Published books

I am a systems engineer by trade, and I have spent my career in the unmanned space program. I worked on landers that tipped over on rocks the size of dinner plates. I worked on rovers that outlived their warranty by a factor of sixty. I have been in the room Mars when the telemetry flatlined, and I have been in the room when a photograph came back showing ancient riverbeds carved into a desert that has not seen liquid water in three billion years. What I learned across those decades is that success on Mars is a chain of ten thousand small victories, each one invisible to the public, each one paid for by a failure that came before it. This trilogy is the story of that chain.…