Jet Propulsion Laboratory

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 31st of January 1958, a rocket called Juno I lifted off and placed the United States' first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit. The team behind that launch was not the military, not a government agency, not even an established aerospace company. It was a small research group from the California Institute of Technology, working out of a dry riverbed in Southern California. That group had started less than two decades earlier with a handful of graduate students, a dangerous experiment, and a name that would become synonymous with the edge of human knowledge: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  How does a collection of students testing a small alcohol-fueled motor in an Arroyo Seco riverbed become the organization that sends rovers to Mars, dispatches spacecraft beyond the solar system, and keeps an eye on nearly every known asteroid that could cross Earth's path? That is the question at the heart of this story.

• 2. The Suicide Squad

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  Frank Malina, Qian Xuesen, Weld Arnold, and Apollo M. O. Smith were Caltech graduate students in 1936, but their experiment had a wilder quality than anything the campus typically hosted. They joined forces with Jack Parsons and Edward S. Forman, and together the six were quickly dubbed the "Suicide Squad" by colleagues who appreciated the hazardous nature of their rocket tests. The name was not entirely a joke. Their work in the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech, known as GALCIT, involved live propellants and combustion tests near the Arroyo Seco.

  Malina's thesis advisor, engineer and aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, saw something worth nurturing in the group's chaos. By 1939, he had secured U.S. Army financial support for what was formally called the GALCIT Rocket Project. Two years later, Malina, Parsons, Forman, Martin Summerfield, and pilot Homer Bushey demonstrated the first jet-assisted takeoff rockets, known as JATO, to the Army. The demonstration was a threshold moment: it showed that rockets could have practical military applications beyond the experimental.

  In 1943, von Kármán, Malina, Parsons, and Forman co-founded the Aerojet Corporation specifically to manufacture JATO rockets. That same November, the project formally took the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory and became an Army facility operated under contract by Caltech. The path from university curiosity to national defense infrastructure had taken just seven years. Parsons, however, would not stay long. In 1944, he was expelled from JPL following one of several FBI investigations into his ties to the occult, drugs, and sexual promiscuity, the bureau citing his "unorthodox and unsafe working methods."

• 3. From Army to NASA

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  By 1954, JPL had developed two significant ballistic missile systems for the Army, the MGM-5 Corporal and MGM-29 Sergeant, the first U.S. ballistic missiles to come out of the lab. The military work was serious business, but JPL's engineers were already looking upward. That year, JPL joined forces with Wernher von Braun's team at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to pitch the idea of orbiting a satellite during the International Geophysical Year. The proposal lost out to Project Vanguard, so the two groups quietly pivoted to a classified project demonstrating ablative re-entry technology using a Jupiter-C rocket. Three successful sub-orbital flights followed in 1956 and 1957.

  The partnership's payoff came on the 31st of January 1958, when a spare Juno I rocket placed Explorer 1 into orbit. Less than a year later, in December 1958, JPL transferred from the Army to the newly formed NASA. The transfer changed JPL's character entirely. It became the agency's primary center for planetary spacecraft, leading lunar and interplanetary missions through a period the source describes as a "Golden Age" of planetary exploration in the 1960s and 1970s. Engineers at JPL designed and operated the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon, laying the groundwork for Apollo. They then steered the Mariner missions past Venus, Mars, and Mercury, each pass returning data no human had ever possessed.

  During this same stretch, JPL was also pioneering another kind of inclusion. In the 1940s and 1950s, an all-female computations group used mechanical calculators to perform the trajectory calculations that kept missions on course. In 1961, JPL hired Dana Ulery as the first female engineer to work alongside male engineers on the Ranger and Mariner mission tracking teams.

• 4. Voyager and Deep Space

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  In 1977, JPL launched the twin Voyager spacecraft, and for the next decade the two probes would rewrite what humanity knew about the outer solar system. Voyager 1 was initially aimed at Jupiter and its moon Io, but its mission parameters were adjusted to include a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. The spacecraft returned detailed images and data from both gas giants. Voyager 2 took a broader path, conducting flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in sequence, the first time any spacecraft had gathered direct data from all four of the outer gas giants.

  Both spacecraft were eventually aimed beyond the solar system itself, each carrying a Golden Record, a phonograph disc loaded with sounds and images selected to represent the diversity of life on Earth. The records transformed the Voyager probes from scientific instruments into something closer to a message in a bottle, cast into interstellar space.

  The 1980s brought the inception of the Galileo mission, designed to study Jupiter and its major moons in detail. Though Galileo only reached Jupiter's orbit in the 1990s, its planning during the 1980s reflected JPL's sustained ambition for deep-space work. The Cassini spacecraft, another flagship mission, directly supported roughly 500 work-years at JPL and at peak provided close to 20 percent of the lab's budget, figures that would soon become the center of a painful institutional argument.

• 5. Faster, Better, Cheaper

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  Edward C. Stone, the Voyager program scientist, became JPL director on the 1st of January 1991 and inherited a laboratory facing a crisis it had not confronted before. The Cold War was over, the Space Race with the Soviet Union was finished, and NASA's budgets were shrinking. The agency's response was a philosophy called "faster, better, cheaper," which pushed for smaller, lower-cost missions built partly with third-party contractors. For a lab whose identity was built on sprawling, decade-long flagship projects, this was a genuine rupture.

  Stone faced the prospect of firing around 30 percent of JPL personnel by the end of the 1990s. He and Caltech leadership even worried that JPL could be shut down entirely. To comply with budget restrictions on Cassini, engineers had to remove the scan platform from the mission's plans, saving $250 million. Stone also installed Richard Laeser, a former Voyager project manager, to introduce total quality management at every level of the lab. The change rankled staff accustomed to a different culture. Before TQM, project managers at JPL had been famously autonomous. As Voyager manager Norm Haynes put it, they "were culled out to be sort of rugged individualists." John Casani, described in the source as "the epitome of the breed," was also known around the lab as the "Ayatollah Casani."

  The most celebrated product of the faster-better-cheaper era was the Mars Pathfinder mission and its rover, Sojourner, which cost around $200 million and landed on the covers of Time and Newsweek. But the approach also produced four mission failures in 1998-1999 alone, including two Mars orbiters. Both Stone and NASA administrator Daniel Goldin acknowledged they had pushed too far. No project manager from those failed missions was fired. Stone retired in 2001; historian Peter J. Westwick later described him as a "cautious revolutionary." His successor, Charles Elachi, felt no need to continue changing the lab's culture.

• 6. Mars as a New Home

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  Sojourner, the first successful Mars rover deployed in 1997, proved that wheeled exploration on the Martian surface was feasible, not just theoretical. Seven years later, in 2004, JPL deployed two more rovers: Spirit and Opportunity. Opportunity outlived its expected operational lifespan by 14 years, accumulating scientific data far beyond what planners had projected.

  The pace did not slow. Curiosity, part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, extended JPL's presence on the surface, and the Mars 2020 mission added both the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter. Perseverance carries a specific long-range mandate: collecting samples that a future Mars Sample Return mission is intended to bring back to Earth. That retrieval mission remains a central planning priority for JPL as it looks toward the remainder of the 2020s.

  JPL also opened the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA in 1998. By 2013, that office had identified 95 percent of asteroids measuring at least one kilometer in diameter that cross Earth's orbit, a figure that represents a substantial share of the planet's planetary-defense awareness.

• 7. Structure, Funding, and Turbulence

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  In fiscal year 2022, JPL operated on a budget of approximately $2.4 billion, with the largest share directed toward planetary science development. NASA remains the primary source of funding, but the lab also draws project money from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Department of Defense. Missions can range from flagship interplanetary programs costing billions of dollars to smaller Earth observation satellites in the hundreds of millions.

  In February and November 2024, budget pressures tied to the overall federal situation and to shifts in the Mars Sample Return program led JPL to lay off approximately 1,000 employees and contractors. The workforce, after those reductions, stood at approximately 5,500 regular employees. In January 2025, the Eaton Fire in nearby Pasadena and Altadena forced JPL to close and evacuate entirely; the Deep Space Network had to be relocated offsite. The facility escaped fire damage but suffered minor wind damage, and many employees lost their homes.

  Caltech's contract to manage JPL runs through September 2028. In May 2026, NASA announced that it would open the contract to competitive bidding, inviting private companies, nonprofit organizations, and universities to submit proposals. Caltech remains eligible to bid. The arrangement would follow a model similar to those used by the Department of Energy for several of its own federally funded research and development centers.

  There is also a quieter tradition that has nothing to do with contracts or budgets. After the Ranger program suffered repeated failures in the 1960s, the first successful Ranger mission to impact the Moon happened after someone, either project manager Harris "Bud" Schurmeier or trajectory engineer Dick Wallace, passed out peanuts to ease the tension in the room. The staff decided the peanuts must have helped. JPL engineers still eat lucky peanuts before launches, orbital insertions, and landings, and the Europa Clipper, which lifted off in 2024 to study Jupiter's moon Europa and its suspected subsurface ocean, would have been no exception.