Morale and Image Blast Off at JPL

While the Mars Pathfinder mission has rekindled excitement about space exploration, it has also helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory out of years in the doldrums.

The La Canada Flintridge complex has suffered internally for years as interest and money for the space program have faded.

JPL’s image took a beating in recent years when its Mars Observer craft was lost in space and a broken antenna nearly disabled its Galileo space probe.

There were deep staff cuts, and engineers and scientists defected to private companies. With Bill Gates supplanting Buck Rogers in the imagination of the latest generation of techno wizards, JPL could not convince many of its college student workers to accept job offers upon graduation.

A research psychologist even used JPL staffers for a case study of low morale.

Pathfinder’s success won’t cure all of JPL’s woes, but it has brought a long-awaited meteor shower of public acclaim to the lab.

Some of the crew for the spacecraft, not to mention its equipment, have become stars. Mars program manager Donna L. Shirley is profiled in the latest Mirabella magazine. JPL democratically put many of its hands-on staff, not just top management, before the TV cameras to explain what was going on. And miniature Mars rovers are sold out at toy stores.

The impact has been felt internally as well, some JPL scientists and engineers said.

“It’s boosted spirits,” Shirley said.

After years of anxiety at the lab, “an event like Pathfinder can do a lot of healing quickly,” added Pathfinder flight system manager Brian Muirhead.

JPL and NASA plan to build on the momentum.

As they did in the 1960s, spacecraft launches and missions will now occur several times a year, a concept that was validated by Pathfinder’s success. JPL hopes the frequent, less costly missions can hold the public’s eye, as well as its imagination and purse strings.

Indeed, maintaining public interest and support has been one of JPL’s most daunting challenges in the last decade. Along with its own troubles, JPL suffered with the rest of the space program.

The space shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 was followed by a string of failures like the Hubble Space Telescope’s problem with blurred vision. The Strategic Defense Initiative to develop space-based systems for shooting down nuclear missiles, nicknamed “Star Wars,” was made irrelevant by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Federal programs to uphold America’s preeminence shifted their focus from the Soviet military machine to the Japanese semiconductor industry.

That didn’t stop the George Bush administration from calling for manned missions to the moon and to Mars. But the 12-figure proposals failed to win over Congress, and their chief proponent, then-Vice President Dan Quayle, was ridiculed in the press for his inarticulate sales pitch ruminating on the links among Mars, water, oxygen and life.

For JPL staffers such as Linda Robeck, 33, part of the generation of young engineers who played a major role in the Pathfinder mission, their early careers seemed ill-timed and ill-starred.

By the time Robeck was in college at MIT in the mid-1980s, computer science was the hot field, and students from other departments thought of the space program as dominated by the military’s “Star Wars” initiative. “I’d go to a party, and when I told someone I was studying aero-astro, they’d say, ‘Ooh you’re a baby killer,’ ” she recalled.

None of that deterred Robeck, who had been enthralled by space exploration since childhood. But graduating in the year the Challenger exploded, Robeck found that few aerospace companies were hiring as space projects were put on hold. She “took refuge” at Stanford University for a year, earning a master’s degree before going to JPL in 1987.

She was just in time for the space program’s post-Cold War drop in support and the succession of grand mishaps.

Robeck still remembers the day in 1993 when the Mars Observer was lost. “I came home, and there was Dan Rather on TV,” she said. “The first thing he said was that it was another setback for the space program, and [he] proceeded to tell the story of Hubble and the shuttle. It made us look ridiculous.”

Although her work at the lab was fulfilling, Robeck was sometimes discouraged by the lack of public interest in the space program. When speaking to community groups, she would find audiences sometimes turning on her and asking “why we’re throwing our money away on the space program,” she said. “Sometimes I wondered why I was in this business if the public didn’t support it.”

Pathfinder brought Robeck out of her decade of toiling in obscurity. She’s been appearing on television talk shows, and for the first time in her career, “when I’m out with my NASA shirt on, people give me the thumbs up with big smiles. It’s overwhelming.”

A division of Caltech, JPL is NASA’s lead center for unmanned space exploration.

The laboratory evolved from a group of graduate students led by Caltech professor Theodore von Karman, who began testing primitive rockets in the 1930s on a dry riverbed in the Arroyo Seco just north of the Rose Bowl.

The research team started calling itself the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when it worked for the Army on the first U.S. guided missiles during World War II.

The first U.S. satellite, launched in 1958, was built and controlled by JPL. JPL has since led the world in unmanned explorations of all the solar system’s known planets except Pluto.

Since the 1970s, the lab has been known for multibillion-dollar missions that stretched for years or decades.

But NASA and JPL have been hit by the same cost-cutting pressures affecting businesses and other government agencies. The era of grand space missions is over, and downsizing and outsourcing now define JPL as much as big spending once did.

NASA plans to keep JPL’s annual budget at about $1.1 billion through 2000, which is about what it’s been for the past decade.

JPL now employs about 5,800, down from its peak of 7,600 in 1992. In the next three years the lab’s work force is scheduled to shrink to 4,800.

The reductions will mainly come through a combination of increased dependence on outside contractors, normal attrition, the completion of the large Galileo and Cassini missions and limited staff layoffs, according to JPL associate director Kirk Dawson.

Dawson said that even though JPL’s budget has been stable, the lab will cut its staff as part of an overall shrinking of NASA workers that is in turn part of the federal effort to cut government agency payrolls. Although JPL workers are Caltech employees, NASA includes job cuts in its totals.

JPL also wants to spin off work such as maintenance that is outside its core space exploration mission, Dawson said.

Some worry, however, that JPL could lose part of its in-house expertise as more work is contracted out. “You can wipe out a culture overnight, but you can’t build it back up overnight,” said Pathfinder flight system manager Muirhead.

Even with the staff reductions, JPL is continuing to hire new workers whose skills are needed for upcoming missions, Dawson said.

To continue to do pioneering space exploration with fewer people and less money per mission, JPL must now rely on the smaller, faster, cheaper projects backed by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin and embodied in Pathfinder.

Pathfinder’s success validated the new approach, according to JPL director Edward Stone. “We are in an important new era that says, ‘Find another way to explore space,’ ” he said. “We had one way with [missions such as] Galileo and Voyager; now we’ve found another way.”

John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said JPL was at first reluctant to switch to the smaller missions. “The way JPL was doing business was at right angles to the way Goldin was saying NASA should do it,” he said.

Logsdon said the smaller, faster and cheaper approach also satisfies JPL’s congressional funders. “It’s the only way to get political support. It’s not a series of delays and failures,” he said.

Many at JPL think the quick-turnaround, small-scale missions will help restore morale at the lab. Rather than working on a project for 10 years before seeing it launched, the smaller missions “will make it very easy for everybody to see the fruits of their labor,” said 31-year JPL veteran Glenn E. Cunningham, manager of the Mars Global Surveyor project.

Cunningham, 55, said the continuous excitement generated by the frequent launches could also help JPL retain staff. Employee attrition has risen to about 10% annually, roughly three times the rate in the 1980s.

It is the excitement of working on space exploration that keeps many JPL staffers from moving to better-paying jobs with private companies.

Mark Adler, 38, a leader in JPL’s Mars exploration program, said he took a small pay cut to join the lab five years ago because “this is the place you go to do the most audacious things you can think of.”

Adler had been working on video compression for direct television systems. “I was not interested in working on developing digital perfection for people to watch 200 channels of drivel,” he said.

JPL staffers now look forward to a quick succession of missions in the wake of Pathfinder and hope the public will get more spectacular displays of their tax dollars in action. Another Mars probe now in space will begin reporting back to JPL in September, and the Cassini mission to Saturn will be launched this year.

Cunningham, who was managing the Mars Observer when it was lost, compared post-Pathfinder enthusiasm at JPL to the start of his career in the 1960s, when moon missions were launched just a few months apart. “It’s wonderful,” he said. “I’d love to be a kid right out of school now.”

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Profile: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

* Founded: 1936

* Location: 177 acres in La Canada Flintridge, adjacent to Pasadena

* Annual budget: $1.1 billion

* Staff, 1992: 7,600

* Staff, 1997: 5,800

* Projected Staff, 2000: 4,800

Upcoming Mission Highlights:

* September 1997: Mars Global Surveyor will enter Mars orbit. Launched in 1996, the Global Surveyor will map Mars and remain for three years as a relay station for future spacecraft. Costs for the $150-million project were held low by using spare parts from the 1993 Mars Observer mission.

* Mars Landings: Scheduled for 1998, 2001, 2003, 2005

* October 1997: Cassini mission, the last scheduled large-scale flagship project for JPL, will be launched to Saturn. A joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency and Italy’s Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, Cassini will reach Saturn in 2004. The entire mission is planned to stretch out 19 years and cost $2.7 billion.

* 1999: The Stardust spacecraft will be launched to gather dust and other samples from the comet Wild-2. Stardust, with a budget of $200 million, is scheduled to return to Earth and land in a dry lake bed in Utah in 2006.

Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory