Lably
Skip to content

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA federally funded research and development center

  • 20 min read
  • 13 chapters
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the upper Arroyo Seco and San Gabriel Mountains foothills, of Pasadena and Altadena, Southern California.
NASA · Public domain

Related on Lably

Through Small Solar System body

LabSolar SystemLabSolar SystemLabSolar SystemLab · Class 6–11Rocket Launches & Satellites

The primary function of the laboratory is the construction and operation of planetary robotic spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN).

Among the major active projects at the laboratory, some are the Mars 2020 mission, which includes the Perseverance rover; the Mars Science Laboratory mission, including the Curiosity rover; the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter; the SMAP satellite for Earth surface soil moisture monitoring; the NuSTAR X-ray telescope; and the Psyche asteroid orbiter. It is also responsible for managing the JPL Small-Body Database, and provides physical data and lists of publications for all known small Solar System bodies.

JPL's Space Flight Operations Facility and Twenty-Five-Foot Space Simulator are designated National Historic Landmarks.

History

JPL traces its beginnings to 1936 in GALCIT (the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology) when the first set of United States rocket experiments were carried out in the Arroyo Seco. This initial venture involved Caltech graduate students Frank Malina, Qian Xuesen, Weld Arnold and Apollo M. O. Smith, along with Jack Parsons and Edward S. Forman, often referred to as the "Suicide Squad" due to the dangerous nature of their experiments. Together, they tested a small, alcohol-fueled motor to gather data for Malina's graduate thesis. Malina's thesis advisor was engineer/aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, who eventually secured U.S. Army financial support for this "GALCIT Rocket Project" in 1939.

Rocketry beginnings

In the early years of the project, work was primarily focused on the development of rocket technology. In 1941, Malina, Parsons, Forman, Martin Summerfield, and pilot Homer Bushey demonstrated the first jet-assisted takeoff (JATO) rockets to the Army. In 1943, von Kármán, Malina, Parsons, and Forman established the Aerojet Corporation to manufacture JATO rockets. The project took on the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November 1943, formally becoming an Army facility operated under contract by the university. In the same year, Qian and two of his colleagues drafted the first document to use the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In a NASA conference on the history of early rocketry, Malina wrote that the work of the JPL was "considered to include" the research carried out by the GALCIT Rocket Research Group from 1936 on. In 1944, Parsons was expelled due to his "unorthodox and unsafe working methods" following one of several FBI investigations into his involvement with the occult, drugs and sexual promiscuity.

During JPL's Army years, the laboratory developed two significant deployed weapon systems, the MGM-5 Corporal and MGM-29 Sergeant tactical ballistic missiles, marking the first US ballistic missiles developed at JPL. It also developed several other weapons system prototypes, such as the Loki anti-aircraft missile system, and the forerunner of the Aerobee sounding rocket. At various times, it carried out rocket testing at the White Sands Proving Ground, Edwards Air Force Base, and Goldstone, California.

Transition to NASA

In 1954, JPL, under director William Pickering, teamed up with Wernher von Braun's engineers at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, to propose orbiting a satellite during the International Geophysical Year. The team lost that proposal to Project Vanguard, and instead embarked on a classified project to demonstrate ablative re-entry technology using a Jupiter-C rocket. They carried out three successful sub-orbital flights in 1956 and 1957. Using a spare Juno I (a modified Jupiter-C with a fourth stage), the two organizations then launched the United States' first satellite, Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. This significant achievement marked a new era for JPL and the US in the space race.

Less than a year later in December 1958, JPL was transferred to the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). As a result of this transition, JPL became the agency's primary planetary spacecraft center, leading the design and operation of various lunar and interplanetary missions. The transfer to NASA marked the beginning of a "Golden Age" of planetary exploration for JPL in the 1960s and 1970s. JPL engineers designed and operated Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon that paved the way for the Apollo program. JPL proved itself a leader in interplanetary exploration with the Mariner missions to Venus, Mars, and Mercury, returning valuable data about our neighboring planets.

Notably, JPL was early to employ female mathematicians. In the 1940s and 1950s, using mechanical calculators, women in an all-female computations group performed trajectory calculations. In 1961, JPL hired Dana Ulery as the first female engineer to work alongside male engineers as part of the Ranger and Mariner mission tracking teams.

Deep space exploration

Building on the momentum from the successes of the 1960s and early 1970s, JPL initiated an era of deep space exploration in the late 1970s and 1980s. The highlight of this period was the launch of the twin Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

Initially set on a trajectory to explore Jupiter and its moon Io, Voyager 1's mission parameters were adjusted to also provide a close flyby of Saturn's moon Titan. The spacecraft sent back detailed images and data from both gas giants, revolutionizing the understanding of these distant worlds. The Voyager 2 spacecraft followed a more extensive trajectory, conducting flybys of not just Jupiter and Saturn, but also Uranus and Neptune. These encounters provided firsthand data from all four gas giants, offering insights into the nature and dynamics of the outer planets. Both Voyager spacecraft, after fulfilling their primary mission objectives, were directed towards interstellar space, carrying with them the Golden Records – phonograph discs containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life on Earth.

The 1980s also saw the inception of the Galileo mission which launched in the late 1980s. The Galileo spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter and its major moons in detail. Although the probe only entered the gas giant's orbit in the 1990s, its inception and planning during the 1980s signified JPL's continued commitment to deep space exploration.


"Faster, better, cheaper" era

In 1991, Edward C. Stone, the Voyager program scientist, was made the JPL director. His directorship was during the difficult period of the 90s: with the Cold War and the Space Race between the US and the USSR finished, NASA saw dwindling budgets and introduced the so-called "faster, better, cheaper" approach, that encouraged smaller, cheaper missions built with the help of third-party contractors, efficiently "commercializing" the research lab and forcing it to work with industry. Cost-cutting had to be done by Stone, who tried to adapt a new management culture at JPL, while at the same time trying not to hurt science. The plans were to downsize the lab and fire around 30% of JPL personnel by the end of the decade; Stone and Caltech leadership even feared that JPL could be closed.

JPL had little experience in small missions at the time: its "flagship" missions, like Voyager, Cassini, and Galileo, employed hundreds of people for decades. Cassini, for example, "directly supported maybe 500 work-years, about 10 percent of total lab staff [and] provided close to 20 percent of the lab budget". In order to comply with budget restrictions and save the mission, Cassini was downsized; to save $250 million, the scan platform had to be removed from the plans. Stone himself saw the "faster-better-cheaper" as a cultural change of the lab's engineering practices.

Stone also became a proponent of a management culture change at JPL, and installed Richard Laeser (former Voyager project manager) to apply total quality management (TQM) at all levels. Reorganization was required to meet NASA needs, and TQM "emphasized customer service", even though few people at JPL saw NASA as their customer. Many employees were against the new management practices; before TQM and the management changes, project managers at JPL were autonomous and even autocrative:

Project managers were often hard-driving autocrats; as Voyager manager Norm Haynes put it, they "were culled out to be sort of rugged individualists." The otherwise good-natured John Casani, the epitome of the breed, was also known as the "Ayatollah Casani". At one point a consultant gave a personality test to senior managers; at one end of the scale were the counselor types, such as the professorial Stone, and at the other were what Casani called the "leg breakers", including himself.

The most successful, "model" example of an FBC mission was the Mars Pathfinder lander and the first Mars rover, the Sojourner, developed by the JPL. The mission cost around 200 million dollars and was widely reported in the press, appearing on the covers of Time and Newsweek. Other missions were less fortunate: in 1998–1999, six missions were launched; four of them failed, including two Mars orbiters. Both JPL (Stone) and the NASA administration (Daniel Goldin) acknowledged that they pushed too far with the FBC; no project manager of the failed missions was fired.

According to Peter J. Westwick, as the director of JPL, Stone was a "cautious revolutionary". He retired in 2001; his successor, Charles Elachi, "felt no need to change JPL's culture".

Mars exploration

The 1990s and 2000s saw a resurgence in Mars exploration, driven by JPL's Mars Pathfinder and Mars Exploration Rover missions. In 1997, the Mars Pathfinder mission deployed the first successful Mars rover, Sojourner, demonstrating the feasibility of mobile exploration on the Martian surface. In 2004, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, landed on Mars. Opportunity outlived its expected lifespan by 14 years, providing a wealth of scientific data and setting the stage for future Mars missions.

Earth science and robotic exploration

In the 2000s and 2010s, JPL broadened its exploration scope, including the launch of missions to study the outer planets, like the Juno mission to Jupiter and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn. Concurrently, JPL also began to focus on Earth science missions, developing satellite technology to study climate change, weather patterns, and natural phenomena on Earth. JPL also opened the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA in 1998, which had found 95% of asteroids a kilometer or more in diameter that cross Earth's orbit by 2013.

Entering the 2010s and 2020s, JPL continued its Mars exploration with the Curiosity rover and the Mars 2020 mission, which included the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter. Perseverance's core objective is to collect samples for a future Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. In addition, JPL ventured into asteroid exploration with the OSIRIS-REx mission which returned a sample from asteroid Bennu.

2020s and beyond

As JPL moves forward, its focus remains on diverse interplanetary and even interstellar missions. Future Mars missions will aim to return the samples collected by the Perseverance rover back to Earth. Additionally, JPL's Europa Clipper mission launched in 2024 to study Jupiter's moon Europa, believed to harbor a subsurface ocean. Building on the Voyager program's success, JPL continues to push the boundaries of deep-space exploration. The Interstellar probe concept, though not yet formalized, proposes to send a spacecraft ten times the distance from the Sun as Pluto, to explore the interstellar medium and the outermost reaches of the Solar System.

JPL has been recognized four times by the Space Foundation: with the Douglas S. Morrow Public Outreach Award, which is given annually to an individual or organization that has made significant contributions to public awareness of space programs, in 1998; and with the John L. "Jack" Swigert, Jr., Award for Space Exploration on three occasions – in 2009 (as part of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander Team), 2006 and 2005.

In January 2025, JPL was closed and evacuated due to the Eaton Fire raging in the nearby towns of Pasadena and Altadena, with operations like the DSN getting relocated offsite. Although the facility has not sustained damage from the wildfires, it has experienced minor wind damage and as well as numerous employees losing their homes.

Caltech's contract to operate JPL runs through September 2028. In May 2026, NASA announced that it would open the contract to competitive bidding, allowing private companies, nonprofit organizations, and universities to submit proposals for the laboratory's management. NASA stated that the laboratory would continue operating as a federally funded research and development centers (FFRDC), and that the competition process would be conducted on a full and open basis. Caltech would remain eligible to bid for the contract. The arrangement would follow a model similar to that used by the Department of Energy for several of its FFRDCs.

Sign in to keep reading

12 more chapters are free with a Lably account.

More in Physics

PhysicsScientific field of studyUltravioletForm of electromagnetic radiationIonParticle, atom or molecule with a net electrical chargeElectronElementary particle with negative chargeQuantum mechanicsDescription of physical properties at the atomic and subatomic scaleDigital object identifierISO standard unique string identifier for a digital object