One thing that has stimulated Ann Devereaux since she was a child is space exploration. She grew up near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marveling at shuttle launches.

And so despite her aversion to math, she long ago set her sites on a job in the space industry. In high school, she did an internship at Kennedy. While in college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she once spent two hours in line, she says, to get an interview with a JPL recruiter.

Devereaux joined the lab 11 years ago, before staff cuts and a new directive -- faster, better, cheaper -- launched JPL into a new era of more missions with smaller budgets and, ultimately two failed Mars missions in 1999. Devereaux worked on an earlier mission, the Mars Observer, which failed in 1993.

"We needed some cuts, just like any organization would after time," she said. But she echoes other JPL employees in saying that the cuts contributed to the mission failures. And the combined effect "took a toll on the morale of the place," she says.

Meanwhile, JPL came to be run less like a research institution and more like a business, which Devereaux thinks took some of the romance out of the place. Colleagues left or were asked to leave, and replacements were not welcome. She recalls being one of the youngest JPL employees for several years, because "they just didn't hire for a long time."

Then things got crazy.

"A couple of years ago ... communications was hot, hot, hot. I entertained thoughts of leaving, just as anyone has, just because you could make so much more money."

So why did you stay?

"People don't come to JPL for the money," she said. "People come because they want to work in the space program."

As the red dust settles on the Mars failures, with better, faster, cheaper becoming a fixture of daily life, Devereaux even sees advantages to the new streamlined approach: "Missions have shorter life cycles now," she says. "With Mars missions, you get a quick payoff."

And while many industry enthusiasts complain that the overall space program lacks a goal, Devereaux sees it otherwise at JPL, though she says this with less enthusiasm than when talking of past glories: "There is a sense of a goal in the Mars program."

The Mars program, in fact, is the most visible and dominant item on JPL's agenda. Every 26 months, when Mars and Earth are ideally positioned in relation to each other, JPL has plans to send another robotic mission to Mars.

In a recent interview, JPL Director Charles Elachi said he will lead a push into several frontiers over the next decade, but "particularly to create a permanent robotic presence on [the surface and above] Mars."

The push for Mars has, in fact, temporarily sidelined the WARP project.

On Devereaux's workbench, next to the WARP headset, is a prototype of a short-range transceiver that will help future Mars landers better communicate with orbiters. The transceiver is, for now, her full-time project, relegating WARP to spare-time attention, which means WARP won't fly until next year at the soonest.

It's part of life at JPL -- you go where the program goes, and you work where the funding has been allotted.

Meanwhile, WARP is still expected to be built. But there's that nagging acronym problem. The Wireless Augmented Reality Prototype is really a Wireless Mixed Reality Device.

But in a world of competing programs and an expanding mission count, will funding continue for research into a WMRD?

Clearly, an accurate name must be developed that keeps the cool letters, W, A, R and P. And yet it must accurately portray what the thing does. Devereaux has employed her brother, who works in launch control at Kennedy, to help dream up a new name.

"I sent him an e-mail saying, 'Think what you could make from this acronym. It's not a prototype any more, and it's not augmented reality. But it is wireless. Have your buddies come up with some names.'"

If her brother can't help, Devereaux still has a few thousand bright minds to turn to right here on the campus of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This stimulating intellectual environment, with all its competition, is one reason Devereaux has stayed for more than a decade, through thick and thin and despite a lower paycheck than she knows she could get elsewhere.

"I don't have to walk very far to find an expert in almost any field."