Transcript · The Engineer Who Convinced NASA to Try a Crazy Idea on Mars · Adam Steltzner

Marco, picture a kid whose only good subject in high school is drama, who smokes weed instead of studying and plays bass in a band, and who, after scraping through graduation by a miracle, gets a job at a health food store, and his only ambition is for the band to hit it big. You tell me, what are the odds you'd give him of ending up landing a robot, a rover, on Mars?

Well, under those conditions absolutely zero, really, really slim. And the kid we're talking about is Adam Steltzner, and in 2012 he's the man leading the team that lands Curiosity on Mars, which is the biggest rover, it's basically the size of a MINI Cooper, so the size of a MINI Cooper, the biggest ever set down on the surface of another planet.

But the most interesting thing is how Adam gets there, because how does someone go from working in a grocery store to being the head of the landing of a rover going to Mars?

It's an amazing story, but to me even more beautiful are the lessons Adam writes in his book, which is called The Right Kind of Crazy, which we got in English because it doesn't exist in Italian, we translated it, and now we're doing an episode on it, on this book. And to me they're concrete lessons, that's what's great about it: they're concrete lessons, leadership lessons tied to engineering, to solving technical problems that aren't just hard but almost impossible.

Or even just questions nobody had ever asked before.

Especially landing a rover the size of a MINI Cooper on Mars.

So, where does it all start?

It all starts one night when Adam looks up at the sky and sees the constellation Orion. But before we tell you how this story begins, first of all we want to welcome you to In Buona Compagnia. Every month my brother and I pick a book, a memoir, a biography, an essay by someone who in our view has done excellent work, good work in their life, and we gather ideas and reflections from it that are useful for our work and our life. Now, this is absolutely not a manual, so what you do with it is entirely up to you. But we hope you can find something to take with you, and if that happens let us know in the comments, subscribe to this project, but above all, if you find something that can help you, send us an email.

I'd start, though, from where he says why he's writing this book, the opening. I mean, fine, interesting, but why does he decide to write this book? I mean, he's an engineer, fine, why? And he writes: "I sometimes joke that curiosity changed my life. But in some sense it is really true. I am very different from the man I could have been, and I think I might be better. I'm sharing this story not because I think it's unique but because I think it's not. There are scores of young people out there getting bad or conflicting advice, locked into what they think is the thing they are supposed to do and pushing themselves to perform. With those high standards frequently comes a crippling fear of failure. I was crippled by it", so by the fear of failure. "And if I hadn't been curious about the world, I would probably still be working in a health food store, dreaming of the day when my band would hit it big."

Adam grows up in San Francisco, and the key figure at the start of his story is basically his, his dad, because... He was a bit of a do-nothing, and he was afraid.

Yes, Adam describes him like this: he knew about everything, all of it, "from the aerodynamics of laminar airfoils to the artificial insemination of sheep", two completely different things. But his dad, he writes here, "never showed much interest in earning a living." "Work meant struggle, struggle meant the possibility of failure, and failure was simply unacceptable."

So the problem is that, as you said, he showed no interest in earning a living, so little by little the money was running out. In fact he writes: "As the family wealth dwindled, denial hung over us all like a cloud. My father dealt with it by drinking heavily. I coped by becoming a human projectile." He describes a game he used to play, which made me laugh a lot: one day he'd wake up, leave the house and say: "Today I have to go to the supermarket. Okay, but I have to do it going straight." So in a straight line, so he'd start climbing over the fences of the houses, going across the roofs. The game was getting from point A to point B, but going straight, plowing through any obstacle. In fact he writes: "By the time I reached high school, it had become abundantly clear that I was not 'college material,'" and then, as you were saying, "I was simply acting out a challenge to my dad."

"I could see what fear had done to him, and I was having none of it."

"I'd also internalized the message from my dad that trying to do anything seriously was pointless, even dangerous, because absolute perfection was required, and absolute perfection was unattainable."

So then Adam graduates.

Just barely.

He starts working at a grocery store, plays in a band, and we get to that night. One night, while he's driving to a gig, he looks up at the sky and sees the constellation Orion in the east, in the sky, on his right. After midnight the gig ends, and after midnight he drives back home, looks up at the sky again, sees the constellation Orion in the west, but still on his right. And he writes: "I'd never taken an astronomy course, but for some reason this intrigued me. As I drove on home that night, I kept thinking about this movement in the sky, what I'd now call celestial mechanics, and for the first time..." This is beautiful. "For the first time in a long, long while, I was deeply curious about something. And that curiosity changed my life." As you can see, there's always this word, curiosity. There's a line here from Paul Graham, in the essays How to Do Great Work and How to Do What You Love, where he writes that the engine of everything is curiosity. There's this paragraph where he writes, and if you only remember one thing, remember this: "Curiosity is the best guide. Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. Notice how often that word has come up. If you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the oracle replied with a single word, my bet would be on 'curiosity.' That doesn't translate directly to advice. It's not enough just to be curious, and you can't command curiosity anyway. But you can nurture it and let it drive you. Curiosity is the key to all four steps in doing great work: it will choose the field for you, get you to the frontier, cause you to notice the gaps in it, and drive you to explore them.

The whole process is a kind of dance with curiosity." How interesting, because it's the same thing that happens to Adam.

Right, the beautiful part is that, as we said before, at school he was a slacker, he barely graduated, so he didn't go to college, so he had no knowledge of anything about astronomy, I mean he knew nothing. And so he writes, this is beautiful: "I worked hard to catch up, entering a monkish phase." So before deciding what he wanted to do, he starts studying a bit on his own to build himself some foundations.

And then he enrolls at a community college, it was a community college, in an astronomy course.

"Entering a monkish phase during which I let go of music and buzzed off all my hair." And then he writes this, really beautiful: "I was simply saving my life and the lives of everyone to follow in my lineage, hell-bent on not repeating the mistakes of my father." "In fact, I had no burning desire to do research, and I didn't even have a particular field that I wanted to explore." So, as I was saying, he still didn't know anything, but he was "driven simply by curiosity and the need to overcome my insecurities." So, as you said, he enrolls at this community college and then he transfers to the University of California...

Where he studies mechanical engineering and design, graduates, and now he starts looking: where can I go? It's interesting anyway, because with no background he manages to go to community college, take an astronomy and physics course, go to the University of California, Davis, where he's one of the top students, and now he has to decide: where do I want to go? And he picks Caltech for a very specific reason, that is, he writes: all these universities were great, but when he saw Caltech in Pasadena he saw that "they seemed focused on the work more than on their prestige." And so he decides to go to Caltech, and he completes his master's in mechanics. And there, that whole part, as you said, was all theoretical. He was hungry for something hands-on, he wanted to build something, do something, and here he writes something beautiful about engineering. He writes: "The act of engineering, of being ingenious, is fundamentally a creative one." Even if you don't see it that way, you don't think of engineering as a creative act.

"I think engineers and artists have a great deal in common." So now he's faced with the question: what do I want to do? Where do I go? Where do I go? The next choice was... it could be going to JPL. JPL stands for Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is NASA's main research and development center dedicated to the robotic exploration of deep space and the solar system. JPL also designed and built Explorer 1, which was America's first orbiting satellite. So Adam wants to work at this place.

Okay.

He asks his professors for contacts, and they put him in touch with this person named Donald. He describes him as a "famously curmudgeonly engineer." He sends a résumé, fine, they set up an appointment. During the interview, we're talking about 1991, so we weren't even born yet.

The chapter is "A Disastrous Interview."

Exactly, because in that interview Donald asks Adam to design a two-wheeled robot that wouldn't lose traction. Adam explains how it would be done, this and that, but Donald doesn't like the answer. And here Adam writes: "By this time I realized the interview was over."

Yes, because he doesn't say anything to him. After he's done explaining, he looks at him and says: "You can find your own way out."

Exactly, and here Adam writes: "I stumbled through the lab building looking for the exit. I was floored. So I wasn't good enough to work at JPL?"

I mean, imagine that after an interview this guy tells you: "You can find your own way out." So...

Also because he was sad, discouraged, and he can't find the exit. And here he writes: "In the years since, I have worked arm in arm with Bickler without a hitch, and I've realized that the interview was an epic fail on my part. I went in assuming I'd be right, and my cocksure attitude prevented me from really hearing what Bickler was trying to ask. JPL embodies a culture of questioners, and my unwavering certainty in the face of doubt probably didn't communicate that I was ready to give up my pet answers", so me being right, "in pursuit of real truth." This is really beautiful. What happens next? What happens is he takes out the Caltech phonebook and looks for other people he could send a résumé to. The first on the list was a guy named Mike, who was part of JPL, of Applied Mechanics. He sends him a résumé, then calls him, and Mike goes: "I'm sorry, but I have a stack of résumés on my desk I'm interested in, and I don't see yours." And here Adam writes: "I was crushed. Who are these guys? Who are they? What titans work at JPL that they would pass on the top student from the College of Engineering at UC Davis? Isn't that enough? What does it take?!" But then what happens? Five minutes later, Mike calls him back, he's found the résumé in his unopened mail, and he sets up an interview. This time, Adam writes here, he "approached the interview with a huge portion of humility. Which is how my career at the lab began."

Now let's move on, and there's a really beautiful part here, in my opinion. This is one of the principles I carry with me: the idea of holding on to the doubt. "When I took physics back at College of Marin, we were allowed to bring one sheet of paper into each test. On that one sheet, we could have anything we wanted, formulas, equations. A lot of students would write down equations and formulas. My sheet of paper might list a few of the governing laws we'd been studying, but most of the page was devoted to the words "Hold on to the doubt!" Through my dad I knew full well that fear of failing was enough to cause me to fail. Staring at the blank space beneath the problem was sufficiently anxiety provoking that it could lead me to rush to an ill-considered answer. Jumping too soon into solution space might cause me to miss some key element of the problem being posed or to answer a conceptually adjacent question." "I resolved that the solution for my anxiety while staring at the unanswered question was to remain calm in the presence of the openness", of that question, "to not close off the inquiry too soon and thus run at full speed into a solution that might not take the whole truth of the problem into account." So: "Holding on to the doubt meant listening to all that the problem had to say and not making assumptions, and committing to a plan of action based on them, until the deepest truth presented itself." And we'll see how this idea, this principle of holding on to the doubt, will help him enormously later on.

The problem is that at first he ends up in a part of the lab he doesn't love, that he doesn't like: he's in the Spacecraft Structures and Dynamics Group, working as an analyst. Basically, the people around him, let's say they don't exactly thrill him, because he always has this thing in his head that he wants to see something practical, something that works, that moves, that has problems to solve. Something real.

Because the way it works, from what I understood, is that there are the design engineers, they design a component, then they throw it over the wall, and then there are the engineers, the structural analysts, who check whether the design would hold up. But he writes that even though what he was doing wasn't ideal, it was a bit boring: "it was a hell of a lot better than working in a health food store in Mill Valley. I was doing something real, not selling the promise of some hippie dietary supplement. This engineering thing was all about making ideas reality. I started to feel part of a multigenerational effort to push the boundaries of our exploration always further, farther, deeper into space." And what I thought is that I'd like that too, to do something real, even though I'm not good at math, at physics. But this is a beautiful idea, doing something real, not selling some damn, I don't know, crappy detox drink. Doing something real, something concrete.

And this part is beautiful too: feeling part of something bigger. And here there's an important part that applies a lot to young people, but really to all of us too. Now, if you think about it, a person who joins a big company walks into a context that's already structured.

It's already built.

There's already a system. That person, since they have a mind that Adam describes as a beginner's mind, sees the things that could be done better. Why not change this? Why not do this? Why not do that?

Also because they're an outsider.

And this, he says, is a good thing and can bring great opportunities to the institution, but it also poses big challenges. And here Adam gives an example. Here he's talking about all those people who enter the working world, who walk into a structured environment, but also into a small organization. And he writes that in the way they worked, in their world, there was the cognizant engineer, called the Cog E, who designed the structure, the device, according to his own bent. The Cog E was basically a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. So he really designed the whole structure, the whole device, he did everything himself, and then the analyst came in and looked at what doesn't work, what could be improved. Exactly. When he was working on Cassini he had analyzed, he was analyzing the structure of this boom that was supposed to hang off the spacecraft, and something was wrong, there were problems. And he asks himself: how is it possible that I, the analyst, can see the problems, but he, the Cog E, the engineer in charge, can't?¹

I mean, you make this whole mess and then I'm the one who has to fix the problem.

And so he says: maybe we need another person, he calls it the Cog A, who works together with the cognizant engineer. So when he proposes this idea to this guy called Frank, Frank looks at him as if he were speaking Swahili. He says: "You're completely crazy", because he writes that Frank represented the status quo, meaning not changing things.

And so he writes: "A fresh perspective frequently brings with it insight not available to those on the inside. Zen Buddhists call it shoshin, "beginner's mind." That is one of the greatest gifts an entering employee can give, but it also presents a challenge." Because when a new person joins a new company, like you were saying before, they see things that don't work, and so they ask themselves: how is it possible that this thing exists, it's so stupid?

They see the holes in the operation, but they don't see why those holes might have been accepted long ago as a necessary evil. And so here he writes: "Beginner's mind presents both challenges and opportunities for the institution and for the new employee." The institution, so what does the institution, the company, have to do?

"The institution must listen, and listen with an open mind. Frequently these youthful observations, like mine about creating another role, the Cog E, are awkward, sometimes not well framed, and easily dismissed" and judged. "The challenge for management is to look past the warts and imperfections of the delivery for the essential virtue that might lie in the suggestion. In situations like these, the challenge for the young employee is patience." In other words, for management the challenge is not to say "this is a load of rubbish", it's to understand the essence of what that person is saying, to understand whether the idea is promising, not to dismiss that person. The young new hire, that person's challenge is not to think that everybody is an idiot, or that this system sucks, because maybe this system is there for a precise reason that this person, this young guy, can't see. And so the challenge for this young person is patience.

But also the opposite, though: speaking up about what's not right.

Yes, both.

Exactly.

And here he writes that "the media is rife with examples of" people who made it "overnight", especially in tech. For example, a super famous example is Mark Zuckerberg. And here he writes that it's easy for a young person to think and say: "I have been here two years, and I don't see my mark on the institution, they pay me the same salary, and it's time for me to be recognized or leave." And here he writes: "Here's what I wish I could tell my younger, impatient self: Advancement and influence in any industry do not in general keep pace with an industry's most famous outliers. At least in a meritocracy, such as JPL, if you do good work", he writes, "and really focus on mastery and excellence, good things happen, for the institution and for you." So, key words: you do good work and you focus on mastery and excellence.

Yes, but that's because you have to "put your head down and be useful", as he writes.

Exactly, and then here he writes: "That is not to say that 'the institution' is a benevolent, all-knowing, and all-rewarding entity, but any institution desperately needs good people. There is a vacuum at the top. Their desire for good people and talent is insatiable. If you do good work that is valuable to the institution, you will inevitably be vacuumed upward." And then here's the sentence that sums it all up: "If you want people to take you seriously, better put your head down and be useful to them." Now, he's talking about the institution because he works at JPL, but you can apply it in any field, not just to a big company.

During that period Adam also has a girlfriend, she was finishing her master's and they were also making plans to get married, and Adam wanted to keep working at JPL but he also wanted to do his PhD. So he looks for various programs that would offer a place for both spouses, and the compromise they found was that he would start teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What he discovers is that he loved teaching. And here there's another important lesson, we always come back to holding on to the doubt: "It was through teaching that I first learned how to hold on to the doubt with others, not just alone." And here he gives a really beautiful example, one I've thought about a lot. He writes, let's take an example, something that has happened to all of us, at school, at university, but also in working life. And he writes: "Take a typical professor-student interaction. One day during my office hours, a sharp student, let's call him Tim, walks in with an assignment that is neat, tidy, well written, looks right, but is somehow wrong. The assignment: the classic bowling ball problem. A popular exercise in undergraduate physics classes, this involves asking questions about the dynamic behavior of a bowling ball as it travels down the lane toward the pins. Everyone who has ever bowled knows that the ball starts out sliding but eventually starts to roll. This behavior seems frighteningly complex, and that makes it a great and challenging problem for college students. Tim comes in with this problem, and he's solved it. At least he has the correct answer, but he hasn't used the proper approach."

Or the one Adam wanted.

Exactly.

But in the end his answer is right.

It's right. So Adam says he basically comes to my office to tell me that I'm wrong, that what he did was right. To solve the problem, you need to utilize Newton's second law of motion in two dimensions, which for undergraduates is a lot, it's a very complex thing.

So the easiest response is to tell him he's simply wrong, hand him the correct working of the problem and tell him... walk him to the door and push him out. Which has happened to me so many times. Why? Because that technique minimizes the time spent in the presence of doubt, Adam talks about doubt.

Exactly, the doubt of the one in authority, and so who wants to say: "Damn, I got it wrong"?

Am I really correct?

The other approach, instead, the better one, is "to wade into Tim's work, line by line, term by term, not knowing if I will discover what went amiss; not knowing if I can prove to Tim that I know my stuff; worrying, maybe, at some deep level, that I don't. True learning lies in the latter approach."

"To embrace the confusing mess of tangled thought and tangled algebra and let curiosity loose to hunt for what is right and true. This is not a process without anxiety. It requires that both parties sit side by side with doubt and hold on to it no matter what the ego demands."

"Holding on to the doubt is a big deal, and it is not always easy, but it has to happen, and it has to happen at many levels. Not only does holding on to the doubt make you a better thinker yourself; it is indispensable in making a good thinking team. Developing something new and novel is a nonlinear process. Being part of that process, as a team member or a leader, can be anxiety provoking, because we don't know where it is going and we don't know if we are really going to find a solution that works. The temptation to short-circuit the team process is strong. It is only by holding on to the doubt together that we can allow ourselves to fully understand the problem we are solving and fully develop the solution."

"In my current job, I don't have answers beforehand, and I don't know the solution method that will work. But I still use the same process I developed back in Wisconsin" with Tim "whenever I'm leading a team through an engineering challenge. I've learned to be comfortable sitting beside doubt, and that I've got to help the team feel that way, too. Together, thus far in my life, we always find a solution." But together. Together. Holding on to the doubt together. But with the doubt held mainly by the authority, meaning whoever has the highest rank, whoever makes the final decision.

So holding on to the doubt is Adam's first big principle. The second one I've written down here, one I carry with me, is the idea of self-authorization. Here he opens the chapter with this Theodore Roosevelt quote I'd never heard, but in a few words it describes exactly what I'd like to do with my life. He writes: "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."

And Adam reworks it for himself, and it becomes: "That great work requires many people coming together is one of the great prizes life has to offer."

Because he writes that he feels very lucky to think that the work he does is worth doing, and he also feels lucky to work on a scale that requires people to work together in teams. So he rewrites the definition, saying that what matters is working on something you think is interesting. It reminds me of something Paul wrote: to do great work you have to, it's not enough that you like it, you have to consider it important, I mean, think that what you do is really important. And he, Adam, adds the idea of working with other people, so of collaborating. And we see these two ideas in the book. The idea of working on something worth doing, following your curiosity, but also teamwork. I mean, if he worked alone...

Apart from the fact that he'd never manage to send it to Mars.

Exactly, but I think that's also what he didn't like about being an analyst. The fact that you work alone, you're there in that little room working, and in fact he writes here that what was missing was that human factor. So for me it's important to know that what I do has to be something I consider important, something worth doing, but at the same time the most beautiful thing is that people coming together to do something important is one of the greatest prizes, as he writes, that life can offer. And then he writes: "To really participate as a member of a team, you have to bring yourself to the process. Bringing all that you have requires offering up your opinion", so your opinion, "in the absence of an invitation. It requires self-authorization. You need to believe that you have the answer, and you need to give it to the team." The idea of self-authorization is saying: "Guys, I've got an idea here." So you authorize yourself.

Even when nobody asked you.

Especially when nobody asked you. But then Adam clarifies later, I'll put it here, that saying okay, I want to authorize myself, you raise your hand and say: "Okay, this is what I think." But at the same time you need the humility to say: "This is what I think. You didn't get it wrong, this is my idea." But to not be arrogant, you have to start from that premise, I mean you have to say: "This is my idea", and present it in a way that shows you're really here to solve the problem, not to show off and say: "Me, my answer is better than all of yours."

No: "I'm offering my answer because I want to solve the problem together with you." I think that's important. And he puts this idea of self-authorization here because it's what changes Adam's life. Because at that time, in 1995, Adam starts working on a project called Champollion, where the idea is to bring a spaceship close to a comet and link up with it by driving a spike into it.

Yes, but this is before, because he comes back from Wisconsin expecting another boring year of boxes, and at the first meeting with his supervisor, this Frank, he starts talking and hears someone talking about this project, so the development of this mission, and they needed some knowledge, a specialist really, who could talk about mechanics and plasticity.

So he hears...

He goes up to them and says: "Look, I've just been in Wisconsin and I spent this last year studying mechanics and plasticity." And so he writes: "To me, harpooning a comet sounded like an interesting problem." Harpooning a comet. "I told Ann", so she was the one talking about Champollion, "I'd been doing some plasticity theory work in Wisconsin." And so she tells him...

"Oh, you should work with us." He becomes part of this team trying to harpoon this comet, a... what is it?

The Rosetta.

The Rosetta, incredibly difficult, absolutely, really difficult. He starts working with two other people called Chris and Randy. And there he sees that nobody understood anything, there was the problem, a mess here and there, nobody had broken the problem up properly, they hadn't divided up the tasks, a total mess. And so he writes, what did I do? "I then did something I had never done before, an act that perhaps more than any other changed my career and perhaps my life. I stood back and allowed myself to look at the whole problem of anchoring to a comet. I then broke the problem up into the pieces that seemed logical and useful, and then I, the dweeb from 354, opened my mouth and told the comet stabbers what I thought." Ah, right here he says exactly what I was saying before. "I started from the perspective that I was definitely not the boss or anything like it but, rather, that I had thought about our problem and broken it up into the pieces that we could analyze." And in fact here he writes: "I wasn't making any particular claim to leadership. I'd acted like the team's leader by asking Chris and Randy questions", these questions are beautiful, "that would help them organize their thinking and solve their problem. His promoting me", so me speaking my mind, "endorsed the idea that you have to rise to the performance level of the job you want to have." So if you act like the boss, you say your piece... what you think just to feel important and order everyone around, the most common response is: "Who the heck are you?" "Who on earth are you?" And he writes: "So the trick is to exhibit leadership, lead, without having to claim leadership or to subjugate others. This is leadership really as a service function, as a gift to the group. I used to think of leadership as the sign of power. At JPL I learned it is also a sign of service, if you offer your direction to the group."

At this point, after all this, at JPL he's no longer seen as an analyst. So he writes: "So I began to poke around for new opportunities at the lab."

And a new project, again, that he hears rumors about, is called Mars Exploration Rover, MER, and it was going to send up two small robotic geology labs, Spirit and Opportunity. So the idea, since we're talking geology, was to explore and study and understand the rocks of Mars. The problem with these two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, is that they had no time. Because depending on how the orbits line up, obviously you launch when Mars and Earth are closest, because Earth and Mars can be either 401 million kilometers apart or 54. So I'd say that's quite a difference in distance.

And the problem is that the more they developed these two projects, the more they realized there were changes to make. And he writes that some people handle the anxiety one way, others fold, others thrive on it, and he developed his own system, his own method. And he writes: "Whenever I felt I was being swept up in the storm, I visualized being in a warm coat on a snowy slope with a blizzard swirling around me. I would focus on the warmth and calm inside my coat and the beauty of the storm outside." So after Champollion, this was really his first chance to become a leader, to influence the trajectory of a much larger project, while Champollion was a much smaller project. And now here he refers to people in positions of leadership and writes: "I think most people in positions of leadership have some insecurity about their authority, at least at some level. I definitely did. And the way I cemented my authority, at least in my own eyes, was to push to understand my teammates' jobs as well as they did. I tried to win authority through technical credibility. I was able to think of the problems and the solutions to the problems my people were working on right alongside them, which seemed to put them at ease."

So we get to MER: they have to design the landing system, and they have to design the parachute. So they bring in helicopters, take it up to almost a kilometer and a half and drop it, and he writes: "The parachute opened and exploded, fluttering to the ground like a dead bird. We were stunned. 'What the fuck just happened?'" They try again: same story, it explodes again. And the point is that they were a year from launch and they had basically nothing, nothing at all. He writes: "We were not just behind schedule. We had no idea what to do, because we had no idea what was wrong."

So now there's a year left, they can't, I mean they can solve the problem, but it would take a lot more time. So they do five designs, five redesigns, and they go to the Ames wind tunnel, which is exactly this one, I'll put it here later, it's exactly this one. There's a huge tunnel where you can blast wind at 220 kilometers an hour, and the great thing is there's this enormous parachute, as we can see here, and you can go and watch right in front of it how the parachute moves. And what happens? Some inflate, others don't, even there, damn it, it's not possible, they don't work. So what's the problem? How do they fix the situation? Now, I'm not an engineer, but I tried to understand it because it's really interesting. Now I'll put a photo here, I'll put it on screen, now let's look at the parachute. Can you see the parachute? You see the parachute is made of this section here, which is called the disk, this part here, which is called the gap, and then there's the band. What happened? When they redesigned the parachute for this project, they made it much bigger, and they widened this part here and they also widened this dome here, this part here. And what happens? Let's try to picture it, let's compare it to a container: we put the container under the tap. If the hole in this container is huge, the water goes straight through like this, right? So when the air went through, it deflated, and it deflated because this was too big, because they had enlarged both this part here and this part here. So Adam understands that this part here is the real problem, he calculates the size of this dome here, and it becomes clear that this really is the real problem.

And here it's interesting to connect it to this: "But I had let fear of not getting enough drag pull me away from the question of how much drag was enough." Because the question Adam asked himself about this parachute problem is: we need more drag, so to slow the rover down, more drag, so I need a bigger parachute, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger. The question he hadn't asked instead is: how much drag is enough? So the fear of not getting the right answer takes you in the wrong direction, when actually the question and the answer are somewhere else. Because the right question is how much drag we really need, not that we need more drag. Because if the question is that one, we need more drag, the answer is: I need a much bigger parachute. The real question is: how much drag is enough? For Adam the solution is always curiosity, and he writes: "It is as if there are two forms of decision making: fear based and curiosity based. In fear-based decision making, we find ourselves wanting the answer as fast as possible. We don't really pay attention to, or care, what the answer is. In curiosity-based decision making, we use one of the core traits of our species to pull apart, examine, and wade into the open question. In my experience curiosity-based decision making yields much better solutions." And here he writes that for him and Miguel, to find a solution to these things, it was important to always strip things down to their essence. So we keep finding this concept of not complicating things, of making things as simple as possible. And he writes: "What is the key element of the solution? What is the most important part of the particular problem we are facing?" And he writes: "Your brain", I love this one, "is like a sausage casing. It can only hold so much, and if you try to stuff in too much, something important might get pushed out." Now, "after deployment of the parachute and the rockets, the air bags were going to be our ultimate deceleration device." But what's the problem?²

The problem is that, while they're analyzing the landing site and figuring out where they want to land, also using past images from other rovers that had been on Mars, they discover this rock, which has a particular shape, which they then call the Black Rock, and by running tests on Earth, recreating it here on Earth, they discover that this Black Rock would have punctured Pathfinder's air bags. So if, by pure bad luck, Pathfinder had landed on the Black Rock, the air bags would have burst and the rover would have crashed into the ground.³

Completely. Before you explain the solution, here there's the concept of the Dark Room, meaning that "there comes a moment in every creative or innovative process", I even wrote this into the process of my own life, "when you're not only lost; you're not even sure where to find a map." So just think how many people are in this moment right now, and how many times we find ourselves in this moment where we're lost and don't even know where to find a map, which way to go. "Spending time in this Dark Room is terrifying, but there is no easy way out. You have to stay calm, hold on to the doubt, listen to the problem, and keep thinking of solutions while avoiding the mind-locking panic that you won't find one in time. We were in the Dark Room with those air bags, and our only way out was persistence. After almost a year of groping in the darkness", a year, bro, incredible, "we found a ray of light, a spark of an idea. It was a rather arcane solution", meaning the inner tube.

Exactly, because the air bag... there's the outer shell of the air bag, and then inside there's a membrane. And what they do, in a nutshell, is create a second membrane. So in case the first membrane burst, inside there was an actual inner tube, like the one you use for bicycles, which served, let's say, as a safety backup. So maybe the air bag wouldn't have burst, but if it had hit the Black Rock it would still have cushioned the blow for the rover.

But the most important thing in my opinion, because this is all the technical part, the most important thing is the Dark Room. I mean, how many times in our lives do we find ourselves in this Dark Room? And "the toughest thing about the Dark Room", about when we find ourselves in this room, "is that you don't know if it's the darkness before dawn or the darkness before pitch-black"...

Absolutely. So maybe you think you've hit rock bottom, but actually you haven't reached the very bottom yet, so it's going to get even worse.

And here he writes: "And there is a virtue in staying in the Dark Room until you completely surrender. Not give up but completely surrender the ego, which means that you stop trying to force the existing solution. That's when a breakthrough can occur. When you're in that neutral zone and no longer striving, when you've reached that ultimate humility of questioning whether you even have the right to call yourself an engineer, the subconscious is free to kick in. And then, when the new solution presents itself, you're so completely drained and empty that you're wide open to it."

Which is incredible, because it seems like what he did is the hardest part of his career so far. We've been recording for two and a half hours, but I still have to get to the most... Which is the biggest challenge Adam has ever faced, meaning Curiosity, which is landing this rover on Mars.

Let's remember why it has to move. It has to move.

But the hardest thing is that the rover is the size of a MINI Cooper. Spirit and Opportunity, I think, were the size of a lawn mower.

Imagine that.

Curiosity was the size of a MINI Cooper, so they needed bigger rockets, bigger parachutes, basically everything from scratch.

And it's cool because they want, I mean, why do they end up with such a big rover? Because they have to move around on this blessed red planet. The problem is that there aren't exactly paved roads there, it's all rocky, so no rover had ever crossed Mars. Yes, they had satellite images and they know more or less the shape of the terrain, so big rocks, medium rocks and small rocks. And he writes that if you're in the middle of these rocks, "a small rover fits between rocks", but if they're too big it can't get through. "A big rover rolls over rocks", and that's why they decided to build it so big, because they wanted enough freedom to move around on Mars.

The problem is that, as we said, the rover is so big that they have to reimagine everything. The parachute and the air bag. Right. So the rover arrives, it separates, the parachute opens. As we saw earlier from the photos, they'd already struggled to build such a big parachute for a rover like that.

And they couldn't use the bridle.

Exactly. Imagine building an even bigger parachute. I mean, that parachute has to be taken, folded properly, and it has to fit on the spacecraft they launch into space, so on top of that it's also extra weight. So they actually take the measurements, they try to develop this parachute, but they don't think about the fact that, with the parachute being so big, the bridle has to be longer, and, with the rover being so big, so heavy, as a consequence the rover acts like a pendulum. And as we rightly said before, you can't know the weather conditions on the day you'll land on Mars, so maybe there's a 100 km/h wind, bye bye, the rover swings like a pendulum, maybe it flips over and that's it, game over. And so they start thinking about this idea, now how they get to this idea is a very long story, but this idea is born, and it's called Sky Crane.

"Here's how we needed it to work. After the nearly nine-month journey of 566 million kilometers, our work has barely begun. The spacecraft must be aligned at the proper angle to withstand 15 g's in deceleration forces and temperatures of 2,100 degrees Celsius when it smacks into the atmosphere of Mars." The spacecraft, smacking into the atmosphere of Mars, is protected by the heat shield. "The spacecraft enters the atmosphere and, at about, about 11 kilometers from the surface, friction with the atmosphere will have slowed the lander's speed from 21,000 to... kilometers per hour, to 1,600 kilometers per hour", and here we'll put in the video, so you can see it while I explain it, "that's when we pop the supersonic parachute", which is huge, so huge. "Twenty-four seconds later, we blow off the heat shield so the radar can see. A kilometer and a half above the surface, we let go of our parachute, the rover free-falls for a few seconds, the rockets are lit to bring the rover to an altitude of 18 meters, and then, here's the good part", total madness, meaning the Sky Crane, the one we were explaining before. Oh, and we didn't say that the Sky Crane... the book is called The Right Kind of Crazy because it refers to the Sky Crane as the right kind of crazy, because it was total madness, but it could be the right thing. So, "Then, and here's the good part, comes the Sky Crane maneuver, in which the Curiosity rover is lowered out of its rocket backpack by a set of cables. The two objects, rover and backpack, separated by eight meters of cable, then descend to the surface. We have to retract the cables right after touchdown, in real time, so they'll stay taut as the rocket backpack continues to descend at a little less than three kilometers an hour. At this point the cables are cut, and our rocket backpack, its job complete, flies a safe distance away and crashes into the surface somewhere, leaving the rover all alone on the Martian surface, ready to roll", we hope. And he writes: "If anything, if any part of this scheme goes wrong, and all it takes is one failure from among tens of thousands of components to cause catastrophic loss, we will all look like idiots, and I'll be at the head of the line." Because we didn't mention that Adam is put in charge of EDL for this project, and it's still incredible, I mean, going from a grocery store to, years later, leading this, this crazy mission.⁴

Here Adam has a beautiful reflection on the model, he calls it the model of the universe. Everyone creates, as he calls it, their own adjacent universe model. To get to this reflection, Adam starts from another obstacle they have to solve, which is the heat shield. As we said, the spacecraft comes down towards Mars at 21,000 km/h, so try to imagine it, I mean 21,000, I can't even imagine the speed of that 21,000, right. As we know from watching the videos, when the spacecraft hits the atmosphere of Mars, the atmosphere is basically air, but at that speed it becomes a wall. So the spacecraft crushes all the gases in the atmosphere, the compressed gas becomes red-hot and what we see forms, the cushion, we can call it a red-hot cushion, which I think is called a shock wave. But it's incredible that when you watch the video, in the one we're putting in, the spacecraft... It looks like the glowing shield doesn't touch the spacecraft, like there's a gap between the spacecraft and the glowing shield. And how the heck is that possible? How is that possible? How is it possible that the spacecraft doesn't get burned by this immense heat? The shield has several layers of protection, which I didn't know about, and I hope to explain it as precisely as possible, I might get a few things wrong because I'm not an engineer, but I think it's fairly accurate. Or at least it's how I picture it. When the shield enters the Martian atmosphere, the shield has a film of still air on its surface, and every object we have here has a film of still air on its surface. Now my hand, if I move my hand like this, if I put some dust on this hand and I move it like this, some of the dust goes away. But how is it possible that some dust stays here? How is it possible that a fan that has dust on it, the dust doesn't go away? Maybe a bit of dust goes away, but if the fan spins like this all the dust should disappear. That's because it's a law of fluid dynamics, and because on every object there's a film of air and the speed of that air at the surface is zero. So when I do this, the speed at this surface of my hand is zero. As I increase the distance between my hand and here, the air increases and it's faster. So the shield, when it enters, has a layer of film exactly like my hand. And we can call it, we can imagine it as a film, a film of air. As we said, exactly like the hand, the further I move from the hand, the faster the air is. So if we picture the shield, okay? The air touching the shield at the surface is still and slow, and as I move away from the shield it gets faster and faster. So we can picture it as layers. So the layer here on my hand is zero, the speed. Here a bit more, here a bit more, here a bit more and here a bit more. When I do this, right? Exactly like the fan. The role of this film is to keep the speeds of the other layers of air away from the surface. Because otherwise what happens? With the fan, if this layer weren't there, going that fast even the material would be destroyed. Another thing this film of air does is slow down the heat. Some heat passes through this film of air and attacks the surface of the shield, we're still talking about 21,000 km/h, so crazy speeds, this heat attacks the surface of the shield, and on the surface of the shield a charred crust forms that insulates what's underneath, so it keeps the rover from burning. This crust is exactly a crust that can come off, exactly a crust like when you burn a piece of wood: it forms a crust, you run your hand over it and the crust comes off, so it's very fragile. Now, when the heat shield is small, right? Are you with me so far? When the heat shield is small, for example like on Mars Pathfinder or even on Apollo, even though Apollo came in much slower, these layers of air, the gases, flow across this surface in an orderly way, without getting mixed up. What does that mean? It means, let me try to picture it, if I blow out a candle, right when I blow it out, the stream of air is fairly orderly, right? It doesn't go like this straight away, it's fairly orderly. As the distance increases, it starts going like this, it starts making little swirls. And why doesn't it do it straight away, but later? A law of fluid dynamics, because the stick, for example incense, or the candle anyway, starts making swirls 40-50 centimeters above the stick. This is important because exactly the same thing happens on the shield. When the shield is small, the air that arrives, the gases that arrive at the surface, behave exactly like the candle. The air passes but doesn't have time to create these swirls. So it arrives in an orderly way, it arrives like this, orderly, and it leaves, okay? Exactly like the candle. When the shield is huge, the gases that arrive arrive in an orderly way, then, exactly like the candle, gradually, gradually, gradually as they spread across the surface, they create swirls, okay? But here we're going at 21,000 km/h. What do these swirls do? These swirls break up this film of air that forms. The layers mix, so the fastest layer, the slightly slower one, the slower still and the still one all mix together. The film gets thinner and thinner. The heat that was a few millimeters away, what does it do? It reaches the surface three to six times hotter than before. The fast gases, by creating these swirls, start scraping the shield, this crust, and as a result, by scraping this crust, the shield wears away much more, and this keeps going: so these swirls scrape the crust, the crust forms again, they scrape, scrape, scrape, and so it wears away much more, and as a result, before getting through the atmosphere, bye bye heat shield and the rover is done for. Now Adam decides that for the heat shield he wanted to use a thermal protection system based on "a kind of rubbery, cork-based material", which had been used for Viking and Pathfinder, so on a much smaller heat shield.⁵

His reasoning is that the predictions were too pessimistic, so if that material had worked for Viking and Pathfinder, well, it would work for Curiosity too. Why not? The problem is, then they test this material. There's this specialist called James who tells him: "We tested the material you wanted," and he was convinced he'd be using this material. The material had simply evaporated. Boom. How is that possible? How is it possible that a material that had already brought three missions safe and sound to Mars now just evaporates? Because Adam hadn't thought about the swirls of air.

And that the shield was the biggest one?

Exactly.

So then what?

They're two years from launch and they still don't know how to protect the spacecraft. And this is where, for me, the most beautiful reflection comes in: the model we have of the universe is not the universe. Adam writes that "the lesson, if there is one, is that no one's engineering judgment is foolproof," and he says he believes in "a determinant universe, one that (a) exists and (b) is ordered by laws that cannot be changed at will." So if the universe is fixed, okay? If it's ordered and you can't change it, when something goes wrong it's not the universe's fault, it's your fault, because you don't have enough facts, you don't even know the things you don't know, you don't know how the facts connect, you didn't ask the right question. But if the universe is out there and you can't touch it, the only thing you can do in your head is build your own map of the universe, which is a copy in your head of the real map of the universe. He calls it "an adjacent or surrogate universe," meaning a map of everything you know. But it's not the real map of the universe, because you don't know everything, in fact you know almost nothing. And so when you decide, you never decide based on the right model of the universe, the real one. You always decide based on the copy, your model of the universe. And the copy can be wrong, because it isn't the real universe. And it's wrong without anything warning you. Because the copy you can see, it's in your head; the universe you can't. Exactly like Adam. He made a decision based on his copy of the universe, meaning the heat, the spacecraft. But the universe, the map of the universe, included the swirls, the fact that they were breaking up the crust.

But he didn't know that, nobody knew. So what can we do? "A careful balance needs to be struck between our confidence in the parts of the universe we know," so our copy of the universe, "and our suspicion of the universe we don't know." And he brings up the categories of Donald, who was the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and his speech that divides knowledge into three categories. The first is the things we know that we know: for example, we know the parachute opens at about Mach 2.2. The things you know you don't know: so you don't know how dense the Martian atmosphere will be when you launch the spacecraft, you don't have the answer, but you have the question. So the things you know you don't know, but you have the question. Right? You have the question, and so the question can be measured, it can be shared, so you don't know how dense the atmosphere is, but you can ask yourself the question, because you know the problem. And then there are the things you don't even know you don't know, exactly like the swirls. It never crossed your mind, and you have neither the answer nor even the question. And he writes: "The art of engineering, or being successful in business or life, for that matter, lies in how one finds the unk-unks and makes them 'kn-unks.'" Nice play on words. I mean, you find the things you don't even know you don't know and turn them into things you know you don't know, but now you can put the question into words. Because once you can ask the question, now you can find a solution, but how do you find a solution when you don't even know the thing exists? So the job, he writes, isn't eliminating ignorance, it's moving things from one category to another. You don't need to know the answer, you need to bring the question to the surface. And here he writes something else that's beautiful. Super smart people, the ones who get amazing grades at university, in high school, the ones who win the physics prizes, tend to underestimate this. And he writes: "They are aware of their intelligence, and their model of the universe is one in which that intelligence will always prevail." Adam says that over the years rocket science has taught him humility, and that every now and then he still finds himself in their number. Meaning smart people think their model is the right one. They don't even know there's another model they don't know. When in truth, as he writes, when you design rockets, when you go to space, you don't know; you know what you know based on your model, but the truth you don't know.

So everything we know is the model we've built for ourselves over our lifetime. The project...

As a whole, it took about ten years to get to that point. Whatever happens, they, so Adam and his team and the whole control center, won't know for seven minutes. Because, you know... Besides the fact that when the spacecraft goes through the atmosphere there's no radio signal, because the heat blocks the waves, so the rover can't send signals to Earth to say how things are going, whether the shield is holding, whether the parachute opens or not. When it comes out of the landing phase, the signal takes seven minutes to reach Earth, so it opens the parachute, it sends the signal that it opened the parachute, but in the meantime seven minutes have gone by, so when the message arrives the rover could already be dead. Exactly, they're watching the past. So, whatever happens, they won't know for seven minutes. That's how long it takes the data to travel from Mars to us, here on Earth. So we get to the countdown. It's half past eight, everyone's in front of their screens, screens on, and he writes: "We had now crossed the threshold into lockdown." So two hours to the critical stage, meaning the moment when the spacecraft switches off, stops listening to them, doesn't take any more commands, and only does what they told it to do before it left.

So the whole procedure from A to Z to touch the... the ground on Mars. So, "Nine minutes before we hit the atmosphere," so the spacecraft is heading into Mars, "we separated from the cruise stage." So the whole contraption that was carrying it separates, and all that's left is the rover inside the shield. "At 10:24 the aeroshell hit the atmosphere," like we said before, "at 21,000 km/h, with temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Celsius." And now he writes: "We were into it now, the terrifying moments when there's no data coming in and we're all alone with our thoughts, waiting for the next piece of news." Because, right, the waves don't get through, too much heat, so they don't know what's happening. Ten years of their lives, and at that moment they have no idea; the spacecraft could even have blown up at first contact with the atmosphere, they don't know. So the spacecraft comes out of the, let's say, glowing-hot phase, drops the shield, and the signal reaches them. The signal reaches them that at an altitude of 11 km they've opened the parachute, and he writes: "And now time is accelerating, and I feel as if I'm going down a ski trail, out of control, with everything whizzing by so fast that I can't keep up. We're getting down to 200 meters, the height of the tallest buildings in LA, and I keep waiting for the disaster to happen. And now each moment begins to dilate, and time slows to a crawl." Cue Sky Crane, and they're just waiting for the rover to send the signal. There's a guy in mission control who announces all the maneuvers as they happen, so this guy announces: "We're in Sky Crane." "We're 22 meters from the surface," the rover drops out of the descent stage and rappels down toward the surface of Mars. So when the guy announces Sky Crane, he starts counting. Because they know, from when Sky Crane starts, how long it takes the rover to land, to cut the cables, and for the rocket backpack to fly away. So he starts counting, counting, counting, and he writes: "Have we done it? Has our insane contraption for landing in the Martian dust actually worked? I'm counting along, but I'm stuck with four fingers in the air. I'm pacing. We're all supposed to sit, but fuck sitting. I'm pacing. I'm a pacer."

Adam keeps counting and writes: "Al's eyes are on me, waiting for the signal telling him he can say it," meaning he can give the guy who announces the maneuvers permission to say what happened. And he writes: "Then it really settles over me. I can let go of all my dread and accept it. I give him the nod", to Al, that's this guy's name, "and he says, 'Touchdown confirmed. We are safe on Mars.' The room just goes crazy. Guys are hugging, and people are screaming, and I'm simply stunned. I give everyone this big hug, and all of a sudden I am just dazed, and I realize why tennis players fall down on the court when they win Wimbledon. This thing we've been working on as a team for ten freakin' years, and all of a sudden, it just happened! And it happened beautifully. It worked! It seems unreal, surreal, impossible, but it just worked!" And here's a crazy part, because he writes, they've gone through this whole circus, and that's it, they're done. Out of the way, because he writes: "The biggest, and happiest, chore right now is to transfer control to the rover drivers over in the other building. From now on it's their baby. They will be living on Mars time, wearing 3-D glasses, and working while the rover sleeps to program every move Curiosity will make the next day." The last words he speaks, up on the stage: "It had been a job, my job. A fucking awesome, full-throttle, use-my-whole-self job but a job nonetheless. I had not done this job with any conscious aspiration about furthering humanity or discovering the great unknown. I really had just wanted to make something happen, something cool. As I sit on the dais, I realize it was also something much, much more. It was an enormous human effort, it was something of our humanity with which I had been entrusted. Landing, our effort to explore, our struggle to understand our world, our universe, ourselves. It had all been rolled up in what we had just done."

Well, this is how we want to end this episode. Thank you so much for being with us, if you made it this far. If you liked it or learned something, subscribe, leave a comment, it helps us enormously. We also have our newsletter on our website inbuonacompagnia.com, where you can sign up, and after every episode we send you the main reflections plus other reflections, other ideas we don't cover in each episode because we don't have time. Well, thank you so much for being with us, and see you in the next episode.