Donna Shirley was raised in a small town in Oklahoma where her parents encouraged her academic studies. As a small girl she had an intense interest in flying airplanes and her father and uncle encouraged her. Before she was out of her teens, Donna Shirley was soloing and earned her pilot's license.
She entered college in the 1950s with the purpose of studying aeronautic engineering. However, engineering schools were still an all-male bastion. When she walked into her advisor's office he said "What are you doing here?"
She replied, "I'm enrolling in aeronautical engineering".
"Girls can't be engineers" He said.
She declared, "Yes I can", and did.
She managed the Mars Exploration Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on July 4, 1997 the entire world watched as the Mars Pathfinder and the Sojourner Rover successfully landed on Mars. Two months later the Mars Global Surveyor successfully went into orbit around the red planet. Not only were these events two of the U.S. space program's greatest successes, but they may well provide the world with some of the most important scientific data of the 20th and 21st centuries. According to Shirley, "My proudest moment was having my daughter, my second moment was when the Pathfinder and Sojourner actually worked. When you consider that it was going 17,000 miles an hour and it wasn't supposed to make just another hole in the ground—well, that was a great achievement." Donna Shirley retired in August 1998 as Manager of the Mars Exploration Program after a 32-year career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
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