Briefly noted in recent articles on the impending opening of Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum was the name of the director, Donna Shirley. “That’s got to be the same Donna Shirley” I thought. Indeed it is. In her 32 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Shirley managed numerous projects, culminating in the Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner Rover missions which explored the red planet in 1997. In interviews about her life she tells the story of her first meeting with her college advisor who told her “Girls can’t be engineers.” She went on to earn a BS and MS in aerospace engineering. Shirley retired from NASA in 1998 and embarked on a speaking and consulting career. Now she’s nabbed what I hope is a dream job, managing a museum of the dreams that inspire those she used to work with.