How to Engineer a Life You Love - Mark Rober - #1035

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I never knew that you worked on the Mars Rover for NASA. That's so fucking cool.

**Mark Rober** (0:05)
Well, what's really wild is my name, Mark Rober, is only two letters off for Mars Rover. If you change the K to an S and the B to a V. And honestly, it was meant to be. It took me like four years working at NASA to realize that. It's just one day I'm like, oh, dang. What did you do? So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I got my bachelor's and master's in that, and I worked on the rover that's on Mars for like seven years. So the way it works is they just throw you into the deep end, and I was responsible for a chunk of the rover. And so I design what it should look like. You test it, you integrate it, you put it together. You have a team of people working with you. They have graybears, they call them at NASA, who look at your design and tell you all the reasons it sucks. So you go back and change it.

**Chris Williamson** (0:53)
This sounds like some Gandalf the White, like you need to go and pay homage to the dude at the top of the mountain.

**Mark Rober** (0:59)
That's effectively what it is. But they're smart, they know what they're doing. They've put stuff in space before. And so they give it to the young folks who are just coming up. And they literally, I was in charge of a trunk on the top of the rover. The arm go digs in the dirt, takes that sample, puts it into the belly of the rover. And like, I designed the hardware to accept that. And it's still working, fingers crossed on Mars.

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
But it's still going.

**Mark Rober** (1:22)
Which is wild when you look up at the sky. All the stars look the same. Mars has a little bit of red tint to it, right?

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
You know where your baby is.

**Mark Rober** (1:30)
Yeah, and it's like, that's 90 million miles away. And I've touched something that's rolling around on that dot in the sky. And what's really cool is on Earth, things oxidize and break down. So they crumble and go away, right? So let's say, thanks to AI or whatever you want to say, a million years from now, our species is done. There won't be any, if you came here, you would just see nature. Like at that point, everything's broken down and crumbled and rusted and gone away. So the aliens would come and they'd just see this lush planet. And then they'd go to Mars and be like, what the hell are these? Because on Mars, there's no oxygen and stuff doesn't break down. So a million years from now, those rovers are going to be sitting there, spaced.

**Chris Williamson** (2:13)
The shit's going to still be there.

**Mark Rober** (2:15)
And it's like, where the hell did this come from?

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
What did you learn that you didn't understand about payloads going into space? What's interesting about that?

**Mark Rober** (2:28)
You know, one thing that's interesting about space is like, there's no air resistance. So once you get up there and you start, you just thrust at the beginning, essentially. You get up to about 25,000 miles per hour. That's like five times faster than the bullet.
And then you just coast for the rest of the period, right? You just accelerate and then you go to where Mars will be in nine months. And they have, and you get like three or four times to do little course corrections, but those motors, we call them mouse fart motors. Because when you're 90 million miles away, and you're just getting that initial thrust at the beginning, you know, fractions of a degree mean you miss the planet by, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million miles. So, it's just this tiniest little poof, just at the side. And because of that, okay, now you're going to hit Mars when it comes around. So, it's really interesting, the math orbital mechanics. It seems really complicated, but because there is no friction, it's like, you know, for a computer, it's pretty easy to do. And then we eventually learn tricks of like orbital slingshots. So, you actually go around planets, and you pick up speeds, kind of like, you kind of slingshot around, right? So, it's a really fascinating, you know, science. But it's the equivalent of hitting a golf ball in New York City and getting a hole-in-one in LA. That's the scale of landing a planet on, landing something on Mars.