Page 87 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

ROBOT EXPLORERS 67

I had a difficult time making friends
with the girls anyway because I
wasn’t interested in dolls, dress
up games, or pretending to be a
princess. . . . I much preferred to
play cowboy or detective, but few
of the boys were willing to play
those kinds of games with a girl.

Shirley loved to read books about
airplanes and flying adventures,
imagining that she was a bush pilot
transporting “flying doctors” in the
Australian outback. When she was
10, she saw a reference in a gradu- Donna Shirley managed many
ation ceremony to “aeronautical aspects of the program that brought
engineering.” When she asked what Sojourner, humankind’s first
mobile robot space explorer, to the
that meant and was told “building
surface of Mars in 1997. (Photo
airplanes,” she knew that was what courtesy of Donna Shirley)
she wanted to do.
Shirley also became fascinated
by space exploration, particularly
as portrayed by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The
Sands of Mars. Shirley’s interest in aerodynamics was visceral as
well as intellectual. She was eager to learn to fly, and by age 16, she
was ready to go “solo,” having learned the feel of flying an Aeronca
Champ, a fabric-winged trainer with a tiny 65-horsepower engine.

Getting Respect

After high school, Shirley attended the University of Oklahoma.
Telling her adviser that she wanted to enroll in the engineering pro-
gram, Shirley recalled in her autobiography the curt response that
“Girls can’t be engineers.” When she was enrolled in engineering
courses for which she had not been prepared, Shirley had to struggle
to earn a passing grade in her first year. Seeking an alternative that