SOJOURNER

Reviewed 4/30/2004

Sojourner, by Andrew Mishkin

SOJOURNER
An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission
Andrew Mishkin
New York: Berkley Books, 2003

Rating:

5.0

High

ISBN 0-425-19199-0 333p. HC/BWI $21.95

This book complements Donna Shirley's account1 in that it focuses on hardware issues, while hers devotes more attention to management. However, on a hardware project like MESUR (Mars Environmental SURvey), any coherent account must needs cover the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the problem, since those are primary. Mishkin goes into detail about the size and configuration of Sojourner's solar array, the choice of electronic vs. mechanical power switches, the way the cable harness was built and routed,2 and other technical topics. Some of these are also covered in Managing Martians; but Mishkin's perspective is very different from Shirley's. He focuses more on the development of the rover, while she included more descriptions of management interactions.

There is also the fact that Managing Martians is a memoir of Donna Shirley's life through the completion of the Pathfinder mission, while Sojourner covers just the development and operation of the two spacecraft.

Mishkin has drawn together his personal notes, recollections of colleagues from the Pathfinder days, and research to produce a very readable account of the development of a complex spacecraft on a tight budget and a demanding schedule. The style is informal, reproducing relevant conversations, relating anecdotes, and not shying away from a few of George Carlin's Seven Words.3 It is not the definitive history of the Pathfinder project; that has yet to be written. However, I rate it excellent as a personal account, and I recommend it.

Numerous passages touch on the reason for the intense involvement of the engineers and programmers, who routinely "pulled all-nighters" building the spacecraft and went on Mars time to run it — like this quote from page 197:

Cooper began to allow himself to believe. "We're really going to Mars. We're going to do this." He opened the door partway to view the enormity of what he was involved with. Like many of us on the team, Cooper had grown up reading science fiction. He and I had often discussed the reason working at JPL was special, and as Sojourner took form, it applied more than ever before: "We get to turn science fiction into reality."

And on pages 305-6, he presents some words that illuminate the fate of Mars projects that came immediately after Pathfinder.

The Pathfinder and Sojourner team members had become victims of their own success. What had been the exception became the rule. Future missions were now expected to cost even less and do still more. Pathfinder was held up as the shining proof that this expectation was realizable. Other projects at JPL talked about "Pathfinderizing" themselves, but no one who had been on Pathfinder ever used that term. The keys to Pathfinder's success—largely the quality of its people, their freedom to cut across usual organizational boundaries to solve problems, and the mandate to modify the scope of the mission as necessary to remain within its fixed budget—seemed to be lacking in these other efforts. At a panel discussion on "How Pathfinder Invented Faster, Better, Cheaper" held in Washington, D. C., on November 5, 1998, the Project Manager was asked, "What would you do differently if you had the chance to do Pathfinder again?" Brian Muirhead smiled and answered, "That's not the question. The trick is being able to do the same thing again." The environment at JPL had changed.

Mishkin supplies a glossary of acronyms used on the project and a list of people involved. An extensive index rounds out the book. I found no typographical errors per se. However, the errata page linked below comments on what seem to me several questionable statements and one poor word choice.

1 Managing Martians, Broadway Books, 1998. Reviewed in my "Visions of a Space Age" section.
2 The cable harness was one example of a crisis successfully solved. To gain maximum flexibility, ribbon cables were chosen, and their manufacture was contracted out. Because the drawings were unclear on whether certain miniature connectors were male or female, the delivered harness was a mirror-image of what it should be. Re-doing it would bust the schedule (not to mention wasting $450,000). But the engineers realized that the mating connectors could be rewired with little impact, and they were. Such crises — and workarounds — are quite common.
3 For example, see the very interesting anecdote on page 288.
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