Oral History Interview with Donna Shirley

Oral History Interview

with

Donna Shirley

Interview Conducted by Juliana Nykolaiszyn March 14, 2011

Inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project

Interview History

Interviewer: Juliana Nykolaiszyn Transcriber: Kortni Wren Editors: Ashley Sarchet, Latasha Wilson, Juliana Nykolaiszyn

The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Project Detail

The oral histories collected as a result of the Inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project preserves the voices and experiences of extraordinary Oklahoma women who serve as pioneers in their fields, made significant contributions to the State of Oklahoma, or have championed other women, women’s issues, or served as public policy advocates for the issues important to women.

This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on June 18, 2007.

Legal Status

Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Donna Shirley is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on March 14, 2011.

Inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project

About Donna Shirley…

Donna Shirley was born in 1941 in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, and grew up in Wynnewood. At fifteen she took her first flying lessons and soon earned her pilot’s license. She studied engineering at the University of Oklahoma despite the fact she was told women could not be engineers. In 1962 she earned a degree in professional writing and returned to earn her aerospace/mechanical engineering degree in 1965 from OU. She later completed a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Southern California. She worked in St. Louis, Missouri as a spec writer for McDonnell Aircraft before moving to Pasadena, California, to work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she stayed for thirty-two years.

When she began working for NASA in 1966 Shirley was the only female with an engineering degree out of 2,000 engineers. She worked on numerous space missions throughout her career. She managed NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, becoming the first woman to manage a NASA program, and led the team that flew the Sojourner rover on the Pathfinder to Mars in 1997. She retired from NASA in 1998. She then served as Assistant Dean of Aerospace Mechanical Engineering at the University of Oklahoma for three years where she taught a course she designed called Managing Creativity. She moved to Seattle where she became director of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame (now EMP Museum), and eventually made her way to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she enjoys speaking and mentoring young women interested in engineering.

Shirley is the author of Managing Martians: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman’s Lifelong Quest to Get the Mars—and of the team behind the space robot that has captured the imagination of the world, and Managing Creativity: A Practical Guide to Inventing, Developing, and Producing Innovative Products.

In 2003, Shirley was inducted in the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame. Among many other recognitions, she was inducted in the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame, and the Academy of Achievement, a museum of living history. She also received NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal and the National Space Society’s Wernher Von Braun Memorial Award, and Asteroid 5624 Shirley was named in her honor.

Shirley enjoys spending time with her family, including her partner George, her daughter and grandson.

Inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project

Donna Shirley

Oral History Interview

Interviewed by Juliana Nykolaiszyn March 14, 2011 Tulsa, Oklahoma

Nykolaiszyn My name is Juliana Nykolaiszyn, with the Oklahoma State University Library. Today is Monday, March 14, 2011. I am in Tulsa, Oklahoma interviewing Donna Shirley. This interview is being conducted as part of the inductees of the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame Oral History Project. Donna Shirley was inducted to the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame in 2003. Thank you for joining us today.

Shirley You are quite welcome.

Nykolaiszyn Well Donna, let’s begin by telling us a little bit about yourself. Let’s start with your early life.

Shirley Well, I was born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. I grew up in Wynnewood. I guess I lived the first two years of my life in Pauls Valley. Then my father went into the Navy during World War II—kind of late in World War II. We moved to Seal Beach, California. My mother moved us there in the hope that if he ever got a leave she could actually get to see him. I think she did get to see him once or twice. My sister was born in Pauls Valley, but we took her with us to Los Angeles, Seal Beach, California which is a suburb of Los Angeles. That was really neat. I went to a really good preschool there. Then we moved to San Jose where my father set up a medical practice. Then he got a call from my grandmother that she was not doing well. She was ill and he needed to come back to Wynnewood and take care of her, so he did, which was kind of a shame because we lived in a really neat place in San Jose. I can still remember it was a fairly large house with lots of fruit trees around. I would climb the fruit trees and eat fruit.

Then I grew up the rest of my life, up until graduation from college, in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, which is in south central Oklahoma— population 2,500. I don’t know what to say about that except that it was an interesting experience growing up in this very tiny town, but I was always interested in flying airplanes from the time I can remember.

When I was fifteen, my father got me flying lessons for my fifteenth birthday, so I went up to Pauls Valley and learned to fly, which was really kind of neat. Later when I went to the University of Oklahoma, I took flying lessons and got several pilots ratings at OU.

Let’s see, in Wynnewood my mother was the chairman of the Red Cross, the Garvin County Red Cross Water Safety Program. From the time I was ten I taught swimming to little kids and got my water safety instructor’s rating when I was seventeen by lying about my age, because you were supposed to be eighteen. Since then I haven’t done much swimming. (Laughs) You do it and you get kind of tired of it. Since I have graduated from college, I haven’t done much flying or any flying at all because my father stopped paying for it and I couldn’t afford it. So instead, when I ended up in California, I took up skiing and hiking, things like that.

Nykolaiszyn Well growing up in Wynnewood, outside of going to school and flying later, when you were really small what did you do for fun?

Shirley Well, actually it was fun because such a tiny town you knew all the kids. In those days, your parents would say goodbye in the morning and you would go off and come back in the evening for dinner and nobody worried about where you were. We played a lot and just did things that kids do. We had a swing, a tree swing. There was a creek nearby that we weren’t supposed to go into but we did; just general kid stuff. When I was ten, I got into the band because I was really too young to be in the band but they needed an oboe player. In those days the only people who played oboe and bassoon were people whose parents had enough money to afford to buy them an instrument, because the school couldn’t afford oboes and bassoons and exotic instruments like that. So I started playing the oboe when I was ten. But, you can’t play the oboe on the march and so I played cymbals and then I played snare drum all the way through high school.

I was too klutzy to play basketball so I didn’t do any sports. Basketball was the only girls’ sport that we had in school. I was in Girl Scouts. My mother started a Girl Scout troop specifically for my sister and I. We did a lot of church activities. I was very active in the Methodist youth fellowship in those days. Everybody was active in their church group. That was something that kept us pretty busy. I read a lot. I read a lot of science fiction, and I built model airplanes and hung them from the ceiling because I was still very air struck. What else did we do? Lots and lots of chores and fortunately, I lived in a little town of 2,500 people and both sets of grandparents, a great aunt and uncle, another aunt and uncle lived within three blocks, so I spent a lot of time with my great aunt and uncle who were my favorite. My great aunt was my favorite person in

the world, although she and I weren’t really related. She was great. We read and I would go over there and read Collier’s magazines. She taught me to sew and cook. I did all the normal things, plus weird things like building airplanes.

Nykolaiszyn What were your schools like? Were they large schools, small schools?

Shirley Oh no. In a town of 2,500 people, are you kidding? The high school was 150 kids, and my graduating class was forty-nine kids.

Nykolaiszyn Wow.

Shirley I was the valedictorian. Whoopty do! In a class of forty-nine kids, which wasn’t very difficult, it was a very small school. (Laughs) We had the requisite Oklahoma stuff. We had a football team, and a band and some of the kids played on the football team and played in the band at other times because there just weren’t enough kids to go around. I did not take home economics. I was the only girl not to take home economics. I took mechanical drawing in school because I was really interested in engineering kinds of stuff. I wasn’t interested at all in home economics. (Laughs) I was a little weird.

Nykolaiszyn Favorite subjects?

Shirley Favorite subject was actually English; excellent English teacher. We did a lot of reading Shakespeare and things like that. I really loved it. I was pretty good at everything except typing. I made two B’s in high school. One was in typing and one was in algebra two. I was just absolutely a klutz mechanically. I didn’t do too well at typing. Like I said, I got a B in algebra two, so I ended up without a perfect 4.0 when I graduated, 3.8 something.

Nykolaiszyn You can go to school anywhere, yet you decided to go to college at?

Shirley OU.

Nykolaiszyn Why did you go to OU?

Shirley Ah. Good question. Well, we actually went and looked around at a number of colleges and I wanted to go into engineering. I should mention, when I was ten my mother took me to my uncle’s graduation from medical school. On the program it said aeronautical engineering. I asked my mother what that was and she said, “That’s people who build airplanes.” I said, “That’s what I want to do.” I looked at (well, my family looked at) MIT and Georgia Tech and places like that, but MIT’s—I am a country girl. (Laughs) We got to MIT and it’s in a city

and it’s big and I am sort of going, “Eww, this doesn’t look very good.” Same thing with Georgia Tech, it’s in the middle of Atlanta. We ended up with, let’s stay a little closer to home. So, I went to OU, which worked out fine because I am sure I would have flunked out if I would have tried to go to MIT or Georgia Tech.

In fact, I nearly flunked out the first semester of my freshman year. No, the second semester of my freshman year, because it was really hard. Kid from this little tiny school—like we had chemistry, but our textbook was written in 1929. We had no lab and we didn’t have physics, we didn’t have anything like that. The thing is that I test well, so when I went to college and took all these entrance exams. I scored really well just because I know how to take multiple choice exams, so they put me in these advanced classes that I was nowhere near ready for. I was really struggling. In fact, my parents at eight weeks into school got red cards which means your daughter is in danger of flunking. They just went bananas. They said, “Can we get you a tutor? What can we do?” I said no, so I went home on Christmas vacation and I just studied and studied and studied and studied. I ended up with a B average. I was completely unprepared for it. In chemistry, fortunately one of my sorority sisters was brilliant and she was my lab partner so she got me through chemistry. That was the only thing that saved me. I got through with good grades until my junior year. Then I got engaged. My grades went from a 3.5 one semester to a 1.2 the next semester. (Laughter) It was quite bad.

Nykolaiszyn Well, I take it there weren’t lots of women in your classes?

Shirley Oh no. No, of course not. I almost was the only woman in any of my classes. In fact, in the whole College of Engineering I think there were like five or six women. In fact, one of the reasons my sorority pledged me was because they expected me to help their grades. They were hurting for grades at the time. I was a closet case. (Laughs) I was a year or two years younger than everybody else because I started school when I was five. I was a slow developer. I was a slow developer psychically and a slow developer socially. My face didn’t work right. (Laughs) My jaw was too big, and things like that. I had this frizzy hairdo. But one of the women in the sorority was a pilot. She found out that I was a pilot. She said, “We have to pledge this woman.” So they did. She turned out to be a super good friend, and still a good friend to this day. Her name was Gene Nora Stumbough. She lives in Boise, Idaho.

Nykolaiszyn So you continued to fly throughout college?

Shirley Yes. In fact, I nearly flunked out. One of the problems I had my first semester my freshman year was I went into my advisor’s office. He said,

“What are you doing here?” I said, “I am here to major in Aeronautical Engineering.” He said, “Girls can’t be engineers.” I said, “Yes, they can.” So he signed me up for sixteen hours of regular classes plus three hours of flying. Now for flying you had to drive out to the airport. Fortunately I had a car. Drive out to the airport, spend the time flying, drive back and find a place to park and so on. It was a little tough. That’s why I was having so much trouble the first semester my freshman year. I was just overloaded. I am sure it was because this guy was trying to flunk me out, but he didn’t succeed. (Laughs)

Nykolaiszyn Well, you got engaged.

Shirley That was my junior year. Flying wise, I got my pilot’s license. I started to learn in Pauls Valley. I wasn’t old enough to get a license by the time I graduated from high school, so in college I got a private pilot’s license. Then I went on and got a commercial rating, and then in Stillwater, which is where you are working, in the summer they had a seaplane course. I went up there and took the seaplane course. The seaplane course is really interesting because there is a lake called Lake Carl Blackwell near OSU, and we learned to fly in this little Piper Cub on pontoons. A Piper Cub is a very small plane. It had these great big pontoons, so we charged down the lake, and the only way we could get off the water was to lean up and get one pontoon off and pop the other pontoon off. It was pretty hairy. Anyway, so I got a seaplane rating. One summer I went to Illinois and got a multiengine rating and then I got a flight instructor’s rating. So I was chock full of airplane ratings.

Nykolaiszyn What did you hope to do with all this great knowledge? You are quite the pilot now, you are going though school. What’s going on?

Shirley Well, partly, originally I wanted to get my degree in aeronautical engineering then go work for a company that built airplanes. For a while I considered being a flight instructor, but I had two students. One of which owned his own Piper Tripacer and I could never get him to learn to land. I spent probably twenty hours with the guy and we would come in and get closer and closer and I would say, “Okay mister, so and so back on the wheel, back on the wheel, back on the wheel!” He would just freeze, driving right into the ground. After twenty hours I told him he should get a different instructor because I obviously wasn’t going to do him any good.

My second student was a kid that owned his own Taylorcraft, which is a little sixty-five horse power airplane. He was actually very good. I taught him down at a little grass field somewhere a little bit south of here. He was really good. I was able to solo him very early, but on his first solo flight he got off the ground and he went up and started around

and a little front came through and the wind changed directions. You have to land into the wind, but now he was coming in with the wind behind him. This is a very short field, and there was no way. I was down there waving but he couldn’t see me. He came in and I thought “Oh, my gosh. He is going to overrun the runway and crash into the trees at the end,” and so on. He didn’t. He was really good. He put it on the ground and stuck it there. After that, I decided I don’t think flight instructing is really my thing.

About this time I was engaged and I was completely burned out in engineering school. I was overloaded and I was in love. He was also kind of burned out. He was majoring in petroleum engineering; very smart guy. He decided he wanted to be a doctor. He was going to change majors and go to medical school. I was going to change majors and major in something I could get a degree in very quickly and then put him through medical school. The thing that I could get a degree in very quickly was professional writing. I changed my major to professional writing and loaded up twenty-two hours a semester to get my degree quickly. I ended up with a degree in professional writing, and then about halfway through my junior year or maybe my senior year, I suddenly realized what Johnny was interested in, he wanted to get married and have kids and his fondest dream was sitting on his front porch watching his grandchildren come in. It finally occurred to me, “Hey. I am not even twenty-one years old yet and that’s not what I want to do with my life. I want to do something more interesting.” So, we split up. He went off and I think he ended up with a degree in chemistry and ended up owning a ceramics factory somewhere in Dallas.

At any rate, that didn’t go exactly the way I had planned but just to fill in what happened then, I graduated with this degree in professional writing and applied for a job. I could not get a job anywhere. In fact, I only had one job interview. This guy was a young fellow and he said, “Well, let me take you up to my hotel room and we’ll discuss this.” We got up there and it was clear he had other things in mind other than this job interview. I was sort of, “Okay, no thanks,” but it turned out I got an offer from McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis to be specification writer. That was the only offer I got, so I ended up going off to St. Louis and being a specification writer. In the meantime I did graduate, had a degree, but after a year working as a specification writer, I realized what I really wanted to be was an engineer. Went back to OU and finished the engineering degree in a year. Then I went to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Nykolaiszyn How did that come about?

Shirley That came about because I was at McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis. I just

hated St. Louis. World’s worst weather. Just absolutely terrible. I hope you are not from St. Louis.

Nykolaiszyn No, I am not.

Shirley World’s worst weather. It is just miserable. Cold and slushy and snowy in the winter, and hotter than blazes and humid—you think it’s humid in Oklahoma, it’s really humid in St. Louis. It is right at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. People are very unfriendly. It is a very clannish town. I didn’t have any friends. It was six months before I had a date. Finally one of the secretaries invited me to be part of her bridge group. Then all of a sudden, I was in with her social scene and had friends, so that was better. But, when I went back to St. Louis [after getting the aerospace engineering degree] I said, “Well, I want to be an engineer now. I don’t want to be a spec writer.” The guy who was my boss said, “Oh no. You are the best spec writer we’ve got. I won’t transfer you.” Just at that time, a letter came around from the vice president of McDonnell. It said, “I understand people are being denied transfers, so this will cease.” So I took that letter in and gave it to the guy.

So he transferred me to the aerospace engineering department. I worked on Martian entry vehicles. You fly in and you come in and the front end of the vehicle has to be blunt enough to slow you down. It’s shaped like a short of a coolie hat with a round top. It can’t be too blunt or it won’t be stable. It will waggle around too much. It can’t be too pointy or it won’t slow down enough before you hit the ground, so I studied. My job was to look at the whole entry system and process how that all works, what shapes the blunt-sphere-cone-entry body could be. But I was still in St. Louis. About that time I saw an ad in the paper from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and it said, “We are looking for aerodynamicists to work on Martian entry vehicles.” Hot dog! So I wrote them and said, “I am very interested in this job.” They sent me a telegram saying, “Okay, come out and interview with us.”

So I was just ready, they had the reservations all made everything, and then an airline strike happened. So they sent me a telegram saying, “Well, you can’t come because we can’t guarantee you an airline ticket.” I went down to the airport, got on stand-by, flew out to Los Angeles, checked into the hotel they had for me already planned [in Pasadena] and called up the guy who was going to interview me and said, “I am here, do you want to interview me?” He said, “Okay.” I had this job interview and it was very tough. JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] is very picky about who it hires. At that time, there was a dearth of aerospace engineers, so I had several job interviews and they were all, “Oh this is the desk where you are going to be sitting. Here are the perks we can

give you,” and so on and so forth. JPL made me an offer, but it was the lowest offer I had. I thought, “Gee, it is so great to be in a place like this,” that I accepted and drove out to Pasadena in August in a little tiny sports car, which was pretty grim over the desert. No air conditioning. Went to work for JPL and stayed there for thirty-two years.

Nykolaiszyn You had quite the career there.

Shirley Well it was interesting, yes.

Nykolaiszyn I mean quite the career, and I know it’s probably too many to name, but could you go through some of your key moments while you were working at JPL?

Shirley Well, I started out working on this aerodynamic entry problem, and what JPL… Well, originally I had written JPL because McDonnell aircraft was going to propose a project to land on Mars in 1971. The project was then called Voyager. JPL was going to be managing that project, so I thought, “Wow, if I work for JPL, even if McDonnell doesn’t win I will get to work on this project.” So that was the project I was working on, studying how blunt those blunt-sphere cones could be, doing wind tunnel tests at Langley in Virginia, and it was really pretty exciting stuff. Then, they cancelled the project. Congress cancelled the project. This happens all the time. I mean, it just happens all the time. Somebody had to get laid off. I was a junior person in the group, so I got laid off.

I found a job at a tiny company in Pasadena who did aerodynamic studies of various and sundry kinds. Went to work there, and they were working on a project to—originally I was attracted because they said they were going to be studying dolphins and how dolphins swam and why dolphins can swim so fast and so on. Well, that is fluid dynamics. I got cross wise with the owner of the company because I wouldn’t falsify my results so that he would, they would, look good. He demoted me. There were only ten people in the company. He demoted me to being the proposal writer, so my job everyday was to get up and open the Commerce Business Daily and look for a proposal and write a proposal. The chances of a single person writing a proposal and actually winning it are zero, which was pretty bad, but in the process, I found out about the previous history of this company. (Laughs) I found out they basically made a career out of cheating the government. So it went from the Army to the Navy to the Air Force. (Laughs) Also, there was a time when he went out with one of his sponsors and took me along and went to this nice restaurant in Los Angeles. It became clear through the evening that he somehow expected me to be a hook for this guy. Fortunately, this guy was a very nice guy and didn’t try to take any advantage of it at all. I thought this was really terrible, but when I found out he was doing this

falsifying travel funds and all this stuff, I went into his office and I said, “I quit.” He said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “I don’t like the way you do business.” So he wrote me out a check and off I went.

So then I had no job, but I had friends at JPL. I called my friends and said, “I have no job. Is there anything open at J.P.L?” Fortunately, there was a guy who ran a group that did advanced studies looking at kind of far out stuff. I went out for lunch with him and he said, “Well, your background doesn’t fit this really well, but you are really smart so you can probably do it. So, I will hire you.” So he did. I was working on this study to look at flying from one planet to the other, and flying through the atmosphere, like from Venus, to get to Mars to slow down to get in the right direction. It was so boring. My office mate was working on a project to develop an automated drug identification machine. This is in the sixties so drugs were just starting to be this big deal, and he was bored. He loved what I was doing, so we went to the supervisor and said, “Can we change jobs?” He said, “Can you do that?” (Laughs) We said, “Why not?” He said, “Okay.” So we changed jobs.

Next thing I worked on was this automated drug identification machine. I got to go around to crime labs and medical labs all over the country looking at how they analyzed urine samples, blood samples for drugs. I finally determined there was just no way we could actually build a machine or system that would do the job for what was affordable by these labs. That didn’t work out too well. In the meantime, I was dating a guy, and his roommate was in charge of mission design for the Mariner 10 mission. Mariner Venus Mercury. So he and I got to be friends and he said, “You know, I need a mission analyst.” I said, “I don’t know anything about mission analysis.” He said, “Yeah, but you’re really smart. You can pick it up.” (Laughs)

So he hired me and I went to work on this project to go to Venus and Mercury in 1973 and 1974. The first day I went into the project, the guy on the project who managed it, managed this part of this project, he was mission design manger, and I said, “Well, I am a mission analyst. What does a mission analyst do?” He said, “It is customary to define your own job.” It turns out, what I ended up doing was going around and, the main thing I did was talk to scientists and talk to the engineers and kind of interlocutor between the two. The scientists always want more than the engineers could do. I spent two years figuring out how to balance the science requirements or the end desires versus the engineering capabilities. I finally managed to do that. We picked the launch date. The optimal launch date was November 3, 1973. That was my first big accomplishment. It was a framed letter saying we have changed our launch date to November 3, 1973. I had that on my office wall for a long time.

Went all the way through the project and that all finished off. In 1974 we got to Mercury, Venus and Mercury. Went around Mercury three times. Let’s see, what was the next thing? Then I said, “I am really tired of working mission operations.” It’s long, long hours. Very intense. There was a guy who had a section (section is about a hundred people) who was looking at non-space problems, like energy and so on. I went to him and said, “Rhody, do you have an opening, a project opening?” He said, “Yeah, I’ve got this really neat project.” So I said, “Okay.” I turned down the next mission analysis job which was on Voyager, which ended up going to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, not Pluto. It is still flying. There are two Voyagers flying all this time later. So, I said, “No I don’t want to be on Mission Operations again. It’s just too taxing, so I will do this energy project.” I went over and talked to the section manager and he said, “Oh, well actually, I don’t have a project job but I have a group supervisor job.” Well, that is a line management job, so you know you are taking care of people. That is not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do a project with a real output and so on. I said, “I don’t want to do that.” He said, “Well, it’s all I got.” At that point I said, “Well, okay.”

Then I became the Civil Systems Group Supervisor, so we had energy, we had medical things, we had police stuff, you name it, as long as it wasn’t space, we had it. Well, our job was to figure out things like what can we afford, how many people are interested in having this and so on. Somebody said, “We need to hire an economist.” (Laughs) I said, “What’s an economist?” They said, “Go out and find one.” I had no idea what an economist was. I squirreled around and squirreled around and finally found a guy who had just finished his master’s degree in economics. I got him to come in and give an interview. One of the things, JPL is a division of Cal Tech, California Institute of Technology. Cal Tech had this whiz bang economics department. So I said, “Would you guys listen to a seminar by this applicant and tell me what you think?” His seminar was on fin fish. Now fin fish are not shellfish. Fin fish are any kind of fish that swims like that. He started giving this lecture and I realized he had not a clue what he was talking about. It was so embarrassing because these Cal Tech people are just brilliant. I was going, “Oh, my gosh. What I have done?” At the end of it I ran up to the supervisor of this group of economists and said, “Oh Charlie, I am so sorry. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything about economics.” This other guy in the group who is really a harrassable fellow came storming up, and Charlie says, “That’s okay. She has already apologized.” (Laughs) I said, “Look, I can’t do this. I need you guys to help me.” So they did.

They went out and looked for people and they found two or three, four people, economists who they thought were acceptable and their

standards were very high. The first guy we hired, he was from UCLA and he came up from Los Angeles. Immediately had an allergic reaction and his eyes swelled shut. He went back and that was it. The second person we got was a guy who had just been in Maine. We hired him and he came out with his family from Maine. They came out in the summer. They had two kids, wife and two kids. When those little kids hit the summer in California they just wilted. (Laughter) He stayed for his whole career. He was six feet tall and had a beautiful blonde wife. The second economist we hired was six feet tall and had a beautiful blonde wife. I thought, I have got this down pat, this is how you hire an economist. The third one was Katchin Terasawa, who you know was an Asian with a little short Asian wife. So we thought, “Well, so much for that.” So that worked out really well.

We had an economist, and then some of projects we worked on we needed a policy analyst. We were doing a National Geothermal Program Plan NASA [National Aeronautical Space Association] had been tasked with. This was during the 1970s, the big energy crisis in the ’70s. NASA had been tasked with coming up with a National Energy Plan, specifically geothermal energy, to produce lots and lots of geothermal energy, so NASA gave it to us, JPL. Of course, the engineers plunged in and started designing geothermal things. We said, “Wait a minute. It is not really a technical problem. There are really a bunch of other issues. Like what about utilities? How do utilities react to these kinds of sporadic things that are located in areas? Geothermal is not in areas where it is close to users, so somebody would have to make the power and pipe it. Then in the case of using it for heat, for industry and things like that, how are they are located? And so on.

We got into that, so I had these economists. I was the one with the economists, so we started working on that. Then we discovered a lot of it is really building code and things like that. They are really legal issues, so I ended up hiring a policy analyst and a lawyer. This was the strangest group at JPL. It was really odd. (Laughs) We worked on that for a while. Then we got into solar energy and all other kinds of energy. Started working with the gas company, electric companies, found out how utilities work and so on. We still were getting stuff going with the police, and the hospital, and somehow this group got bigger and bigger. Finally I said, “This group is forty people. It is too big. Can we split it?” So we split the group. The section manager said, “Okay, we’ll split the group and give half of it to somebody else and you keep the energy part?” I said, “Okay.” So that kept growing and growing. Finally I said, “Okay, can I just give this away to somebody and go work on something else?” So we hired somebody else to be the group supervisor. (Laughs)

At that point, I went to a friend of mine who was in charge of all of the

advanced projects at JPL and said “John, I really need to get back into the space business. Okay, I have had enough of this non-space stuff. I came here to work in space.” He said, “Well, all I have is this little study, but it is going to be the next big JPL project. It’s Mariner: Jupiter- Saturn.” I said, “Okay that sounds like fun.” So I took over this study and we had about, I don’t know, $250,000 or something. We had to design this mission. That was a lot of money in those days. We had to design this mission to go fly by Jupiter and use the gravity assist from Jupiter and go to Saturn. Now in Mariner 10 (it was the first gravity assist mission) we used the gravity of Venus to turn the trajectory so it would go to Mercury, so I knew something about that. Anyway, we did this. We designed this mission and came out with, this is the way this mission should work. A few years later it became the Cassini Mission, which was two billion dollars at the time, but it wasn’t two billion dollars when we did the study.

So, I’m working on that and I put myself back into the mission design section. I said, “I don’t really want to be in management. I just want to do this work, so I will put myself in a group,” which is like ten people. So I put myself in this group, and the group supervisor was nowhere near as senior as I was. I said, “Don’t worry about it, Ron. I will work for you and everything will be fine.” At that point, the section manager said, “What are doing in here in this group? I want a deputy section manager.” So he grabbed me and brought me up to be deputy section manager. Well that meant that he got to do all the fun stuff and I ended up running the section, working with the marital problems, the raises and all the parking problems, all these things that a line manager has to do. He went off and became the mission design manager for a mission to Venus. He left me with this section, so I said, “This is not really what I want to do.” So I started scouting around and it turned out that another friend of mine was running a little advanced study for the Space Station, which in 1980 was just an idea. I said, “Gee, Al, can I help you with this Space Station?” So I ended up working on this Space Station and then he went off and did something else, so I ended up with the group that dealt with the Space Station.

In the meantime, somebody else had an autonomous systems project for the Air Force, so I worked on that for a while and found out about how to fly robotic systems and so on. The Space Station job lasted about four years and what we found out was nobody wanted JPL. The space station and all the manned programs are owned by the manned centers, namely Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center and Marshall Space Center. They were going to be in charge. Here JPL is in there trying to tell them how to do things. They didn’t like that all. In fact, JPL is in an odd position because it is the only NASA center that is a contractor. The rest of them are civil service. We are working for Cal Tech, under

contract to NASA. We are this, as one of the Marshall guys says, “You guys are neither fish nor fowl.” (Laughs) We were always taking flak from these people. Finally about 1984 I just realized that this really was not going to work out.

At that point, what did I do then? I think at that point I got back in—oh, before then I had been the Division Manager for Energy. My job was not to manage anything really but to be staff to the division manager for energy issues. So, I did that for a while, and in the meantime, that was in the ’70s, because we’re still having these big energy problems in the ’70s, I got married and I had my daughter. At that point, I said, “Gee I have done enough of this. I would really like to have a good responsible job.” I couldn’t get one, so I asked my friend who was a section manager, I can’t remember all the details, but he finally went to the division manager and said, “Why can’t Donna get a responsible job?” He said, “She is now fulfilled as a mother.” (Laughs) So I had to go and say, “Look. I am not fulfilled as a mother. Yes, I like being a mother. Motherhood is very important, but I still want to have a responsible job.” They ended up giving me a responsible job.

Anyway, that was the ’80s. My boss at that time was what is called an ALD, an Assistant Laboratory Director. He was my boss for the Space Station Program. He said, “Well, I need somebody to run the Robotics Technology Program, automation and robotics.” I said, “I don’t know anything about that.” He said, “That’s okay. The people who do know something about it don’t want that job. They just want to do Research and Development. Would you try it?” I said, “Okay.” So I took some classes in robotics and I read up on it and all that sort of stuff, took over that job and ran the Robotics and Automation Program for several years. One of the big parts of that was rovers, planetary rovers. They were doing a lot of Mars rover sample return studies. [They were going to be] precursors to human Mars exploration. The rovers were going to go to Mars and pick up samples, deliver them to a rocket. The rocket was going to take off and fly back to Earth and bring the samples back to Earth. That was going to tell us something about where to send the people. That project with the rover and the Lander and the Earth return vehicle and all that was ending up going to cost about $6 billion. We were involved in studies taking a look at the whole manned program. That was so expensive. It was about $400 billion. It was so expensive that NASA didn’t want to tell Congress what we expected the costs to be. So Congress said, “This is going to be way more than we can afford.”

So they cancelled all of the Mars exploration including the Mars Rover Program, Mars Rover Sample Return. Well, I was running the rover part of the Mars Rover Sample Return. Basically, I was out of money, so

once again, the story of my life, things are cancelled and I’m out of money. (Laughs) But, in the meantime, the technology program was going along and during that I got somehow all tangled up with putting together all of the NASA centers to create a Mars Systems Engineering Handbook, which was not easy because NASA centers don’t like to work together, but we did that. Then we were asked to do a plan for management training, program/project management training. We did that and got in big trouble because the things we were suggesting that needed to be done, the center directors and the head of NASA really didn’t want to hear.

I went in and made a presentation at one point and these guys started yelling at me. They yelled at me for about an hour, because I said, “Well, you need to do things like have the project managers have their salaries not determined by the center directors, because they are going to push work to the centers even when it’s not appropriate because the centers don’t want to let go of their control of their resources.” They were yelling at me and yelling at me and finally the guy who was kind of our sponsor at headquarters said, “Well, do you not want us to go on with this?” This was the first of three reports. The head of NASA said, “We really can’t cut you off because that would really look bad, so carry on but just only address the training issues and so on.” So we ended up with this namby pamby report. After this first presentation, this woman comes up, and she was only one other woman in the place. This woman comes up to me and says, “How can you live with being yelled at by all those people?” I said, “I am from JPL. I’ve been yelled at by experts.” (Laughs) It’s true. When JPL does reviews, they really do reviews.

So at that point there was life returned to the Rover Program in the form of a little tiny in-house sponsored project for $2.5 million to build a small rover, because it was clear that nobody was going to be able to afford a big rover, and there were some people working on technology for small rovers. One of the managers at JPL came up with $2.5 million to pay for developing this little rover up to a demonstration. That went on and they said, “Well, we are going to try to carry this on now to a real project.” They advertised for a project manager, and I applied and got the job. My job was basically to go to headquarters and sell [the technology people] on the idea of spending ten times as much money as they had ever spent on a flight project, on a real project. It was clear that unless we flew a rover, we were never going to get to fly a rover, because nobody would ever believe they really worked. After much travail, I finally ended up getting the resources for that and building this little rover, which became Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997. The Managing Martians book is full of that.

Nykolaiszyn So Pathfinder landed on Mars in 1997?

Shirley Right. Interestingly enough, the technology it used to land was this blunt sphere cone technology that I’d worked on back in the ’60s.

Nykolaiszyn It all comes back around. (Laughs)

Shirley It does. It all comes back around. So anyway, we landed and the little rover gets off and crawls around and is beloved by everybody. We set the new record for the internet in terms of hits, there was something like 45 million hits. They say Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor address was the defining moment for radio, landing on the moon was the defining moment for television and Pathfinder landing on Mars was the defining moment for the Internet.

Pathfinder lasted for about ninety days, about three months. Even though it was only supposed to, technically, contractually, supposed to last for a month, I think. The rover was contractually only supposed to last for a week, but it lived longer than the Lander did. Finally, when the Lander died, because the rover could sleep at night, and then when the sun came up, it could use the energy from the sun to do its thing. It had a primary battery like a flashlight battery to run on at night. It also had little radioactive heater units so it could stay warm at night. The Lander was too big to have these little radioactive heater units. It would get cold unless it had batteries that could run at night, but it had rechargeable batteries. Well, the batteries just ran down after three months, and then it died. The rover was so small, about the size of a microwave oven, so small that it couldn’t communicate. It didn’t have enough power to communicate all the way back to the earth. The rover would to talk to the Lander; the Lander would talk to the earth. Then you could send commands to the rover through the Lander, so when the Lander died the rover could not be heard from. We had the rover programmed to, if she lost contact with the earth, to go around the Lander going, “Hello? Hello?” Finally, if she didn’t hear from us, she would get stuck on a rock or something like that. We had this image of this little rover going around the Lander, if she tipped too much she was programmed to stop, just call for help, but help would never come. It was very sad.

Nykolaiszyn But you must have been very proud the day it landed?

Shirley Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, I had actually turned over the management of the rover in 1994. We started in ’92 and in ’94 I was kicked upstairs to manage the whole Mars Exploration Program that is the Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor and all of the following missions. The rover was managed at that point by a guy named Jake Matijevic, who was much better suited than I was. One way was that I was just terrible at doing the bookkeeping. Just terrible. Jake has a PhD in math and he could do it

just like that. I would spend hours and hours trying to make the numbers work out. It was just terrible. We couldn’t afford to have staff who would do that so I had to do it myself. It was a very small, small group of people. Thirty people max, at the most. I was very proud of the rover and I was very proud of the Lander.

Mars Global Survey was successful to some extent. It was an orbiter of Mars and just recently died. It went orbiting Mars for a long time, but when it launched, it had a broken solar panel. It is kind of a long story, but anyway, because of this broken solar panel it took an extra year to get into the right orbit. That affected the two ’98 missions, which failed. In ’98 we had been telling headquarters that there wasn’t enough money for what they wanted to do and they kept sending more and more requirements and no money. The problem was that the headquarters managers were all scientists. They did not understand engineering. They did not understand the engineering issues at all. They didn’t want to understand the engineering issues. “People are just whining.” We kept telling them disaster was going to ensue, so before the launch, I retired. I was kind of sad to do it but I didn’t want to be associated with it, so sure enough, both the Lander and the orbiter failed.

Then they came to their senses and put more money, because the next two years, launches to Mars are every twenty-six months. So the next one was 2001 and they planned to send two more, a rover and a Lander. Finally they came to their senses and put all of their money in the orbiter and it worked fine. It is still there, Mars Odyssey. Since then they have had a Mars reconnaissance orbiter, which is much bigger and can see tiny little things on the surface. It can see something the size of a person on the surface of Mars. It is going gangbusters now. The next one in the series just to finish up is something called Curiosity, which is a curiosity all right. Oh, and in 2003, before the reconnaissance orbiter, there were two much bigger rovers named Spirit and Opportunity. They are still up there. Spirit is probably dead but Opportunity is still taking an opportunity to go on. The next one is going to be Curiosity, which launches next year. It is enormous. It is the size of a [small] car. It carries kazillions of instruments and is badly cost overrun. Just billions of dollars, I forget exactly how much. Once it went from these tiny little modest things up to boom!

Nykolaiszyn After you retired from JPL, you ended up back in Oklahoma?

Shirley Right. When I was the Mars Exploration program manager, I sort of did all of the publicity stuff for Pathfinder, which was extensive. So Norm Haynes (who was my boss) and I ended up doing the TV and all of that stuff so it wouldn’t bother the people actually doing the work. So, I end up on television a lot, and spent a lot of time on CNN the whole day of

the mission, the whole day of the landing on CNN, and got a lot of exposure. I ended up with a big speaking contract, lots of speaking assignments. I had written a book called Managing Creativity that just didn’t sell, so I got this agent who sent me a letter saying, “How would like to write a book?” I said, “I did and you turned it down.” (Laughs) She said, “Send it back.” (Laughs) I sent it back and she shopped it around.

Nobody wanted it but one company, Broadway Books, [and they] wanted an autobiography. They said, “Okay, write this autobiography.” So I did, but they insisted I had a co-writer. It ended up that was not entirely a really great relationship. I wanted the book to be a lot more management and she wanted the book to be a lot much touchy feely. She was not particularly worried about accuracy and I was very worried about accuracy, so it was not a super comfortable relationship. We did get it written and I got a terrific advance for it, which they will never ever make back, poor things. It’s their business. I wrote the book, and in the meantime I was so disgusted with the management issues on the Mars program that I wrote this book called Managing Creativity, which is about how to really manage. That was when I was trying to get published and nobody was interested in it. It wasn’t really all that good, either, but I was just so furious that I set out and wrote it in like a month. I did that and then I did a lot of speaking.

After about a year I realized I just hated Los Angeles. My daughter had graduated from college. She went to Scripps College for Women in Claremont. When she graduated I thought, I don’t really have to stay here anymore. She is going to go off to grad school somewhere else. I got this offer from University of Oklahoma to be the Assistant Dean of Engineering, so I said, “Fine.” So I sold the house, went back to Oklahoma. My daughter, I just sent her an e-mail because she and her fiancé were on a grand tour of Europe at the time. I sent them an e-mail saying I sold the house. She was totally upset. “How could you sell our house, the house I grew up in?” and so on. She was never going to live there. Her fiancé sent me an email, she spent the night sobbing on the Paris subway because I sold her house. (Laughs) I made great profit on it, so I invested that. That did rather well. I did four years at the University of Oklahoma doing strategic planning and also teaching. I taught my Managing Creativity course for four years, four times a year. Then they got their budget cut, happens to me all the time. (Laughter)

Nykolaiszyn I see a trend.

Shirley A trend. The budget was cut and they just couldn’t afford to have an assistant dean and I couldn’t afford to live on a half salary. I thought well, if I am going to be broke I might as well be broke in Seattle, which

is where my daughter was at the time going to graduate school. So I moved to Seattle. When I was there, this woman asked me to be on the board of a new museum they were starting up called the Science Fiction Museum. Then they decided they really needed a director for the Science Fiction Museum. They asked me if I would do that. So I said, “Well okay.” I ended up doing that for ten months or so, just to get it started, get it kicked off. Then I had some health problems. I was kind of out of things for several years. Still did a little speaking and so on in Seattle.

Then by good luck, my son-in-law—by that time my daughter and son- in-law had gotten married and they had a baby, he was an investor and he worked for Bill Gates to invest Bill’s pocket change. Didn’t work for Microsoft but worked directly for a little group that worked directly for Bill investing his money that went in to support the foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He and his boss had sort of agreed that it was time for him to move on. He got this offer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to work as the Chief Investment Officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation. Robert and Laura had always sworn, they are both West Coast kids. Robert is from the Seattle area. Laura, of course, from L.A. [They would] never, never move to the middle of the country. “Oklahoma? How ridiculous! Why should we move there?” but this offer was too good to be refused. They moved here and I said, “Hot dog!” So my partner and I moved here and bought a house, stayed in an apartment downtown for several months and then bought this house on Swan Lake, where we enjoy the swans.

Nykolaiszyn Back in Oklahoma.

Shirley Back in Oklahoma, in a different part of Oklahoma, but it’s nice to be back.

Nykolaiszyn What does Oklahoma mean to you?

Shirley Well, it’s my place. I like the people. I can put up with the environment. (Laughs) I don’t like the summers, of course. The summers are awful. Interestingly enough, the winters never used to have snow, but the last few years we have just been snowed in. It’s ridiculous. Fortunately George, my partner, has lived in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, which have snow, so he is sort of used to it, but I am not used to it. Seattle had some snow, but Oklahoma I expected maybe one small snow a year. But the last two years have just been insane. The next time we hear it is going to snow we are going to rent a four-wheel drive vehicle. We are housebound. We have got these little cars, we can’t get out of the house. I haven’t really found a whole lot to do. I am on the board of advisors of the College of Engineering. People are always asking me to

give speeches and things like that, so I do that. I haven’t been terribly busy.

Nykolaiszyn You have received many awards and honors through the years, but in 2003 you were inducted into the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame. What was going through your mind when you got the phone call?

Shirley Oh, just how neat. It was just a real honor. I didn’t know there was an Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame. I knew there was an Oklahoma Hall of Fame, but I had no idea there was an Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame. It was just great to be inducted and then meet the other women who are very cool. There’s a lot of very cool women in this state that nobody knows about. Also, I have gotten a little bit involved in politics. I campaigned for Drew Edmondson against Jari Askins, and I campaigned for Jari Askins against Mary Fallin. I am the kiss of death for people who are running for office. (Laughter) I have never gotten involved with politics before. Although it was interesting, when I went to Seattle I went from Oklahoma, which is the reddest state in the union, to a little precinct in Seattle that is the most liberal precinct in Washington, maybe in the United States. It was just incredibly liberal. It was quite a contrast.

Nykolaiszyn What advice would you give to those young girls, maybe growing up in small Oklahoma towns, maybe not, maybe growing up in the big cities and other places in the United States, that have their eye to the sky and want to get involved in science. What would you tell them?

Shirley I would tell them, just do what your heart tells you to do. One of the things that I teach in my course is to follow your passion. Number one, finding out what your passion is and number two, figuring out how to follow it. I was teaching a class at OU for freshman women in career planning. It was interesting. One girl in the class, at the end of the class, they had to get up and give a final report. This girl said, “My parents wanted me to be a doctor, so I was enrolled in premed. I just really didn’t care for it. What I really wanted to do was major in accounting, because my favorite thing to do is my parent’s income tax return.” I said, “Can I adopt you?” (Laughter) She was practically teary about it. She said because her parents really wanted her to be a doctor, she didn’t want to be a doctor, she wanted to be an accountant, which I find strange, but she really meant it. She said, “I prayed about it.” I mean, she was really serious and finally decided, and I think partly on the basis of this class, to do what her heart told her to do. I thought that was just wonderful.

Nykolaiszyn I have gone through your book and there’s a chapter in there that brings up a very good question. What do you do after you have been to Mars?

Shirley Well, that’s been a difficulty. (Laughs) I have done so many things since I left JPL. I’m involved in all sorts of volunteer activities and all sorts of, I’ve run a Science Fiction Museum, I have been the Assistant Dean of Engineering, I have taught engineering classes, I have been on advisory boards.

Nykolaiszyn So what’s next?

Shirley I don’t know. I haven’t found anything as intriguing. I don’t know that there is anything more intriguing than landing on Mars for the first time. It is really great because my grandson is nearly four and he is terrific. My daughter finished her PhD after nine years of agony, and so now she is trying to figure out what to do when she grows up. She is on the board of Planned Parenthood right now, so that gives her something to do. My son-in-law is just working so hard that he is out of the country a third of the time, India, Australia, Ireland and places like that. George and I started to go on cruises with some old friends of mine. We went to Alaska last year and this year we are going on a trans-Atlantic cruise to Europe. I have sort of decided, I put all this money away to retire on and it would be okay to spend some of it on retirement kinds of things. I figure, gee, in ten years I will be eighty. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be doing things like cruises and things. I can’t really do much skiing anymore and I can’t really do much hiking anymore. It’s kind of down to doing old folks stuff. The thing is just to do old folks stuff that is fun as much as possible with friends. So that is kind of what we are doing right now.

Nykolaiszyn That sounds pretty good.

Shirley I have also joined the gym. I am working out trying to get in shape. I broke my leg and the thing to do is to not break my leg anymore, stay healthy.

Nykolaiszyn As we come to a close, is there anybody you would like to mention or make note of that has really played a big role in your career and your life along the way?

Shirley Interestingly enough, I had no role models whatsoever. Wonder Woman and Mary Marvel were my two role models when I was a little kid. I have always been the first woman to do anything that I have done. I was the only woman in my classes. I wasn’t the first, but I was the only woman in my classes at OU. I was the only woman in my graduate school classes. When I got to JPL, I was the only female engineer out of about 2,000 engineers. What I have ended up being is a role model to everybody else, but not having a whole lot of role models myself. I have

a lot of friends, and this one woman I mentioned that got me into my sorority because she was a pilot, we are still great friends and she was certainly a role model for, hey, women can certainly be pilots too and things like that. I am also a member of the Women and Technology International Hall of Fame. There are these spectacular women in that.

Being in these women’s groups that give you role models because they are such wonderful people and you can kind of go, “Oh, wow. These things are really great.” So that’s good. But I think now about twenty percent of engineering students are women. Some schools have a lot more, up to fifty percent. Some schools, aerospace engineering unfortunately, have fewer. Computer science has practically none. I like being a role model. I am going to be giving a speech for the Society of Women Engineers regional event at TU [Tulsa University] next year. I like doing that. I like being a role model myself. That’s important. I guess just keep doing that, helping raise my grandson. He is a great kid.

Nykolaiszyn Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven’t spoken about today?

Shirley Oh gosh, I have been talking steadily. No. I think one of things that I have learned is being close to my family is very important. I only have one daughter, one child. I have been following her around the country. It’s really great because I get along really well with my son-in-law, he is a super guy. I get along really well with my daughter. Just being able to—like we have brunch once a month at the Summit Club. They bring the little boy along. He brings his Transformers along, things like that, so babysitting him and they are now thinking about having another one. Being Grandma is very fulfilling. So you go through these stages of life where you can’t do things you used to do, but there are other things to do. You just have to figure out, “Okay, what can I get fulfillment out of if I can’t keep sailing, skiing and so on?” I have found quite a few things to be, having a partner. I haven’t had a partner in years and years. He’s terrific. He is really helping a lot with my broken leg. He drives me around. (Laughs) It is really nice having a companion.

Nykolaiszyn Well good. We’re glad to have you back in Oklahoma, of course.

Shirley I am glad to be back in Oklahoma. Now, I hope my son-in-law is going to stay with this job for a while. They are talking about at least five years, so I am hoping I can talk him into staying longer than that. He is going to go where he can get the best job. We will probably follow them along, but I hope it is in Oklahoma. I will continue to have ties to Oklahoma. I will continue to be on advisory boards and things like that. Gee, I have been on the College of Engineering Advisory Board for ten years now. It’s about time to let somebody else do it.

Nykolaiszyn Lastly we come to a close. I do have a question for you. What do you think is the future of our space program?

Shirley Very good question. The thing is that the Bush Administration tried to go way too far. The original George Bush, George the First, got up and made this preannouncement that said, “We are going to go to the moon and Mars, the moon and then back to Mars, with people.” It was clear it was never in NASA’s budget to do that. NASA has a problem because when the Apollo program happened back in the ’50s and ’60s, the budget went boom! And all of these contractors went boom! There is this huge organization that has to be fed. You try to cancel anything and the congressmen just go berserk because of the jobs. So NASA has become this big jobs program.

I’m very encouraged by the progress that is being made by the private space companies. Like Elon Musk has the Falcon, and it’s now shot off a couple of times. People are starting to have success, these small companies, and NASA has some money going into these small companies. They are getting investment dollars and things like that. Before, maybe the next ten years, we are going to have private space stuff. That is really good. That will get supported by capital funding. NASA is such a jobs program, it is very hard to cancel anything or to squeeze things down into what can actually be afforded. Poor NASA is getting bombarded all the time with, you’ve got to do this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and they just don’t have the money. So it’s a real problem and I think there will be a transition period where they will be transitioning to a lot more private enterprise.

In the meantime, the Chinese are going gang busters. They are going to have a space station in a couple of years. They can spend money any way they want, because of the kind of government they have. They certainly have a lot of money—ours. (Laughs) I think the Chinese are going to be and maybe the Indians, the Indians are starting to get into it, too. They have got billions and billions of people and they are very smart. If you think about it, if you have two billion people and you have the top ten percent, that is 200 million very smart people. In the U.S. we have 350 million, and the top ten percent of that is 3.5 million smart people. On top of that, I think our biggest problem is that we are simply not teaching, we are not educating, our kids. It is a huge problem. It is one of the things we work real hard on at OU is trying to support OU in getting kids to go into engineering and into the hard sciences as opposed to history. Sorry. (Laughter)

Nykolaiszyn It’s true.

Shirley History is important. I mean those who don’t know it are condemned to repeat it. It is very important. You can’t build an economy on historians. You need to build an economy on science and technology and we don’t have enough of it. I am very concerned about that. In the meantime, the Chinese and Indians are educating all these people like mad and we, for instance, can’t get graduate students. We can get graduate students, but they are all foreigners. They can’t work on classified projects, for example, which is where an awful lot of the money is. The military program has far more money than NASA does. NASA has $16 billion, let’s say, and the military has $300 billion, $400 billion, something like that. The military can just do so much more than we can, and for Oklahoma to be able to get a piece of the action is really hard if all we have are Chinese and Indian graduate students. You need graduate students to do the work so the professors can do research. It is a terrible problem, so I worry about our economic capabilities, “our” being the whole country, and the Space Program is just part of it. The Space Program has to prove that it is good for something. Right now it is a jobs program and you can’t sustain that. You can’t hold together on just creating government jobs. You have to be able to create private jobs, so it’s tricky. Anyway, the answer is, I don’t know. Long answer.

Nykolaiszyn Well it will be interesting to see what happens.

Shirley It will be.

Nykolaiszyn Again, thank you for sitting down with us today. We really appreciate it.

Shirley You are quite welcome.

Nykolaiszyn Thank you.

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