I am clearly not the intended audience for this book. In it, the guy who lead the EDL (Entry, Descent, and Landing) team for Mars Science Laboratory talks about becoming an aerospace engineer, his early career at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and his eventual role as EDL lead for MSL. I think it's intended to be some sort of "inspirational" story about doing things that seem impossible and facing team challenges, but it didn't come off that way to me.



Maybe I'm jaded. I work in the space indus

I am clearly not the intended audience for this book. In it, the guy who lead the EDL (Entry, Descent, and Landing) team for Mars Science Laboratory talks about becoming an aerospace engineer, his early career at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and his eventual role as EDL lead for MSL. I think it's intended to be some sort of "inspirational" story about doing things that seem impossible and facing team challenges, but it didn't come off that way to me.



Maybe I'm jaded. I work in the space industry (though on the commercial side, not science side) and face similar challenges (design doesn't work, trying to get pieces worked by individual team members to come together, making mission ops decisions at the "last minute") but on a much quicker and cheaper scale. My job is similar to the role he describes, but I do it for a spacecraft platform, the backbone that supports the commercial payload. I didn't need all of his deep explanations of the process of design, test, and ops, and though some of the problems they ran into are interesting, they're the same types of problems we all run into in this industry.



The book needed a better editor or support writer. The flow of the space stuff was interesting enough, but I don't know that anybody needs to know of his high school days or his courtship of his first wife. Nor did it seem really relevant that he re-married and was expecting another child when MSL launched. If the idea is about how to lead, then these side stories were just human interest...and were distinctly uninteresting (more so in light of how it seems he doesn't talk about women). More annoying to me was the tone of the book. If you read it and don't understand how the design (etc) process works, you might think that MSL was entirely successful thanks to Steltzner. Never does he talk about the spacecraft that carried it to Mars NOR THE F'N ROVER DOING THE ACTUAL SCIENCE. Yes, if the "space crane" hadn't worked, the mission would have failed, but that could be said for the launch vehicle, the transit spacecraft, or the rover itself, too. Though he talks about his (male members of) his team, he makes it seem like he did everything (and maybe as a manager/lead engineer, he had final say, but really a good lead engineer knows who to go to for each task and has enough of a "jack of all trades" capability to call BS or to allow a design to proceed).



Worst of all, throughout the book there was a distinct lack of discussion of female team members. Steltzner goes on and on describing team members, often devoting paragraphs to them. He said perhaps 2 lines about women, and one of those lines was to use phrases that in my neck of the woods are what men say when they feel that a woman's a b**ch. It's an attitude I see a lot in the industry, especially from my male colleagues who are 10 years or more older than I am. One of the women he didn't mention much was the lead engineer for the entire project...way more important overall than he was. Yet he didn't mention many women (2 or 3, excluding his wives) and never in any good detail. This leads me to think that either JPL doesn't have a lot of women (something I suspect isn't true) or that Steltzner needs to retire because he doesn't see them as equal members of the team (something I've seen over and over again in my job...from customers and coworkers alike, men of a certain age...).



So unless you have a burning desire to glimpse how space missions are designed, feel free to skip this. That a (male) coworker recommended it to me makes me wonder about said coworker....