JPL may not get out of budget trouble

Designing a system that would bring a piece of Mars back to Earth at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — the Southern California lab that launched America’s rocketry and scientific exploration of our solar system — was her dream job.

As she worked toward a degree in mechanical engineering, she watched JPL launches and became fascinated with the images the lab took of Mars. She attended a JPL open house, which she said felt like “Disneyland.” She applied to work at JPL more than 60 times. When she finally got a job on a Mars sample return mission, she hoped to spend the rest of her career there.

But on Tuesday, she was one of 550 employees who laid off the lab — representing more than 10% of the workforce.

It was the fourth round of layoffs in two years at the lab, which has struggled since Congress pulled funding for its flagship Mars sample return mission due to ballooning budgets and schedules.

Morale has been hit amid reports of management problems. Employees say they follow budget debates on the national news while hearing little from lab leaders.

“It was terrifying in anticipation,” said the mechanical engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The boat is coming up to slap us again, but we don’t know when it’s going to drop.”

As a result, an organization with a remarkable record for solving the most difficult problems in space now faces a difficult task here on Earth: reclaiming its place at the forefront of exploration and innovation.

“People forget how internationally known JPL is,” said Fraser Macdonald, senior lecturer in historical geography at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and author of the book. “Escape the Earth” About the founders of JPL. For McDonald, the lab is “a major scientific and technological anchor in Southern California.”

JPL – operated by Caltech at La Cañada Flintridge and funded mainly through NASA – was born in the 1940s, after the experiments of Caltech rocket scientists caught the eye of the US military.

Many stories of their early efforts — including a 1936 test that ended with an oxygen line catching fire, essentially, creating a flaming flame — are now told in hyperbole, Macdonald noted. Nevertheless, they created an “incredible California story,” he said, that won worldwide acclaim.

After World War II, JPL was largely excluded from the military’s rocket efforts, as the United States instead focused on a secret mission to bring Nazi scientists into the country to promote rocket development. But when the Cold War spurred America to seek technological dominance on Earth and beyond, it was JPL that launched the first successful US satellite, Explorer 1, designed to study cosmic rays.

That same year, 1958, the US government created NASA, and JPL found a new home.

Contracts for NASA’s high-altitude missions have become JPL’s living room. But in recent years, there has been less of it to go around.

The White House and Congress — under both Presidents Biden and Trump — have increasingly focused on human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars. Meanwhile, mission costs have risen due to economic factors ranging from supply chain costs to the cost of living for workers, said Casey Dreyer, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, a space science advocacy organization led by Bill Nye.

Meanwhile, a series of well-documented recent management injuries hasn’t helped JPL’s cause.

After NASA Psychic mission The metal-rich star failed to meet its 2022 launch date, the agency commissioned an independent review, which found that internal reorganizations and personnel changes had created confused and uninformed managers and a burned-out, stretched-thin workforce.

And, in 2023, another genius Independent review It determined that there is “near zero probability” of returning a sample to Mars, making the proposed 2028 launch date, and that there is “no credible” way to complete the mission on budget.

NASA has sharply cut its spending on Mars sample returns in anticipation of budget cuts from Congress — which by extension means a big cut in funding to JPL. Administration after all Started looking alternative Plans From other NASA centers and the private sector, JPL places itself in the humble position of competing for its project.

JPL had boosted its workforce from about 5,000 people in the early 2010s to about 6,500 to support its flagship missions, including Europa Clipper, which is slated to return samples to Jupiter’s moons and Mars. But with both Clipper and Psyche now in space and the Mars sample returned, the lab couldn’t find roles for some of the project’s workers.

“I struggled with balancing the passion I had for work with the knowledge that I could walk away from projects at any time,” said the mechanical engineer. “Why should I put my heart and soul into it? … Most of the things we do probably won’t go anywhere. We’ll pack them in boxes and put them on shelves.”

Then came the layoffs, many of which had already been prepared.

In January 2024, Lab Leave 100 contractors on site. A month later, 530 employees and 40 contractors. When it became clear that NASA funding for JPL would not change significantly in 2025, the lab was shut down. An additional 325 employees.

JPL’s 2026 budget is still uncertain, with the government in its third week of shutdown. But, regardless of which version of the budget Congress passes, the lab probably won’t see any significant new cash flow.

That could explain why JPL — which says its latest layoffs are not due to the shutdown itself — chose October to send layoff notices.

During two years of continuous layoffs — which collectively eliminated nearly a quarter of all employees — employees will confront Pepper Labs leaders in town halls with the same questions: When did the layoffs happen and who will be let go? They received few responses.

JPL’s Reddit forum, historically a place for engineers and scientists to ask questions about hiring and life at the lab, has gone sour. Employees expressed their frustration and released layoff information that leaders would not share.

“Morale at JPL is tough right now,” said the mechanical engineer. “There’s a lot of mistrust and dissatisfaction built up against the people who are at the top of the decision-making in the lab.”

Still, he still sees hope for Southern California’s first planetary science lab: “I truly believe that JPL can weather the storm.”

This is not the first time JPL has faced a funding crisis.

In 1981, President Reagan’s administration proposed cutting NASA’s planetary science funding.

The NASA administrator at the time responded that the cuts would make JPL “surplus to our needs.” JPL seriously considered returning to its origins by pushing the Department of Defense to work, but politically-savvy Caltech leaders were able to convince Congress and the White House to keep funding Galileo, during JPL’s flagship mission to explore Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Few hope that the return of the Mars sample will inspire a Galileo-like recovery. Dreyer, for example, sees different options for the lab in 2025: increasingly relying on defense and national security projects, and using robotics and Mars skills to support NASA’s new mission to the Moon and Mars.

“Who has been to Mars as many times as JPL?” Dreyer said. (Answer: No one. JPL has successfully landed nine times since 1976. In fact, a successful landing without JPL didn’t happen until China pulled it off in 2021.)

JPL’s signature planetary science missions, such as the Mars rovers and Jupiter orbiters, are extremely challenging. Unlike in 1981, current proposals to cut government spending on science are far from NASA.

And while human spaceflight to our closest celestial neighbors is certainly a reasonable endeavor, Dreyer said, “the cosmos is much bigger than just the Moon and Mars.”