JPL, not IBM
Despite the challenges, several JPL employees we spoke with are optimistic
that Elachi will breathe new life into the place. He's seen as an insider, one
of them, a guy who knows the ropes. Elachi has been at JPL for 30 years, and
he's worked in all three primary areas: science, engineering and technology.
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"The
string of failures took a lot out of people here."
-- Ann Devereaux
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He succeeded Ed Stone, who ran JPL for a decade. Stone is credited by employees
with making the best in a bad situation, toiling under the extreme conditions
of an ever-shrinking staff while still managing to transform JPL from an era
of monster missions to multiple smaller ones.
"Ed Stone represented us capably and kept us going, but perhaps paid a little
less attention to the internal structure here at JPL," said one long-time employee.
"On the other hand, Charles is an insider ... and he knows some of the flaws,
and he's going to try and straighten those out."
Another employee who pins her hopes on Elachi is Ann Devereaux, a die-hard
space fan who grew up watching Shuttle launches at the Kennedy Space Center
and now works in JPL's communications lab. Like many, Devereaux thought in recent
years of heading to greener financial pastures. But like many, she stayed. Still,
while she figures that faster, better, cheaper was an inevitable necessity,
she worries that it has sapped some of the romance out of JPL.
And Devereaux has a message for the new regime:
"It's fine to pay people on the low end, but you have to still make it interesting
for them. Don't reduce it to an assembly line. We don't want to work in an assembly
line. Otherwise we would work for IBM."
History of failure
Whether the new JPL loosens up or becomes an assembly line, one thing is virtually
guaranteed: There will be more failures. It is the nature of the space game.
Twelve of JPL's first 20 missions, between 1958 and 1967, failed at launch,
crashed, malfunctioned, or missed their target altogether. And that was back
when we were just trying to hit the Moon, some 140 million miles closer than
Mars.
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JPL
will do missions that are "on the edge of impossibility."
-- Charles Elachi |
And JPL isn't alone. Think of the Challenger disaster. Or Apollo 1.
In this historical perspective, the recent Mars failures do not seem so egregious.
But they were no less damaging to the morale of those who spent months or years
working on the projects.
"The string of failures took a lot out of people here," Devereaux says. "When
we lost Mars Observer, it was just like losing your child, waiting for it to
call, waiting for it to call." Devereaux and others spent many impatient hours
in the radio operations room, reconfiguring dials and hoping. Someone posted
a sign that read "MO phone home."
Next Page: Success, too, and a new vision
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