Donna Shirley has been the driving force behind the aggressive, low cost and publicly accessible Mars Exploration Program that is sending spacecraft to orbit, land and rove on Mars. Beginning this year with the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Pathfinder, the program will continue to fly two missions during each launch opportunity (occurring every 26 months) through 2005, when the program plans to launch a mission to return a sample from Mars. Ms. Shirley is the most senior female technical manager at JPL.

Ms. Shirley has an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering and thirty years experience in aerospace and civil systems, including twenty years in management. The Los Angeles Times said "her resume lists 24 different assignments during her years at JPL, starting in 1966 as an aerodynamic analyst. And as the years passed, her resume shows, Shirley's managerial responsibilities increased as she was given larger, more expensive and more complicated projects. She managed teams of people assigned to develop space stations, robotics, automation and planetary surface vehicles, including early versions of the Mars Land Rover. In 1991, she became chief engineer of a $1.6-billion project to explore asteroids, a comet and Saturn."

Ms. Shirley believes strongly in involving the public in the space program, and has been proactive in seeing that the results of space missions are understandable to average citizens. She has also pioneered theories of management. "The key is to relinquish control," she says. "A too-controlling manager will never succeed in producing a great creative project." She is working on a book on her management theories.

More information on Donna Shirley is available at the following:
Managing Creativity
NASA Oral History Project: "Herstory" - scroll down the page to find Donna Shirley's "Herstory"

• Profile updated in 2007