"The KISS Principle: Keep it Simple Stupid"

This November is the one year anniversary of the landing of the Mars InSight mission by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), one of the country’s top space organizations in Pasadena, California. While the InSight landing itself got a lot of mainstream attention, what many people don’t know about the InSight is that JPL was able to fund the mission by winning half a billion dollars in a highly cutthroat and very fierce competition run by NASA, our federal space agency, called The Discovery Competition. What even less people know, though, is that the Mars InSight team was the underdog in the competition that everybody thought had zero chance of winning.

While he chokes on a little homemade hot sauce and downs some margaritas, Dr. Leon Alkalai, who led the JPL Mars InSight team to win the $500 million dollars in NASA’s Discovery Competition, shares how he strategically turned the team around to convince NASA to select their Mars InSight mission as the winner in the end — and the story is less straightforward and more savage than you would think.