In those early years, scientists shot from the hip and went straight to the top with a good idea.

There was no bureaucracy to cut through. Rules were few, and sometimes they were broken. Laboratories got blown up. Scientists got injured. To make test-launch deadlines, the scientists would sometimes carry small rockets aboard commercial airliners.

But JPL matured, and by the time the Soviets launched Sputnik into space in 1957, JPL was poised to respond. On January 31, 1958, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory led America's charge off this planet, controlling the launch of Explorer 1, the country's first satellite. Already they had shot a rocket into space, and the former dry wash near Pasadena, California, quickly gained a reputation as the hotbed in humanity's reach for space.

But innovation came with a price.

Missions failed with spectacular regularity. And rules got written with each failure. By the mid-1990s, JPL had become a bloated bureaucratic institution with a Byzantine set of guidelines that sometimes thwarted creativity and frequently frustrated employees.

Meanwhile, a new NASA administration had forced staff cuts and radically altered the way JPL did business. In the new era of "faster, better, cheaper," JPL went from producing a handful of billion-dollar missions that were decades in the making to a flurry of quickly produced excursions that cost less than $300 million each. It was a plan destined to fail, managers and scientists say in hindsight.

There would be more bad news. In a decade marred by cutbacks and mission failures, the robust economy of the 1990s left JPL unable to compete with rising salaries in the technology industry, and many senior researchers jumped ship to start their own firms.

Many of those who remain are guarded, their pride wounded and their sense of purpose muddled. Some say business goes on as usual. But there is also an undercurrent of optimism. Charles Elachi, the newly appointed director who rose through the ranks at JPL, is seen by employees as a man who understands their woes and can fix them.

Elachi wasted no time this May. In his first week on the job, he reorganized JPL's management, creating new positions and replacing several top managers. Now he's on a campaign to make every employee, from accountants to secretaries, see through their paperwork and "feel like a part of the program."

And he began tearing up the rule book.

It is a hot and sunny Thursday in early June in Pasadena. The Philadelphia 76ers have just stunned the L.A. Lakers in Game 1 of the NBA finals. Firouz Naderi, newly appointed head of a new division called the Solar System Exploration Programs Directorate, ponders this surprising defeat in his moderately sized, sparsely furnished office at JPL. Naderi sees a parallel between the Laker's upcoming game two and JPL's Odyssey mission, currently en route to Mars.

"The Lakers have to win on Friday night, because they lost," he says. "So [Odyssey] is the most important mission because it comes after a defeat."

The defeat Naderi speaks of is actually a pair of doomed missions that he terms "the darkest time for NASA and JPL."

Mars Climate Orbiter failed to go into orbit in 1999 because of a human mixup between metric and English units. A few months later, the Mars Polar Lander failed to reach the Red Planet's surface. Analysts suspect the craft may have falsely thought it was on the ground and shut down its engines too soon, leading to a mission-ending crash. Other causes may have been to blame.

The missions were just two in a host of low-cost, often single-purpose projects that are the norm in the new NASA, an agency remade by Dan Goldin. As head of NASA, Goldin introduced his faster, better, cheaper concept in 1992, with a goal of reducing the perceived bloated bureaucracy at NASA itself.

JPL, which is operated for NASA by Caltech, was bound to follow Goldin's lead if it wanted to continue doing business with the space agency (today, about 90 percent of JPL's funding comes from NASA).

Naderi echoes the opinion of many here at JPL, including Elachi, the director, when he says that faster, better, cheaper is not an inherently flawed concept, but that "we got caught in an irrational exuberance" associated with the new approach.

Failure is an opportunist.

Naderi thinks of a successful high-jumper, for whom the bar keeps getting raised: "Eventually you're going to clip it," he says. "I think we raised the bar to an unrealistically high level. And we clipped it."

One JPL scientist, in the trenches here for more than a decade, has a more succinct view of JPL's rocky transition to the new era of many missions: "We've been grossly understaffed to do it."

Elachi, in a telephone interview while on business recently in Australia, said he tells employees that faster, better, cheaper just means they will have to work smarter. "You have to be more efficient in your work, you have to streamline your activity, and you have to be nimble in how you do things, but you still have to apply the discipline that we have learned" in more than 40 years of space exploration.