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Managing Martians After shattering one glass ceiling after another during the past 30 years, Donna Shirley M.S. ’68 needed to soar even higher.
So she engineered the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s safe landing of the Mars Pathfinder on the Red Planet last July.
At the time, Shirley was manager of the Mars Exploration Program, responsible for leading the planning and implementation of NASA’s missions to Mars, a position she had held since 1994.
Born and raised in a small Oklahoma town, she began breaking the stereotypical female mold in high school, when she skipped home economics in favor of mechanical drawing. At 16, she got her pilot’s license.
“I always wanted to fly,” she says. “When I found out that aeronautical engineers were the people who built planes, I knew that was what I wanted to do.”
After completing her undergraduate work as one of a handful of women engineering students at the University of Oklahoma, Shirley earned her masters in aerospace engineering at USC and joined JPL in Pasadena.
“I was the only female engineer when I got there in 1966,” she recalls. “The meetings were all men in cigar-smoke-filled rooms, and me. It was definitely a boys’ club mentality, but there were engineers and computer geeks and all types of people, so the environment was generally pretty accepting.”
Accepting enough for Shirley to eventually become manager of the team that built the Sojourner rover – the first autonomous rover to roll on the surface of another planet. The vehicle actually bounced over the Martian landscape in a large plastic bubble. Her work with Sojourner earned her the management position for the entire Mars Exploration Program, making her JPL’s highest-ranking woman on the technical side.
Of the successful landing of Pathfinder, Shirley says it was “a life peak experience, second only to my daughter being born.”
After the historic mission, she was named Woman of the Year by Glamour and Ms. magazines. She even had an asteroid (5649donnashirley) named for her.
“I’ve been too busy to dwell on any of that,” says Shirley, who stepped down from her post in September to “move on and pursue my other interests.” She has written her autobiography, Managing Martians, and is also the author of Managing Creativity: A Practical Guide to Inventing, Developing and Producing Innovative Products.
“I’ve become very interested in management issues,” she says. “I think there is a lot of disservice with the management fads and quick fixes out there.”
Shirley has not left JPL entirely: she continues to work with the Mars program in an emeritus capacity. “I’m an on-call employee. I come back for the launches and landings. I get to see the fun part.”
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