P2K: Do you test to see how well things work, or do you test to see how things go wrong?

Stacy Weinstein: Hopefully in every test nothing goes wrong, but things always go wrong. We look for robustness. We look for nominal performance. We look for margins... How far can we take this before the system breaks... before we fall off a cliff performance wise. So we are looking for all that stuff.

P2K: What is it that you like about this kind of high pressure, high-risk career? What's fun about having to work this hard and think this hard?

Stacy Weinstein: Dropping airbags... dropping rockets... having hardware to play with, there's a challenge just trying to get things done. The nice thing is that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. There's a launch date and it's coming right up. It's in May of 2003, and we're racing for that and we know that that's the finish line. Mars isn't going to wait for us. We don't get to slip two months or four months. We've got to get it done by then, and that's a big challenge. What's also fun is working with all these great people. Everybody I work with is just so wonderful and so intelligent. It's a high-energy situation.