Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

But Adler came up with a better problem to solve. When I asked him about his thought process, he told me it was “really, really simple.” The way Adler saw it, our problem wasn’t the lander. It was gravity. We were preoccupied with the obvious question: “How do we design a better three-legged lander?” Adler stepped back and asked, “How do we defeat gravity and land our rover safely on Mars?” The same force that causes an apple to fall from a tree also causes unhappy meetings between a spacecraft and the Martian surface unless you do something to cushion the fall. Adler’s solution was to abandon the three-legged lander design. Instead, he proposed using giant airbags with our rover cocooned inside a lander.