Designing the system that would bring a slice of Mars back to Earth at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — the Southern California lab that pioneered American rocketry and the scientific exploration of our solar system — was her dream job.
As she worked toward degrees in mechanical engineering, she watched JPL launches and became enamored with the photos the lab took on 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 the job working on the Mars Sample Return Mission, she hoped to spend the rest of her career there.
But on Tuesday, she was one of the 550 employees the lab laid off — 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 because of a ballooning budget and timeline.
Morale has tanked amid reports of management problems. Staffers say they’re following budget discussions in the national news while hearing little from the lab’s leaders.
“There’s been this creeping dread in anticipation,” said the mechanical engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share her views candidly. “The boot was once again raised to stomp on us, but we didn’t know when it was going to drop.”
As a result, an institution with an illustrious record of solving the hardest problems in space now faces a daunting task here on Earth: reclaiming its place at the vanguard of exploration and innovation.
“People forget how much JPL is known internationally,” said Fraser MacDonald, senior lecturer in historical geography at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and author of the book “Escape From Earth,” about JPL’s founders. To MacDonald, the lab is “a major scientific and technological anchor in Southern California.”
JPL — which is operated by Caltech in La Cañada Flintridge and funded primarily through NASA — was born in the 1940s, after experiments by Caltech rocket scientists caught the eye of the U.S. military.
Many of the tales of their early endeavors — including a 1936 test that ended with an oxygen line catching fire, creating, essentially, a flailing flame thrower — are now told in hyperbole, MacDonald noted. Regardless, they formed a “quintessentially Californian story,” he said, which helped fuel worldwide admiration.
After World War II, JPL was largely sidelined from the military’s rocketry endeavors, as the U.S. instead focused on a secret mission to bring Nazi scientists into the country to advance rocket development. But when the Cold War propelled the U.S. to seek technological dominance on Earth and beyond, it was JPL that developed the U.S.’ first successful satellite, Explorer 1, designed to study cosmic rays.
The same year, 1958, the U.S. government created NASA, and JPL found a new home.
Contracts for ambitious, high-profile NASA missions have become JPL’s lifeblood. But in recent years, there have been fewer of these 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 because of economic factors ranging from supply chain expenses to employee cost of living, said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a space science advocacy organization led by Bill Nye.
At the same time, a series of well-documented recent management stumbles have not helped JPL’s cause.
After NASA’s Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid failed to meet its 2022 launch date, the agency commissioned an independent review, which found that internal reorganizations and personnel changes created distracted and uninformed managers and burned-out, stretched-thin staffers.
And, in 2023, another sobering independent review determined there was “near zero probability” of Mars Sample Return making its proposed 2028 launch date, and “no credible” way to fulfill the mission within its budget.
NASA sharply cut its spending on Mars Sample Return in anticipation of budget cuts from Congress — which, by extension, meant steep funding cuts to JPL. The agency eventually began seeking alternate plans from other NASA centers and the private sector, placing JPL in the humbling position of having to compete for its own project.
JPL had beefed up staffing from roughly 5,000 people in the early 2010s to roughly 6,500 to support its flagship missions including Europa Clipper, which is set to explore one of Jupiter’s moons, and Mars Sample Return. But with both Clipper and Psyche now in space and Mars Sample Return shelved, the lab couldn’t find roles for some of the projects’ workers.
“I struggled with balancing the passion that I had for the work with the knowledge that I could be moved off of projects anytime,” said the mechanical engineer, who said that JPLers don’t join the lab for the paycheck. “Why should I pour my heart and soul into it? … A lot of the stuff that we’re doing might never go anywhere. We’re just going to pack it up in boxes and put it on shelves.”
Then came the layoffs for which many had already braced.
In January 2024, the lab let go of 100 on-site contractors. A month later, 530 employees and 40 contractors. When it became clear NASA’s funding for JPL would not substantively change in 2025, the lab laid off an additional 325 employees.
JPL’s 2026 budget is still uncertain, with the government in its third week of a shutdown. But, regardless of which version of the budget Congress passes, the lab probably won’t see any significant new streams of cash.
That could explain why JPL — which says its latest layoffs are not due to the shutdown itself — chose October to send out the layoff notices.
Throughout the two years of steady layoffs — which, all in all, eliminated roughly a quarter of all staff — employees would pepper lab leaders with the same questions at town halls: When were layoffs happening and who was going to be let go? They received few answers.
The JPL Reddit forum, which had historically been a place for aspiring engineers and scientists to ask employees about getting hired and about life at the lab, turned sour. Employees vented their frustrations and posted layoff information that leaders wouldn’t share.
“The morale at JPL is horrid right now,” the mechanical engineer said. “There is a lot of distrust and dissatisfaction that’s been built up against the people who are at the top of decision making on lab.”
Yet, she still sees hope for Southern California’s premiere planetary science lab: “I do genuinely 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 slashing NASA’s planetary science funding.
NASA’s administrator at the time responded that the cuts would make JPL “surplus to our needs.” JPL seriously considered returning to its origins by pivoting to Department of Defense work, but politically connected Caltech leaders managed to convince Congress and the White House to keep funding Galileo, JPL’s flagship mission at the time to explore Jupiter’s atmosphere.
Few have hope that Mars Sample Return will spur recovery as Galileo did. Dreier, for example, sees a different set of options for the lab in 2025: increasingly rely on defense and national security projects, and use its robotics and Mars expertise to support NASA’s new goal of landing humans on the moon and Mars.
“Who else has landed on Mars as many times as JPL has?” Dreier said. (Answer: No one. JPL has done it successfully nine times since 1976. In fact, a successful landing without JPL didn’t happen until China pulled it off in 2021.)
Saving JPL’s signature planetary science missions like the Mars rovers and Jupiter orbiters is more challenging. Unlike in 1981, the current proposals to cut government spending on science reach far beyond NASA.
And while human spaceflight to our nearby celestial neighbors is certainly a reasonable endeavor, Dreier said, “the cosmos is a lot bigger than just the moon and Mars.”
