I’m Adam Stelzner, an Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and This Is How I Work.

Adam Stelzner is hunting for the truth. The engineer oversaw the entry, descent and landing team on the Mars Curiosity Rover and, tasked with safely delivering the rover the size of a small car to the surface of Mars, decided that a flying rocket crane was the best solution for the final descent. It sounds crazy, but it was just right.

It so happens that this is the title of his book The Right Kind of Madness , which is co-authored by William Patrick. The book details his winding journey to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he ultimately helped accomplish this incredible feat of engineering when the Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars in 2012.

In developing such a complex system, facts, risks and the links between them were carefully studied over nine years. And this is the truth that Adam and his colleagues at JPL seek every day: a clear understanding of absolutely every factor and their causal relationships. This only limitation is a clear picture of the truth. So how did they get there? The 140 million mile journey began on the board.

First, these days most of us mostly live off our phones, both at work and in life, so I’m wondering which phone you’re using. Are you an iPhone or Android user?

I’m an iPhone man. And many of my colleagues do too.

For some reason, I expected the JPL folks to be really technically sophisticated and therefore use Android phones, but I think this is kind of a silly misconception on my part.

Of course, there are tons of people who are Androids, but I would say that the vast majority of them are iPhones.

Does this mean that you are also using a Mac?

I know, yes, I do. And I think it will split 50/50 between Mac users and PC platform users [in JPL].

It’s crazy to think about the number of tasks required to complete something like a lander to Mars. So how do you keep track of what you need to do throughout the day?

Eighty to ninety percent of my day is about talking to other people. The act of identifying technical risks and then eliminating technical risks through conversation, sitting at the board and making an equation, looking at a drawing of a detail, and talking about design. So, one of the most important tools I have is the calendar. And my calendar is obviously always a problem. We use Outlook for us. And I cannot say that it is flawless or even close to flawless.

If you’re working on a whiteboard, how do you keep track of things like that – what’s written on a napkin?

Our iPhones are a gripping mechanism. So three or four people will work on the whiteboards, draw something, some equations, some action lists, and then a photo will be taken and it will be emailed. And then, depending on the bandwidth, it will either be emailed by itself or emailed with a text distillation of the action.

Since this is such a collaborative effort, what is your workspace? Do you have a personal account or spend most of the day in meetings?

And that, and another – I have a personal account, in which I sometimes sit. Literally a busy day, sometimes I only get to my office at 4 pm or 5 pm. That is, I’ll get down to business right away – I’ll have a meeting at 8 a.m., maybe 7:30 a.m. – but I’ll get down to a meeting right away, and then I’ll just go back to back, back to back, go and have lunch, bring him and talk about other things, and then finally I go and work in my office.

On the one hand, your work implies that you never take the shortest path to solving a problem, and yet engineering requires a certain rationale that forces you to be a minimalist. So I’m wondering how you can save time without compromising. How can you achieve so much in a reasonable amount of time?

This is a balance, because quite often the answer lies in the level of detail, which takes a long time to obtain. And sometimes you need to remember that you don’t need to bring the room to that level of detail. So if we find a way forward – if we find a risk, problem, or problem with our space flight system, and we brainstorm in the room with the boards, you try to flesh out each one. these decisions so that the one who becomes the “navel” can take each [decision] and work with it.

And if something is really running out of time, we often work on solutions in parallel – but you have to flesh it out in a broader context with the help of a number of people well enough for us to really turn the tide for each of these solutions. and everyone understands what these solutions are and which are not. And the person – which I call the navel – who is going to use one of these solutions and work with it, has a really clear idea of ​​the scale and what they are going to do.

But then! You have to stop. There is a tendency – especially for me and the curious engineers – to really start working on some of these solutions. Let’s analyze it in detail. And in the lab, we joke that it means we’re having too much fun. So we say, “We’re having too much fun here. This person will go and do the same, and it’s fun for them. ” They have to check it out.

I suppose this is like managing any large project – you have to trust when you delegate something to someone else.

Oh yes, this is absolutely necessary for two reasons. We would not be able to act if someone tried to do everything himself; much more needs to be done. And secondly, I think that we all do our best when we have a sense of personal responsibility for what we are working on. Therefore, it is very important that when you delegate, you delegate ownership of that piece. This is not a water transfer job that you want to give away. You want to receive it with its creativity, with its uncertainty and with its property.

What do you think are your best day-to-day activities? You have achieved a certain amount of fame without having a heavy academic background. So when you think about yourself, what exactly has allowed you to get to where you are?

I am uncomfortable with answering this question because I do not strive to be particularly better than anyone else at anything. But I do think fast, and I am able to use the wide spectrum of my humanity to keep a group of people busy, a little unbalanced, curious and on the hunt for the truth. And I mean humor, surprise, you know, I can bring a broad outlook to my work when we go to sort out these things.

Yes, in the book you mention that people still think of engineers in the old-fashioned sense as robots, when in fact it is a deeply creative and human field because you have to come up with creative solutions. So it makes a lot of sense. Is there any other tool or gadget besides your phone and computer that you can’t live without?

Boards. Every conference room where we work has a board, and every office has a board for reflection and communication with visual counterparts. We even say in “graphs” – so you’re going to explain the idea, and you can explain the idea on the XY axis, graphing your idea of ​​what the solution looks like to help describe whether it is a supra-linear or sub-linear process.

I believe that everything that people do, that makes of them is the result of joint efforts. Very few great works come [from individuals]. Ideas may come from a person, but the product, 99 percent sweat, as Edison put it, is the result of collaboration. And what does it mean? This means that we have to have groups of people who have a consistency and the same understanding of what we are doing. This often requires all kinds of, in fact, pedagogical means in order to agree everyone and truly understand what can be an abstract, complex and complex idea, but at the same time clearly understand it. So the board is important here.

Have you ever listened to music while you work, or is it a distraction when you really need to focus?

For me it is very rare, almost never. I love listening to music; there is almost always music playing in my house. But at work, music is mostly the sound of human voices in discourse.

Out of curiosity, are you currently reading any book or novel that you are particularly interested in?

Lately, as well as literally the last five years, I’ve heard this riff about the first explorers of the United States, and my favorite book in the world is Death Valley in 49 , a memoir by William Lewis Manley. But right now I’m reading Death Valley and Amargosa by Richard Lingenfelter. It is remarkably finished from an academic point of view. This guy has combed small private libraries throughout the desert in the southwest to collect a story of exploring the deserts of the southwest and a kind of illusory quest for gold. Amazing human stories of deceit, ambition and ruin – all surrounded by this beautiful desert.

Many people probably think of you and your team as independent researchers. Following the same line of thought, how do you recharge? Just the thought of Heavenly Crane gives me a panic attack, so how can I stop thinking about it?

Not as often as we would like, but when things are going well, I take my family and we camp in the desert. We are going to explore some new and different place. It can be low and hot, it can be high and cool in the mountains – the Sierras are here – so this is definitely a way to recharge.

American whiskey, rye, bourbons also sometimes help.

Certainly. What is your sleep pattern? Are you a 2 a.m. owl or have a regular schedule?

I am not a night worker. But when the game starts, I don’t sleep much. Like 5 hours a day. And there may be long stretches of time where I sleep 8 hours, but in the heart of Sky Crane’s work, I wake up at 4:30 or 5 and start thinking. If I need to think when I’m not in the office, it usually happens very early in the morning, before dawn.

So you keep a notebook next to your bed to jot down your nightly thoughts?

Yes, I have a notebook, but in fact it is not by the bed; it’s on the kitchen table and I’ll wake up, make a cup of tea, sit there while it’s still dark and think.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

A good friend, mentor and fantastic engineer of mine, Gentry Lee – in fact, he is also a science fiction writer and TV producer as he produced Cosmos , wrote science fiction with Arthur Clarke, and was a Viking mission leader – he said that when he looks back at his life, the big ups and downs really stand out. He instructed me never to let the fear of great falls stop the pursuit of great heights. And he said that if I behaved that way, I would never look back with regret. And I have and I do not.

If you wanted to ask someone these questions about how they work and how they govern everything they do, who would you ask?

I would ask the songwriter. A songwriter whose songs are difficult for me to understand. Elvis Costello comes to mind because stylistically throughout his career, man, it’s been all over the place. I could ask any songwriter about this, but I’ve always been intrigued by the creative process for especially popular music, because in the end it has to be grounded. It must be accessible; it cannot be too abstract.

And the reason I chose Elvis Costello is that his material is always on the verge of being too abstract. I often get the gist of the lyric content of one of his songs, and I can attribute 30% of the lyrics to really telling me this story. The other 60% or so, I don’t quite understand these links. Or even if he is completely distracted. So the idea of ​​being on the verge of being too abstract to get attention, but at the same time somehow successfully telling a story, intrigues me. And I wonder how someone gives birth to such a melody.

I actually thought about it this morning too, because I listened to Leonard Cohen, who is so deeply poetic, and I cannot understand how he does it.

Leonard Cohen would be another great example. These verses become songs and relationships between verses. Was it a poem at first? Was it a song first? Was it just a poem or a piece of a song? It’s easier for me to first come up with a poem and add music to it, but sometimes they develop together.

Now you have become a public figure because of the attention to Project Mars and the book. So to the people who are looking at you and eager to get to where you are, is there anything you would like to tell them?

I would advise them to follow Gentry Lee’s advice. There is no arc. As for me, I look at my life, and sometimes it just amazes me, [because] I’m incredibly, ridiculously lucky. Right? This is true, but I want to give myself credit: I do have the ability to recognize and pursue an opportunity, and to take Gentry Lee’s dash and take advantage of it. And this should not be underestimated.

I am not saying look for opportunities or let this hunt distract you from the work that is right in front of you. This is the most important thing: you have to do the work. Just do a good job, do a good job, do a good job. But keep your nose open to catch the scent of opportunity, and then if you can take advantage of it, do it. And then get back to the right job. This is the only thing I did and it worked for me.

Some people can come up with a grand strategy, but that’s not me. Just focus on the here and now, doing good today, and if the opportunity presents itself, listen to the door and open it.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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