Adam Steltzner

NASA Chief Engineer, Mars Exploration Leader, Innovation and Leadership Keynote Speaker

Adam Steltzner is one of NASA’s most accomplished engineers and an internationally recognized authority on innovation, leadership, collaboration, and building high-performance teams capable of solving seemingly impossible problems. In 2026, Steltzner was appointed NASA Headquarters Chief Engineer for Special Projects, working on priority initiatives that include establishing a permanent presence on the Moon and developing advanced space nuclear power technology. Throughout his career, Adam Steltzner has helped turn ideas that initially seemed improbable into historic engineering achievements. From the revolutionary landing system that delivered Curiosity safely to Mars to the sophisticated Perseverance rover mission, his work provides a remarkable real-world laboratory for understanding how teams innovate, make decisions under pressure, challenge conventional thinking, and accomplish things that have never been done before.

Keynote Speaker Adam Steltzner at a Glance

• NASA Headquarters Chief Engineer for Special Projects, working on priority initiatives including Moon Base and advanced space nuclear power technology
• Former Chief Engineer for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission and leader within NASA’s Mars Sample Return effort
• Led the Entry, Descent and Landing team responsible for successfully landing the Curiosity rover on Mars
• Author of The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and Breakthrough Innovation
• Leading speaker on innovation, leadership, curiosity, collaboration, high-performance teams, and accomplishing seemingly impossible goals

NASA Chief Engineer for Special Projects

Adam Steltzner’s latest role places him at the forefront of some of NASA’s most ambitious objectives. As Chief Engineer for Special Projects at NASA Headquarters, Steltzner brings decades of experience solving unprecedented engineering challenges to initiatives designed to extend humanity’s reach beyond Earth. His work includes priority projects related to establishing a permanent lunar presence and advanced space nuclear power. These initiatives require the same qualities that have defined Steltzner’s career: technical excellence, bold thinking, multidisciplinary collaboration, rigorous testing, and the willingness to pursue solutions for problems that have never been solved before. For business audiences, Adam Steltzner’s experience provides a compelling parallel to organizations confronting rapid technological change and uncertain competitive environments. Innovation becomes more than a concept when failure has real consequences and teams must create solutions without an established roadmap.

Landing Curiosity on Mars

Adam Steltzner gained worldwide recognition as leader of the Entry, Descent and Landing team responsible for getting NASA’s Curiosity rover safely onto the surface of Mars. The challenge was extraordinary. Curiosity was too large for landing methods used on previous Mars missions, requiring Steltzner and his team to develop an entirely new approach. Their solution was the revolutionary “sky crane,” which lowered the rover to the Martian surface during the mission’s famous “seven minutes of terror.” The concept initially sounded audacious. Making it work required years of engineering, experimentation, testing, disagreement, collaboration, and relentless attention to detail. The successful landing demonstrated a central principle of Adam Steltzner’s approach to innovation: seemingly crazy ideas should not be dismissed simply because they are unconventional. They must be subjected to disciplined analysis, challenged from multiple perspectives, and either proven wrong or developed into workable solutions.

Perseverance and Mars Sample Return

Adam Steltzner continued his leadership in Mars exploration as Chief Engineer for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission. Perseverance represents another extraordinary engineering achievement, combining advanced scientific instruments with sophisticated systems designed to collect, seal, and preserve samples of Martian rock and soil for potential future study. Steltzner also held a leadership role in NASA’s Mars Sample Return effort, an ambitious initiative conceived to return carefully selected samples collected by Perseverance to Earth. These projects demanded collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and teams working on extraordinarily complex systems. They reinforced lessons Adam Steltzner brings to organizations about coordinating talented specialists, maintaining focus over long time horizons, managing risk, and continuing to innovate when there is no precedent to follow.

The Right Kind of Crazy

Adam Steltzner is the author of The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and Breakthrough Innovation, named a top leadership book of the year by The Washington Post. Drawing on his experiences at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Steltzner explores the human dynamics behind extraordinary technological achievements. Breakthroughs rarely emerge from a lone genius. They are more often created by groups of highly capable people who learn how to challenge one another, evaluate unconventional ideas, acknowledge mistakes, and collaborate around a shared mission. The Right Kind of Crazy translates the lessons of space exploration into principles leaders can apply when building teams expected to innovate and perform under pressure.

Curiosity as a Leadership Tool

Curiosity has played an unusual role in Adam Steltzner’s life. As a teenager, Steltzner struggled academically and pursued music rather than science. One evening, curiosity about the movement of stars in the night sky prompted him to take an astronomy class. That question ultimately led him toward physics, engineering, and a career exploring other worlds. Adam Steltzner earned a Ph.D. in engineering physics and went on to become one of the most recognizable engineering leaders at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That unconventional journey informs one of his most important leadership lessons: curiosity can be more productive than fear. Leaders who encourage people to ask questions, explore unexpected possibilities, and challenge assumptions can create environments where ideas have an opportunity to develop before conventional thinking eliminates them.

Building High-Performance Teams

NASA’s greatest engineering achievements depend on teams of exceptionally talented people who frequently hold strong—and conflicting—opinions. Adam Steltzner has spent his career learning how to harness that intellectual friction productively. His leadership approach emphasizes creating an environment where ideas can be challenged without making disagreement personal, where expertise is respected without becoming unquestionable, and where the quality of the solution matters more than who proposed it. Steltzner shows organizations how trust, curiosity, accountability, productive disagreement, and shared purpose can transform groups of talented individuals into high-performing teams. His insights are particularly relevant for leaders managing technical experts, multidisciplinary teams, innovation initiatives, and organizations where complex problems require collaboration across traditional boundaries.

Innovation Under Pressure

Innovation sounds appealing when discussed in theory. In practice, it requires organizations to make decisions without complete information, invest in ideas that may fail, and remain open to changing direction when evidence contradicts assumptions. Few environments demonstrate these challenges more dramatically than space exploration. Adam Steltzner uses NASA’s successes and setbacks to show audiences how innovative organizations manage uncertainty without abandoning rigor. He examines the importance of experimentation, learning from failure, questioning assumptions, evaluating competing solutions, and maintaining the discipline required to transform bold ideas into reliable results. These lessons extend well beyond aerospace to businesses confronting technological disruption, organizational change, competitive pressure, and ambitious growth objectives.

Adam Steltzner Keynote Speaker

As a keynote speaker, Adam Steltzner combines extraordinary stories from NASA with practical lessons about innovation, leadership, collaboration, curiosity, and high-performance culture. Adam Steltzner takes audiences behind the scenes of missions including Curiosity and Perseverance to reveal the human dynamics behind technological breakthroughs. His presentations demonstrate why innovation requires more than creativity—it requires leaders capable of creating environments where talented people can question assumptions, debate ideas, learn from setbacks, and work together toward goals that initially appear impossible. Steltzner is particularly well suited for corporate leadership meetings, technology conferences, innovation summits, engineering organizations, association conferences, sales meetings, executive programs, and organizations navigating transformation or pursuing ambitious new objectives.

Daring to Accomplish What Has Never Been Done

Adam Steltzner gives leaders and teams a powerful framework for replacing fear with curiosity, turning productive disagreement into better ideas, and creating the conditions where breakthrough innovation can happen. Adam Steltzner can be booked for keynote presentations, corporate meetings, leadership conferences, innovation and technology events, association meetings, and executive programs through Speakers.com. Contact Speakers.com to learn more about Adam Steltzner’s speaking fee, availability, and customized presentation options.