Nothing I had learned in engineering school at UC Berkeley prepared me for thinking about this kind of design problem. There, I had learned how to mathematically model systems and then minimize something, such as cost or least-squared error. But this work at JPL was different. I had to learn enough about all the subsystems and their possible interactions, and hold it all in my mind, in order to imagine a configuration that might be effective. This was difficult, to say the least. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning to learn strategy.
