The Right Kind of Crazy
Adam Steltzner, with William Patrick Portfolio, 246 pages, $28
When the Mars rover Curiosity stuck its landing on the red planet on Aug. 6, 2012, it not only opened a new era of space exploration, it also signified a triumph of human ingenuity over staggering odds. There was virtually zero margin of error with the $2.5 billion project, 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.
"The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation" is the title of a new engaging book, written by Adam Steltzner, an engineer leading the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was charged with landing the Curiosity. Written with William Patrick, the book is an inside account of the intense decade of teamwork that went into Curiosity, and it's also the story of Steltzner's own unlikely journey — from an aspiring musician, who barely graduated from high school, to NASA engineer. 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 Curiosity mission, and some fascinating insights into the engineering principles and analytics involved in pulling off the project. In the course of this book, Steltzner gives us an appreciation of the engineering of a huge project like the Mars Science Laboratory — and the way teams learned to break down seemingly impossible problems into smaller, more manageable ones.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
