On August 6th 2012, tens of millions of people around the world watched on TV as NASA’s Curiosity rover landed near Mount Sharp on the Red Planet. No space shot had caused such excitement since Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. 

One of the key figures on the Curiosity team was a flamboyant engineer who defies all the stereotypes of the geek. A former bass player in a rock-and-roll band who likes to go to work in snakeskin cowboy boots, Adam Steltzner led the team that invented the revolutionary Sky Crane, which enabled the Curiosity rover to set down on Mars as gently as a duck landing on a pond. 

His new book, The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership and High Stakes Innovation, recalls the heady days leading up to that moment—and how someone who failed high school geometry became one of the