Woman of the Hour Enjoys the Realization of a Dream

When she was a kid, she desperately wanted to go to Mars.

Her rocket fuel came in the form of books such as Arthur C. Clarke’s “Sands of Mars.” But she quickly surmised that she didn’t have a chance of being an astronaut. “Originally, you had to be a fighter pilot, have great eyesight, perfect health and be male,” she said with a laugh.

Now, she figures she’s too old. People won’t get there--if they get there--for 20 years, she says, and she’s 55. “I think 75 is a little old.” But, in a way, Donna Shirley did get there Friday, a little after 10 a.m. Los Angeles time when the Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on cold, predawn Martian soil. Tucked inside that lander was a little robot rover created by the team of engineers that she put together and managed before she moved on to overseeing all expeditions to Mars.

In the Pasadena courtyard outside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was sunny and hot as Shirley, the Mars program manager, gleefully greeted colleagues.

“Hey, Jim!” she shouted to Jim Martin, flashing a thumbs-up. “This is the guy who was head of the review board at Pathfinder and never thought we could do it,” she added exultantly.

“I made you work, Donna,” called Martin, the man whose job it was to be a professional skeptic and fish for problems with the Pathfinder journey before it ever started.

“Yes, you did!” she said.

She was the woman of the hour. People wanted her picture, her handshake, even her autograph--and these weren’t tourists, these were the men and women who had worked on the project with her or the people who worked on other projects and were watching colleagues enjoy success.

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Shirley has been working on Mars-related projects in some way for 10 years. Before she became manager of the project in 1994, she led the team that created the rover--which resembles a quirky looking sport-utility vehicle and will collect data on the planet.

In her bag, Shirley carried a Mattel Hot Wheels version of the rover. “Yes, they’re out, but they’re very difficult to find,” she said, affectionately examining hers.

The media, meanwhile, desperately wanted her words, her way of explaining things clearly and smartly and with a touch of creativity.

As she talked about the special air bags that deployed on the Pathfinder, she explained why the Pathfinder wouldn’t land on a rock or boulder:

“The air bags are so big that if you were a rock, for instance, the lander wouldn’t be close to you because the air bags stick out so much.”

Even as she sat talking quietly on a bench, people occasionally slipped over and sat at her feet to listen.

“Why do I feel surrounded? When Donna talks, people listen?” she laughed.

She, on the other hand, wanted to embrace and introduce every colleague who paraded by. She spotted the engineers who worked on the rover.

“All right, you guys, it better work!” she teased as they sauntered by.

“Sit back and leave the driving to us,” said engineer Art Thompson.

A little more worried was Lin Van Nieuwstadt, who designed the radios on the rover.

“Lin! Yeahhh!!” Shirley called out to her.

“I am so nervous,” Nieuwstadt confided to Shirley. “I feel so sick.”

Shirley, of course, was nervous too. “Oh, I’ve been nervous for . . . years,” Shirley said as she found a bench in the shade of the hot courtyard and shed the tailored red suit jacket (“Mars red”) she had donned for a day of talking into television cameras.

She put herself to bed Thursday at midnight with chamomile tea, waking up once at 2 a.m. and going back to sleep until the radio awakened her at 5:30 a.m.

When she learned that the Pathfinder had landed, she was sharing her excitement with viewers on CNN.

Her 20-year-old daughter, Laura Pivirotto, was watching. “Mom started crying on TV--and then I lost it,” said Pivirotto, a junior at Scripps College.

“I was trying to do commentary,” said Shirley ruefully. “I just got a little teary-eyed, a lump in my throat. Jumping around. I almost hugged the anchorman but he fended me off,” she said. “But we shook hands.”

She knew that the team had planned for every possible crisis. “When engineers design something, you plan for the worst and you design that so if everything goes wrong, you can still make it,” she said. “But when everything goes right, things happen faster and easier than you expect. When everything goes well, everybody is just blown away.”

Shirley loves being an engineer and made sure that everyone knew that it was engineers who sent the vehicle on its seven-month trip to Mars. “These aren’t rocket scientists,” she told CNN Friday morning. “These are engineers.”

“Scientists learn about nature,” she said later. “Scientists need information. . . . The engineers build the things that go get them the information.”

She always knew which one she would be.

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When she was 10 growing up in Oklahoma, she decided she wanted to build airplanes. (Her father, “a country general practitioner,” wanted her to be a doctor. She never wanted to make early morning house calls.)

And she despises the way the movies depict her colleagues. “It really frosts me the way they portray us,” she said. “Scientists are always evil, and engineers are nerdy.”

She believes there is probably life elsewhere. To believe we are the only intelligent beings in the universe, she figures, is not only unrealistic, it’s arrogant.

Even so, she has skipped the current crop of alien movies. “Hate ‘em, can’t stand ‘em. I really detest violence in movies, and the alien movies are always violent.”

But she did see and like “Contact,” the story of a radio astronomer who discovers transmissions from an alien civilization.

“The work we do is so incredibly exciting,” she said, smiling contentedly. “This could be a movie.”