Mars Rover Curiosity Quotes

“Joe reluctantly agreed to form a “Tiger Team” to rethink the whole sample-handling system—simpler, and with fewer motors. (For those unfamiliar with the term, a Tiger Team is a group of experts pulled together temporarily to tackle one specific problem. The term is said to come from a 1964 paper in which it was defined, tongue-in-cheek, as “a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem.”)”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“You begin by going around the room, one person at a time, each speaking about what he or she says is the biggest problem for his/her team.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“Tiger Team is a group of experts pulled together temporarily to tackle one specific problem.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“At a PDR, the team is expected to present a final or nearly final design of every element of the spacecraft. A thumbs-up from the review panel says, in effect, “Your designs look solid and we consider that the project is ready to be funded for building the spacecraft.” With a successful PDR, the project will then be “confirmed,” and NASA headquarters will provide enough funding to cover costs until the project is well along.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“The first of those, the preliminary design review, or PDR, usually takes place about four years, sometimes more, before the scheduled launch. The team has to convince the review board that it has solid concepts for all major aspects of the mission.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“If I could relive that day, I would say, “We almost never get the design right on the first pass. We design a piece of the hardware, build it, test it, find out what’s not working the way it needs to, have it fixed, then test it again before integrating it into the spacecraft.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer

“A project manager is the captain of the ship, the person responsible for making sure the project is on course and moving ahead smoothly. He or she is in charge of the schedule, and the allocation of money. But most of all, the project manager is responsible for maintaining relationships with the people providing the funds.”
― Rob Manning, Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiosity's Chief Engineer