The legacies of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, its pioneering rocket science, bold journeys to space and high-tech robotics, are the result of a firm desire to draw, color and paste.

My how things change.

Today's JPL conceives, designs and runs more robotic space missions than any other place on Earth. But it is an odd duck among institutions. Many people assume that JPL is part of the nuclear family of NASA, which supplies 90 percent of the Pasadena-based laboratory's budget. But unlike the Johnson or Kennedy space centers, JPL is not a NASA field center. It is wholly run by the academic descendents of Mr. Throop.

For decades this distinction was largely irrelevant, as JPL was spoon-fed with nearly all of NASA's robotic missions beyond Earth orbit. But in the past decade, JPL has found itself in a new world of competition.

When Dan Goldin took over NASA in 1992 and instituted his approach to space exploration, called "faster, better, cheaper," he also injected an element of competition that had been virtually nonexistent.

Now, planetary and solar missions are open to bidders inside and outside NASA, and winners are decided in a peer review process that involves independent in-house specialists, experts outside NASA, or both.

"It is quite a departure from the old system of having three field centers working in a specific area and you just keep feeding them projects," says Howard McCurdy, a NASA historian and professor at American University.

Charles Elachi, director of JPL, says the institute is sometimes at a disadvantage in the competitive arena. JPL employees are forced to effectively compete for their salaries as well as for lab equipment. They have to justify missions in order to justify their jobs.

Left out of the equation, Elachi says, are basic supplies like lab equipment and software, things a normal federally funded research facility or university takes for granted.

Elachi is working to solve these problems.

"We have been talking with NASA headquarters about ... getting funding to provide at least the core, critical capabilities that are needed," Elachi said. He'd also like to increase staffing for business and administrative tasks, so that engineers can focus more on the science of a mission.

And there are other problems Elachi is working on. The most glaring is a colossal bureaucracy, fertilized by the very successes that propelled JPL to an annual budget of $1.3 billion and the inevitable failures that came with trying to streamline the operation over the past decade.

As he works to reinvigorate the place, Elachi might consider taking a page out of the handbook of a competitor.

The Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University had its otherwise quiet space program splashed on the front page of U.S. newspapers in February when it landed its NEAR-Shoemaker spacecraft on asteroid Eros.

The $223 million NEAR mission was an unqualified success, an embodiment of faster, better, cheaper. The probe worked beyond its intended lifetime and made a daring landing it was never designed for.

NEAR was a coming of age for APL in terms of popular attention, says Stamatios (Tom) Krimigis, head of the space department at APL. But APL is no newcomer to space. The lab has been sending things off the planet for more than 40 years, with 58 spacecraft to its credit. It is, however, a newcomer in the arena of solar system exploration, having previously worked mostly on Earth satellites.

What did APL do different on NEAR?

"Nothing," said Krimigis in a telephone interview. "It was business as usual."

With just 500 employees and an annual budget that fluctuates between $80 million and $150 million per year, APL's space department has always been forced to do missions in a cost-effective way. As a rule, they take on no mission that will require more than three years from initial planning to launch.

"We think we have the kind of culture that is embodied these days in the faster, better, cheaper mantra that everybody is talking about," Krimigis said. "We have used that model for our entire 42-year history. We didn't know until the early 90s what it was called."

While Krimigis chose not to address JPL's problems, even JPL's own management recognizes an institutional structure that forces project managers to negotiate with various departments in order to marshal the labor and expertise needed to build a spacecraft.

And then a manager faces a set of rules and a process of oversight that can smother a project and lead to delays, cost overruns, and mistakes.

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