THE RIGHT KIND OF CRAZY
A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation
Adam Steltzner, with William Patrick
Portfolio
246 pages; $28
When the Mars rover Curiosity stuck its landing on the Red Planet on August 6, 2012, it not only opened a new era of space exploration and a new door to NASA's future, but signified a triumph of human ingenuity over staggering odds.
There was virtually zero margin of error with the $2.5 billion project, as this new book about the Rover points out, and many things could have gone wrong with a mission that depended upon the work of more than 7,000 scientists and engineers, and about 500,000 lines of computer code.
After being blasted into space by an Atlas V rocket on November 26, 2011, Curiosity spent eight months hurtling some 354 million miles through space, plunging into Mars's atmosphere at 13,200 miles an hour. For the rover to alight safely in the chosen landing zone, everything had to work perfectly in an immensely complicated system known as EDL (entry, descent and landing). The process involved rocket-powered deceleration, a giant parachute and a sky crane using nylon ropes to lower Curiosity gently onto Mars's surface and set it directly down on its wheels.
It all sounded pretty crazy, as NASA's top administrator observed, but, as it turned out, it was "the right kind of crazy." For more than three and a half years now, the little rover has been working diligently, trundling across Mars, looking for evidence that the planet could have supported life, and occasionally tweeting.
The Right Kind of Crazy is written by Adam Steltzner, an engineer leading the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that was charged with landing Curiosity. Written with William Patrick, the book is an inside account of the decade of teamwork that went into Curiosity, and it's also the story of Mr Steltzner's own unlikely journey - from an aspiring musician, who barely graduated from high school, to a California Institute of Technology recruit to a team leader at JPL in Pasadena.
Though The Right Kind of Crazy is hobbled at times by the author's digressions into management-speak, the book offers a gripping account of the mission, and some fascinating insights into the engineering principles and analytics involved in pulling off the project. Mr Steltzner - who became known at JPL for his Elvis hair, his cowboy boots and his swaggering style - often talks less like a science geek than like the rocker he wanted to be as a teenager, and he displays a gift here for capturing the high-stakes, adrenaline-laced atmosphere of the Mars Science Laboratory, as the overall project was called.
On top of racing the clock, Mr Steltzner and his colleagues were faced with inventing a landing system for the car-size one-tonne Curiosity, which was filled with delicate scientific equipment and way too heavy for the air-bag cocoons used in earlier rover missions.
Six months from launch, something went horribly awry in a simulated landing: Radar, crucial to the process, failed to kick in. After a string of all-nighters, examining "every component for the source of the failure," Mr Steltzner says, they found "that all our incredibly sophisticated naughty bits had worked fine." There was nothing wrong with the spacecraft computer or flight software or algorithms.
"What hadn't worked was some run-of-the mill, everyday components" of test equipment. In this case, the problem was caught in time to save the mission; a similarly mundane mistake that went undiscovered (one team had used English units of measurement; another used metric units) led to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999.
Mr Steltzner gives us an appreciation of the hard data and intuition involved in the engineering of a huge project like this - and the way teams learned to break down seemingly impossible problems into smaller, more manageable ones. He writes that one of the difficulties with space exploration is that "we never have enough iterations to allow us to fully learn from our mistakes." And he describes the technology necessary for landing the rover on Mars as "tantamount to magic."
He reminds us that the kind of life NASA hopes to find on Mars "has nothing to do with little green men or dudes who look like Arnold Schwarzenegger." Microbes would be "an astonishing discovery." Life beyond Earth, he adds, would be "a profound and comforting discovery" - comforting because "it means if we screw up and ruin all life on Earth, we would not have destroyed the only living things in all existence."
Curiosity hasn't found any actual life on Mars yet, but it did find an ancient stream bed and evidence that the planet could have supported microbial life billions of years ago. And the rover keeps toiling away, collecting samples, analysing rocks and sending back spectacular photographs of the red planet, along with the occasional selfie. On the first anniversary of its safe landing on Mars, hundreds of millions of miles from Earth, the lonely little rover sang "Happy Birthday" to itself.
©2016 The New York Times News Service
