What do you think?
Rate this book
Managing Martians
The leader of the team that created the revolutionary Mars Sojourner rover chronicles her trailblazing career in space exploration and tells the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of the celebrated Mars Pathfinder mission.
Donna Shirley's 35-year career as an aerospace engineer reached a jubilant pinnacle in July 1997 when Sojourner--the solar-powered, self-guided, microwave-oven-sized rover--was seen exploring the Martian landscape in Pathfinder's spectacular images from the surface of the red planet.
The event marked a milestone in space exploration--no vehicle had ever before roamed the surface of another planet. But for Donna Shirley, the manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Exploration Program who headed the mostly male team that designed and built Sojourner, it marked a triumph of another kind. Since her childhood in Oklahoma, Shirley had dreamed of traveling to Mars, and, through Pathfinder, she did just that.
Managing Martians is Shirley's captivating memoir of a life and career spent reaching for the stars. From her seemingly outlandish aspiration at age ten to build aircraft, to abandoning high school Home Ec in favor of mechanical drawing, and, at sixteen, becoming a licensed pilot, Shirley defied expectations from the beginning.
The only female engineering student in her college class, Shirley earned a degree in aerospace/mechanical engineering (while picking up a beauty contest title along the way) and, in 1966, began a career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that has spanned twenty-four different projects, including Mariner 10's trip to Venus and Mercury and a 1991 assignment as chief engineer of a $1.6 billion project to explore asteroids, a comet, and Saturn.
Shirley's innovations in automation and robotics paved the way to her being named the first woman ever to manage a NASA program. For Pathfinder she assembled a brilliant band of upstarts (her fellow "Martians") and embarked on an improbable to put an untethered, fully automated rover on Mars--at a fraction of the cost of any previous Mars project.
In a vivid narrative, rich with anecdotes and thrilling turning points, Shirley recounts the intense battles she waged to defend her vision and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her committed team. Her moment-by-cliffhanging-moment account of Pathfinder's landing and Sojourner's first tentative foray across the sands of Mars brilliantly captures the fulfillment of a lifelong dream as it heralds a brave new era of space exploration.
Donna Shirley's 35-year career as an aerospace engineer reached a jubilant pinnacle in July 1997 when Sojourner--the solar-powered, self-guided, microwave-oven-sized rover--was seen exploring the Martian landscape in Pathfinder's spectacular images from the surface of the red planet.
The event marked a milestone in space exploration--no vehicle had ever before roamed the surface of another planet. But for Donna Shirley, the manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Exploration Program who headed the mostly male team that designed and built Sojourner, it marked a triumph of another kind. Since her childhood in Oklahoma, Shirley had dreamed of traveling to Mars, and, through Pathfinder, she did just that.
Managing Martians is Shirley's captivating memoir of a life and career spent reaching for the stars. From her seemingly outlandish aspiration at age ten to build aircraft, to abandoning high school Home Ec in favor of mechanical drawing, and, at sixteen, becoming a licensed pilot, Shirley defied expectations from the beginning.
The only female engineering student in her college class, Shirley earned a degree in aerospace/mechanical engineering (while picking up a beauty contest title along the way) and, in 1966, began a career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that has spanned twenty-four different projects, including Mariner 10's trip to Venus and Mercury and a 1991 assignment as chief engineer of a $1.6 billion project to explore asteroids, a comet, and Saturn.
Shirley's innovations in automation and robotics paved the way to her being named the first woman ever to manage a NASA program. For Pathfinder she assembled a brilliant band of upstarts (her fellow "Martians") and embarked on an improbable to put an untethered, fully automated rover on Mars--at a fraction of the cost of any previous Mars project.
In a vivid narrative, rich with anecdotes and thrilling turning points, Shirley recounts the intense battles she waged to defend her vision and the ingenuity and resourcefulness of her committed team. Her moment-by-cliffhanging-moment account of Pathfinder's landing and Sojourner's first tentative foray across the sands of Mars brilliantly captures the fulfillment of a lifelong dream as it heralds a brave new era of space exploration.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published June 15, 1998
8 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 16, 2013
Donna Shirley had a 30-some years' career at JPL starting in 1966. For 4 years in the mid-1990s she managed the team of some 30 engineers and technicians who worked on the Sojourner, a small robotic Mars rover that prefigured the later Spirit/Opportunity and Curiosity rovers; in contrast, the team that worked on the lander had 300 people. The Soviets landed two Lunokhod rovers (misspelled "Lunakhod" in this book, and mistranslated as "moon car") in the early 1970s; because the Moon is only one light-second away from Earth, they were able to drive them as RC cars. Mars, on the other hand, is between 3 and 22 light-minutes away from Earth; a Mars rover must be able to navigate autonomously; for a Mars rover to be launched, the microprocessor needed to be invented first, and autonomous navigation algorithms needed to be developed. Shirley briefly goes through the history of robotics at JPL; one early prototype rover dragged behind cables to the VAX computer that ran its autonomous navigation software.
Overall, I think that it would be a better book with more focus on overcoming the engineering challenges of the author's job, and less on the overcoming the problems of being the only female engineering student in her class and one of very few female engineers in an organization. I have read a few autobiographies of aerospace engineers, from Nevil Shute, who worked on the R100 airship, to Ben Rich, who developed the F-117 stealth fighter; this is the only one with blurbs from Glamour and Mirabella magazines on the cover.
Overall, I think that it would be a better book with more focus on overcoming the engineering challenges of the author's job, and less on the overcoming the problems of being the only female engineering student in her class and one of very few female engineers in an organization. I have read a few autobiographies of aerospace engineers, from Nevil Shute, who worked on the R100 airship, to Ben Rich, who developed the F-117 stealth fighter; this is the only one with blurbs from Glamour and Mirabella magazines on the cover.
November 20, 2015
A combination of Mars mission narrative - very complete and interesting; biography - quite brief; and team management discussion - the author wrote another book beforehand titled Managing Creativity. Especially interesting were some of the plans for future Mars missions and the authors descriptions of challenges encountered because of gender and her leadership role within JPL.
A spread of black and white photos in the book depict the author, her colleagues and both of the spacecraft.
I sought this book out after reading The Martian. In that story, the Pathfinder and Soujourner both play a pivotal role. While some of the probe facts are not quite accurate (no LEDs, no external power port), it still makes for a great story.
A solid 4½ stars, this book is a quick read and definitely recommended.
A spread of black and white photos in the book depict the author, her colleagues and both of the spacecraft.
I sought this book out after reading The Martian. In that story, the Pathfinder and Soujourner both play a pivotal role. While some of the probe facts are not quite accurate (no LEDs, no external power port), it still makes for a great story.
A solid 4½ stars, this book is a quick read and definitely recommended.
February 5, 2009
Informative, at least about how major space projects come together from a management perspective within JPL/NASA, which is interesting to me (and probably not many other folks), but not ultimately anything to fax home about. It is written with a minimum of flair or humor, as to be expected from a businessperson.
January 10, 2018
As an engineer myself it was interesting to learn about Donna Shirley's career path and the trials and tribulations she had proving herself as a female engineer. She eventually became the manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Mars Exploration Program and headed up the team that designed and built Sojourner. I was particularly interested in this book because one of the engineers in the book is my colleague Line Van Van Nieuwstadt is the radio engineer for the project. So cool!
June 22, 2020
Great role model for young women, especially given the era she grew up in. More of a memoir than advice for upcoming scientists, but interesting enough that I read it all the way through (I'm not a big memoir fan).
March 31, 2019
I read this book for a class on tech leadership, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in picking up leadership skills, learning about females in male-dominated fields, or reading about Mars! Donna did amazing things and all her accomplishments are really put into perspective when you realize when they took place. Yet she does not seem to overly brag. This book will make you obsessed with space and NASA! I now follow JPL on Instagram because this book made me realize all the potential exciting projects that these NASA employees are possible of!
November 23, 2015
Usually, I would give an engineering heavy book five stars but the way the story was compiled didn't fully engage me. I found myself skipping over the technical parts and the time line of event sometimes confused me. For a woman in engineering, I expected a lot more focus on how the team accepted Donna and more on her particular expertise area, but her personal life got a lot of bandwidth in the narrative which makes it feel more of a pseudo memoir than a book about managing martians. The blend of topics helps illustrate the passion that drove the author to excel but it didn't resonate with my own struggle as an engineer. The managing projects portion wasn't bad but it didn't provide too much insight or new information into developing teams or delineated a particular strategy; in those aspects it is vague.
If you want to know more about how Pathfinder and Soujouner came to life this is the book for you.
If you want to know more about how Pathfinder and Soujouner came to life this is the book for you.
July 12, 2016
The 70-75 biographical pages after the introductory chapter can be safely skipped or skimmed if you are primarily interested in spacecraft engineering or the exploration of the solar system. I would have read this book years ago if I had known how interesting the 200 other pages were, the secondary prominence of the Mars rover on the cover photograph was off-putting, I expected a lot worse.
January 29, 2008
Adds a lot of personality and "pre-history" to the story of Mars Pathfinder and the Sojourner rover. Then it goes a little beyond to tell the immediate aftermath. That story has changed since that time, however, and no one has written THAT book yet. (Squyres' Roving Mars comes closest.)
February 1, 2016
I read this book because I have long been interested in working at JPL, and I find the Mars rovers to be fascinating. This book gives an inside look at working at JPL, dealing with NASA and funding issues, and ultimately pursuing and achieving a lifelong dream.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews