P2K: How do you get the people to work together as well the equipment?

John Wirth: "Brute force." (Ed. A joke!) No, we’ve been really lucky for the whole team, everybody on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission - Matt Wallace obviously being the best guy because he’s the ATLO manager, and not a plug just because he’s my boss, but really because he’s a great guy. He put together a great team. I mean everybody he’s picked is cream of the crop, and everybody that works for me is cream of the crop, and everybody I work with is cream of the crop, so we do it just because we have a great team, and great people, and a great leader.

P2K: When you’re selecting somebody for the team, what are you looking for?

John Wirth: Working in ATLO you have to be able to react. Some people have a mindset that they need a procedure four months in advance, and they go over it 15 or 20 times, and when the stuff actually comes, they go "A" to "B" in a sequence. The people that work with me are all people that can (handle), "it’s gonna change." No matter how much planning you do years in advance, and how many cables you expect you’re going to use, and how many certain configurations you’re going to use, in all the different pieces you’re going to integrate, it’s not going to happen the way you planned. Just from experience I can tell you that. So the type of person you need down here is somebody that can react. You find out that you have a problem, or, hey this isn’t what you were planning to do because you had this piece that you didn’t even think about, so all of a sudden you’ve got to react, build some cables quickly, or define some different configurations and then go forward. So it’s about people that can react quickly, and can think quickly, and that’s what this team’s got.