Adam Steltzner

In the months leading up to the landing of the Curiosity Rover at Gale Crater, NASA-JPL released an excellent little video called "Seven Minutes of Terror". In this detailed, but stone cold sober, video NASA JPL engineers talked about the hows and the whys of designing and building the rover. They also spoke of what could happen if just one or two items did not go as planned. Adam Stelzner was one of the engineers interviewed in the video. "The Right Kind of Crazy" could have been "Seven Minutes" in book form. I'm serious. The story of the process of designing, testing and having to go back to the drawing board , along with a collection of selected photos, would have made for a very interesting story. Instead, some editor, and mind you I'm just guessing, decided to push for a another business-slash-memoir book. BAD IDEA. This book was won in a Goodreads contest in exchange for a fair and honest review.… (mehr)

I'm an admirer of Adam Steltzner. He's the "7-Minutes of Terror" guy from the Mars Curiosity landing that used the Sky Crane. The book is fairly short, containing a biography, and his engineering and management precepts such as "holding on to the doubt", which is to say, never assume you have it right always keep looking for errors and improvement. The biography was kind of streamlined and not very definitive, it neglected to say who his father was (son of an heir of the Schilling spice fortune) or that he spent time at the Berklee College of Music, or his escapades with sex and drugs during high school. It repeated the "holding on to the doubt" mantra too many times without concrete examples. Nevertheless it was interesting to go into his head for a while, for better and worse. Interesting if you already have an interest in Steltzner or JPL.… (mehr)