An absolutely wonderful documentary about the career of an Engineer in on YouTube: The Engineer who invented the Mars Rover Suspension…in his garage. Produced by someone with incredible access to documents and people, its existence is a rare fulfillment of the early promise of the internet.
Donald Bickler, the engineer who invented the Mars rover’s rocker-bogie suspension, iterated across all rover generations beginning with Sojourner, often prototyping at home in his garage.
Bickler was a tinkerer and a garage engineer from an early age, notably building a hot rod from the ground up at age 18 with more than one innovative features.
Building an entire automobile required Don to teach himself how to weld, grind, sculpt, sew, and paint, among other things. It was just the beginning of a lifelong habit of teaching himself new subjects and acquiring new skills as the project demanded it.
Bickler participated in the cooperative education Northwestern University, saying later:
This cooperative program is exceptionally valuable in producing a functioning engineer who thoroughly understands a factory and its various facets rather than a bookshelf engineer who’s concerned only with his theories.
Oh, and yeah: his curiosity about his son’s hobby, off-roading a Jeep, nudged him toward the Mars Rover research.
I think the takeaway here is to be curious and to follow that curiosity as far as it takes you out of your lane.
Also…
Donald Bickler earned a number of certificates of achievement from NASA, and many are pictured in the documentary.
It’s interesting to see the graphic design style of these shift/deteriorate over time. Here are examples from 1980, 2003, and two from 2004.
Graphic Standards
The 1970s NASA Graphic Standards Manual from the worm logo era has been preserved at Archive.org and is well worth a look:
NASA Graphic Standards Manual, January 1976