mars.

You'd like to go there yourself?

Donna Shirley: Yeah, I'd like to take a cruise. Probably next year, before all the penguins are dead. The penguins aren't doing well because the water's warming up.

I hope you get to go. It's been wonderful talking with you.