Jet Propulsion Lab Director to Retire

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Ed Stone, who led the NASA lab through several spectacular successes in planetary missions in the last decade and also through the embarrassing loss of two Mars spacecraft last year, plans to retire from his post next year.

He is retiring, according to JPL, because in January he will turn 65, the customary retirement age for lab directors. The decision is not related to widely publicized failures in the Mars program, said lab spokesman Franklin O’Donnell.

Stone is a highly regarded physicist and astronomer who has spent 28 years as lead scientist of the 1977 Voyager mission, which exceeded all expectations by capturing the first close-up photos of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and their moons.

“He’s a remarkable fellow,” said Howard E. McCurdy, a professor of public administration at American University and an expert on the history of NASA. McCurdy said Stone was respected, not only for his excellent scientific and leadership skills, but also for his unassuming, soft-spoken personal style.

Stone has directed the lab since January 1991. In that time, he has overseen several high-profile missions, including the 1997 Pathfinder landing, in which a robotic rover successfully landed on Mars and captured the hearts of Americans as it poked around the Red Planet.

A more controversial mission for Stone was to implement cost-cutting and downsizing at JPL under NASA administrator Dan Goldin’s mantra of “better, faster, cheaper.” A series of reports after last year’s losses of Mars craft now concludes that Stone and other NASA leaders may have been too frugal; Stone’s replacement will struggle with balancing cost and effectiveness in future missions.

“The director of JPL will always have a difficult job. They are continually facing a mission impossible,” said David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology. Caltech operates the lab, which runs NASA’s unmanned planetary exploration missions. The lab has about 5,000 employees and a $1.3-billion budget. “Ed Stone has done a fabulous job.”

A search for Stone’s successor will begin immediately, Baltimore said. An 11-member search committee has been created with expertise in aerospace, astronomy and physics and including Caltech trustees, faculty and one JPL employee.

“We want to give the search committee time to find the one other individual, maybe in the world, who can step into his shoes,” said Baltimore. The individual will need experience with spacecraft, science or government but not necessarily all three, he said.

Stone plans to return full time to his position as professor of physics at Caltech, where he has taught and conducted research on cosmic rays and solar physics since 1964.

During his career, Stone was the lead or co-investigator on 14 NASA projects. He also is the lead investigator of NASA’s ACE satellite, which hovers 1 million miles above Earth, collecting samples of solar wind, solar particles and cosmic rays in an effort to understand exactly what makes up the sun.

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Times staff writer Joe Mozingo contributed to this story.