The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : JPL’s Big Plans for Smaller Future

Small can be beautiful, but not necessarily for everybody.

Like so many science agencies these days, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the foothills above Pasadena is shrinking. The glory days when the cost of doing science seemed almost irrelevant are long gone.

The Galileo spacecraft, now orbiting Jupiter, and the Cassini mission to Saturn, to be launched in 1997, mark the end of an era of multibillion-dollar missions for which JPL was both envied and deplored. Nobody else in the world carried out robotic missions on that grand a scale, and we have learned more about our solar system through those remarkable spacecraft in the last couple of decades than we learned in the entire previous history of the human race.

But the effort to do so much with each mission pushed the price out of reach for today’s tight budgets, and we will have to wait for future generations to see programs on that scale again. But if JPL is any example, that doesn’t necessarily have to be all bad.

What we will see out of JPL in the years ahead will be far more missions to other planets, but much smaller in scale.

“In the future, what we need to do is get back there [to places like Mars and Jupiter] more often, and do more focused things when we go,” says Ed Stone, director of JPL and vice president of Caltech, which manages the lab for NASA.

That can be done for a fraction of the cost of the larger missions of days gone by, Stone says. In about a year, JPL will launch twin missions to orbit and land on Mars that will cost a tenth of the Viking mission in the mid-1970s. By holding the cost down, Stone hopes to visit Mars every couple of years.

“That in my mind is a better science program,” he says.

The Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars provided spectacular close-up pictures of the surface of the red planet, but in today’s dollars that mission would cost around $3.5 billion. And it provided us with information from only one area of Mars and that left a lot of gaps in our understanding.

“You can’t imagine understanding the Earth from landing on one spot” on this planet, Stone says.

“From a scientific point of view, we really do need to find a way to make things much smaller, and much lower in cost, so that we can go more often to more places,” he adds.

That could also help solve one problem. The bigger programs involved so many people that individuality tended to become lost, and it was difficult for creative scientists and engineers to see their ideas come to life. Smaller, more frequent missions should pave the way for innovative thinkers to shine. More programs, even if they are smaller, mean more opportunities.

But those who want to just put in their time and go home at the end of the day probably will find the downsizing at the lab personally painful.

Downsizing, Stone says, “will provide more opportunities for each individual. The projects will last two or four years, and so in a 10- or 20-year time span they will have had a chance to work on a number of projects.”

But downsizing also means some of those who are there today won’t be there in a couple of years, and that could get bloody.

The lab is about 12% smaller today than it was in 1992, Stone says, and by the end of the century it is to be cut by another 20%. NASA’s overall budget, which is now less than 0.9% of the federal budget, is slated to shrink to less than 0.7% by 2000.

“That’s the trend which is of most concern to the individuals and scientists who are thinking about their careers,” Stone concedes.

“Everybody is worried about his job,” one scientist told me recently. The lab, however, is still considered the place to work in space science, largely because of Stone’s sensitivities and leadership, so most who leave will do so reluctantly.

But change is inevitable. With the end of the Cold War and a budget deficit that is threatening to strangle the country, scientists--like everybody else--will have to get by with less.

Downsizing will open opportunities for the best and the brightest, and close them for the marginal achievers. Some will survive, some won’t. In the end, the exploration of space, once a hot spot, is likely to become a very cold place indeed.

Lee Dye can be reached via e-mail at 72040.3515@compuserve.com