Amidst failure, there have been smashing successes at JPL. The current Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has mapped parts of Mars to a level of detail greater than some parts of Earth, scientists say. And the pictures have provided the best evidence yet that Mars may once have been warm and wet, and therefore might have supported life.

But in an era when Mars colonies feel within our grasp, and with the search for another Earth actively underway, these and earlier JPL missions seem relatively humble. Dancing above Earth's atmosphere. Putting a hunk of metal on the Moon. Photographing a Mars rock.

JPL's vision for the future involves space missions which, if they are to inspire us and answer some of our fundamental remaining questions about the universe, will have to be grander, no less than reaching for the stars and then checking to see if their habitable zones support creatures that could wave back at us.

Missions that are, as Elachi puts it, "on the edge of impossibility."

Such as?

"We would like to be the first organization that images the first blue dot around another star," Naderi says.

But getting an optical snapshot of another Earth will not be cheap. It will require a space-based telescope that cannot yet be designed and that will easily exceed a billion dollars after figuring in years of development costs. Work has already begun on a predecessor to such a telescope, but no decision has been made as to whether or not JPL can afford to fly it.

"There are certain missions you can't do with pocket change," Naderi points out.

Indeed.

And so a balance must be struck. The JPL of the future will be a mission house that dreams up, builds, and flies spacecraft of all kinds. Some might be no larger than a soup can, flung en masse into the rings of Saturn. Others will seek to establish, once and for all, whether Mars does or ever did harbor life. A series of Mars missions will investigate the dangers for humans and set up a telecommunications infrastructure for future human colonies. Jupiter's moon Europa will be probed. Even distant Pluto will eventually be visited by a robot.

And one day, JPL would like to fly a series of spacecraft in formation that would combine their efforts to become the largest optical telescope ever imagined.

In short, Naderi, Elachi and the other top managers want to position JPL as the hotbed for humanity's reach for the stars. Like Shaquille O'Neal and his Lakers, they intend to shrug off that tiny blip in an otherwise successful run and proceed to their perceived rightful place in the universe.

But the Lakers were overloaded with healthy, confident talent. They had no holes in their starting line-up. JPL managers have a lot of work to do.

And their strongest asset will be the childlike enthusiasm of the typical JPL employee. These are grown-up kids who come to work because they get paid to play with toys and because they are romanced by space.

John Brophy is one of them. He left JPL twice to work in private industry, but he returned both times.

At JPL, Brophy has championed the technology of ion propulsion, a once far-fetched means of space travel that is now powering the Deep Space 1 probe to an encounter with a comet this September and is seen by many as the propulsion system of the future. Brophy says that his appreciation for JPL as "the most intellectually interesting" place to work comes only with having toiled at corporations, where the main objective is to make money.

And what is the goal for a JPL scientist?

"You're principle objective here is to do cool things."