April 1, 2016

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Book Review: The Right Kind of Crazy

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By Clara Moskowitz

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The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation
by Adam Steltzner, with William Patrick
Portfolio, 2016 ($28)

Less than a week before NASA's Curiosity rover was to land on Mars, an engineer on the team planning its touchdown found a problem: the three coordinates that determined the vehicle's “center of navigation” in its onboard computer were off. The team members faced a daunting decision: live with the minor error, which might have no effect on the landing, or update the coordinates and risk setting off other problems by making such a significant change so late in the game. They decided to alter the numbers—apparently a good call, because the rover famously made a flawless descent using its unprecedented “sky crane” landing system, which lowered the rover on cables from a spacecraft hanging above.

Steltzner, leader of Curiosity's entry, descent and landing team, with writer Patrick, recounts the challenges and thrills of planning the most complex planetary landing mechanism ever designed—a system he helped convince nasa's chief was “the right kind of crazy.”

Clara Moskowitz is chief of reporters at Scientific American, where she covers astronomy, space, physics and mathematics. She has been at Scientific American for more than a decade; previously she worked at Space.com. Moskowitz has reported live from rocket launches, space shuttle liftoffs and landings, suborbital spaceflight training, mountaintop observatories, and more. She has a bachelor’s degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University and a graduate degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

More by Clara Moskowitz
Scientific American Magazine Vol 314 Issue 4This article was published with the title “Book Review: The Right Kind of Crazy” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 314 No. 4 (), p. 78
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0416-78a
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