For the second time this yr, NASA’s JPL middle cuts its workforce – Cyber Tech

“This discount is unfold throughout basically all areas of the Lab together with our technical, challenge, enterprise, and help areas,” Leshin wrote. “We now have taken significantly the necessity to re-size our workforce, whether or not direct-funded (challenge) or funded on overhead (burden). With decrease budgets and primarily based on the forecasted work forward, we needed to tighten our belts throughout the board, and you will notice that mirrored within the layoff impacts.”

This yr’s worker cuts got here after NASA determined to think about alternate options to a multibillion-dollar plan to return samples from Mars to Earth, which had been led by JPL. In September 2023 an impartial evaluate group discovered that the JPL plan was unworkable and would value $8 billion to $11 billion to achieve success.

A altering atmosphere

Whereas NASA considers alternate options from different discipline facilities, in addition to personal corporations comparable to SpaceX and Rocket Lab, the finances for Mars Pattern Return was slashed from almost $1 billion for this fiscal yr to lower than $300 million. Moreover, there isn’t a assure that JPL shall be given management of a revamped Mars Pattern Return mission.

The staffing cuts replicate the truth that after the current launch of the $5 billion Europa Clipper mission, JPL just isn’t managing one other flagship deep-space mission at current. One other sizable mission, the NASA-ISRO Artificial Aperture Radar, is nearly prepared for a launch subsequent yr from India. The California laboratory has smaller tasks, however nothing on the order of a flagship mission to command a big finances and help a really giant employees.

JPL has a protracted and storied historical past, together with the administration of most of NASA’s highest-profile planetary probes, together with the Voyagers, Mars landers, and Galileo and Cassini spacecraft. Nevertheless in recent times different spaceflight facilities, comparable to Johns Hopkins Utilized Physics Laboratory, and personal corporations comparable to Lockheed have competed for tasks and delivered outcomes.

The job of Leshin and others at NASA is to make sure that JPL has a vivid future in a altering world of planetary exploration. This week’s cuts will guarantee such a future, Leshin wrote, including: “We’re an extremely robust group—our dazzling historical past, present achievements, and relentless dedication to exploration and discovery place us effectively for the long run.”