By 1943, word spread of Germany's V-2 ballistic missile, which could carry hundreds of pounds of explosives to a target 150 miles (240 kilometers) away. Von Karman was tapped to help counter this threat, and he enlisted Malina and the other engineers from The Project.

A subsequent report had the first known use of the name Jet Propulsion Laboratory on its cover. Von Karman signed the report, "Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory." When the Army offered $3 million for a one-year research project based on that document, Malina said, "This letter threw us into a proper dither."

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was officially born in 1944 and operated by the Army until December 3, 1958, when it was transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Before NASA was created, however, another threat emerged, called Sputnik, and JPL engineers had already been tapped to work on a budding space program.

"I was very, very pleased about that," recalls Herman Bank, who worked on the Bumper Project, a post-war collaboration with German scientist Wernher von Braun that led a spacecraft that went higher and deeper into space than any other. On February 24, 1949, the JPL rocket soared to an altitude of 250 miles.

Bank remembers an underlying idealism among his colleagues that existed in those days.

"There were a lot of people who were not anxious to build more military equipment," Bank recalls. "A number of the fellows at that time mentioned that."

Eventually, Bank became supervisor of structural design for Explorer 1, which launched January 31, 1958, and became America's first satellite, hot on the heels of the Soviet's Sputnik. Bank then served as a supervisor on the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon.

As the space race developed, JPL grew. More scientists, more managers, more projects. And more departments to create red tape, which some say contributed to a decade that was fraught with failure. Of JPL's first 20 missions, between 1958 and 1967, 12 failed at launch, crashed, malfunctioned or missed their target.

Howard McCurdy, a NASA historian and professor at the American University, says the first six Ranger missions, which sought to take snapshots of the Moon, failed because of a feature of JPL's organizational structure that persists today. He says project managers often don't have firm control of a mission, but instead must prod department heads for resources.

"The project managers rely on department heads to share knowledge, engineers, and sometimes funds," McCurdy said. "Sometimes the bureaucracy overwhelms the projects."

Regardless of the causes, with each failure the rulebook grew.

"When things go wrong ... you put a rule in place," said Firouz Naderi, newly appointed head of a new division called the Solar System Exploration Programs Directorate. "It's a process of documenting what you've learned, but sometimes you don't take things off the books. A lesson learned in the '70s might not be applicable now."

One thing that seems not to have changed throughout the history of JPL is a desire to innovate.

Herman Bank, though retired and 84 years old, is living proof.

Back in the 1970s, Bank sought and received $100,000 by appealing directly to then-Director William H. Pickering. He used the money to fund a program that shared JPL technology with doctors. More than three decades later, Bank has turned that project into a full-time volunteer occupation.

Bank founded the Volunteer Professionals for Medical Advancement, staffed by a dozen volunteer JPL retirees. They work with doctors to brainstorm, research and develop new medical technologies. The organization retains strong but informal ties with JPL, which allows the volunteers to drop in and bend the ears of JPL researchers whenever they need to solve a problem.

Bank says there are plenty of "workaholics and idealists" at JPL who aren't ready to stop contributing to society after they retire. And maybe that is a characteristic that attracts them to the space program in the first place.

"It shows they are dedicated people with a lot of conscience," Bank said, "and they want to contribute to the world."