NASA Jet Propulsion Lab Lays Off 300 Engineers

Ghost of Von Karmen writes "NASA JPL, the lab that brought us missions such as Voyager, Cassini, and the Mars Exploration Rovers will eliminate about 300 engineering related positions due to Congressional budget cuts, according to various sources. The cuts reflect a change in emphasis away from robotic technology and toward human exploration of space. Prof. Elachi, head of JPL has indicated that the lab may pursue Department of Defense contracts to minimize additional reductions in personnel."

Comments

Shit

[lilmouse]

That's a bad sign of the times. Especially the DoD part. Granted, one can make tons of money on DoD work, but still, that's not what space is supposed to be about.

--LWM

Wish I had a violin...

[dada21]

One of my main CNC/machining suppliers does 20% of his business with NASA but they account for 95% of his profits.

I recently saw some of his invoices and NASA is typical government waste. Take your $300 toilet seats and $600 screw drivers and double it.

I really want the FOIA to open up every invoice for public consumption in PDF real time. NASA is no friend of the taxpayers.

Is NASA really getting a budget cut or did they just overspend with the cronies again?

Re:Wish I had a violin...

[kevlar]

I have to say, I do somewhat agree with you. Regardless of the money being spent in Iraq right now, NASA is notorious for not knowing where billions of dollars are spent. When large amounts of money go missing, there should be a criminal investigation, because it means that somebody is getting a massive paycheck. The Feds are all over the state and local governments when some crook runs off with some money, but when was the last time you saw anyone in the federal government get cited for embezzlement? I absolutely cannot believe that it never happens on the federal level. Its just never investigated.

Priorities

[Doc Ruby]

$6BILLION a month to cover for Bush's WMD lies in Iraq would pay for a lot of JPL engineers. Hell, if we sent $6BILLION of JPL engineers a month to Iraq instead of invading, Iraq would have a Moon base by now.

Use my form

[dada21]

Honorable [name]:

Thank you for cutting the budget of [department]. It is obvious that you understand our Federast Republic as well as the limits the Constitution sets over your powers.

I am glad that you also understand that the [number] jobs eliminated will reappear in greater numbers in private businesses that will grow stronger from the money taxpayers won't have to spend supporting unconstitutional programs.

I appreciate your ability to restrain your powers and offer your constituents the chance to spend their hard earned money as their households and families need.

Yours truly,
Citizen [your name]
[your address]

Re:Indeed

[symbolic]

Thst cost of Dubya's game of GI-JOE will cost us more than we realize- I have a feeling that this is only one of many side-effects we'll be seeing.

Not a $600 screwdriver problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently work on a JPL project.

We've been having budget problems for a while now. Two big causes are Hubble and the President's space exploration plan. We got a budget cut when they decided they wanted to investigate repairing Hubble. Then we got more cuts to divert money to the President's plan.

Working here is nothing like working for industry. We do things as efficiently as we can because we have barely enough money to keep operating. We use free software tools when we can, we only buy computers when they go on sale, etc.

Keep in mind the highly talented and educated engineers here are working for much less money than they would get in industry because they think it is worthwhile.

Re:Yeah right

[cr0sh]

I hate to break it to ya, but nobody in Iraq did anything to us before we invaded. This undeclared war we are in was sold to the American public via a myriad of lies and deceit, for who knows exactly what purpose (maybe to make Cheney's buddies at Haliburton richer?). At worst, the only thing Iraq was guilty of was not abiding by the provisions set up after the first Gulf War. One could say that by doing so, a declaration of war wasn't necessary - but all that is just interpretation/mangling of the powers of war the Constitution grants Congress (I am not even sure the first Gulf War was officially declared or not). The truth is clear: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and Iraq had no WMDs (and I am not saying Saddam was a good guy, either - but if you are going to rain down bombs on another nation, at least have the balls to be honest about your reasons).

Unless you'd LIKE to be beheaded for what theses crazies call Islam.

I am not so much scared of the Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East as I am of the growing Christian Fundamentalist movement right here in the United States. Oh, when will this madness end?

Re:Write your Congressman TODAY!

[McSmithster]

You posted this to get modded +5 funny right? You can't be serious. This is a joke. What NASA needs to do is drop the human space travel and focus on the robotics. Let the private companies get all the space tourists and let them build space stations and moon bases. NASA should really stop wasting its time with low orbital flight and shoot for the stars. Robitis missions can do science today that humans will most likely not be able to do for the next hundred years. It also takes a technical skill that few to no companies have. Getting to and from orbit and the moon should be left for companies. NASA however should be sending probes to distant planets, searching for life, testing new physics and going places that haven't been gone to before. Instead its wasting all its money and knowledge on things that any company with enough money and some good engineers could do.

I do believe that NASA should still do some human exploration of space but they should be to distant planets which requires the most sophisticated technology but only after robots have scouted the planets/moons out first. What are they gonna do, send more people to orbit for another 30 years just like they did for the last 30 years and before Apollo? Thats a waste. Robots are good so let private companies put people into orbit and get NASA to move on.

Re:Write your Congressman TODAY!

[fbg111]

Thanks for weighing in, always nice to hear from someone with real experience in the topic.

Quick question - for those of us on the outside it appears that we get much more value out of our robotic missions than the manned ones, from various interplanetary probes to the Mars landers. They're relatively cheap, successful, can be done relatively quickly (compared to 20 years for Mars) and return a wealth of fascinating knowledge. What do people at JPL, and NASA in general think of manned Mars missions? Is there consensus that we should do it, even at the great expense, or is there internal debate about it? Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't devote NASA's resources to producing more efficient propulsion systems for Mars and other manned interplanetary missions, instead of attempting such missions with with current propulsion technology.

Re:Yeah right

[Keebler71]

What cuts? Look like the budget is increasing 2% each of the next several years or so.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/107493main_FY_06_budget_su mm.pdf

Looking back to the 50's, in real dollars NASA's budget has been increasing pretty much throughout except for from 66-71 or so. I could really throw my karma to the wind and point out that the budget under Bush jr has increased consistently in both then and 1996-constant dollars, and that it appears Clinton and Nixon seem to be the only two presidents who presided over a continuous decrease in NASA budget (constant 1996 dollars).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

Of course, the article is about cuts at JPL and I am talking about NASA's budget... but I feel perfectly comfortable with a slight redirect like that given that the majority of posts (and most space-related threads on slashdot) schitzophrenically vacillate between "we need more money for human space exploration" and "human exploration budget is raiding scientific space research".

Bah! Bureaucracy is what's crippling JPL

[RKBA]

Bullshit. I worked for JPL for 25 years and retired about two years ago. During my 25 years there I saw JPL go from a relatively lean and mean organization that was actually fun to work at, to a top heavy morass of bureaucracy so burdensome with so many damn rules and regulations that it's a miracle anything at all ever gets done there anymore. Most of the people who knew what they were doing have either retired, died, or otherwise left JPL. Many of the people remaining have no idea how to design a simple closed-loop control system for example - and the worst part is they don't know it. In fact, I once tried to explain to one of the technical program managers for a cancelled Europa project why a closed loop control system cannot simply zero out accumulated error and pretend it doesn't exist because the physical error doesn't simply go away by magic. He had no idea what I was talking about. Because of this so called "technical manager"'s ignorance, JPL paid Lockheed-Martin Aerospace (LMA) for the design of a spacecraft power control system that was so flawed I refused to use their design at all and designed my own, even though the contract had already been paid.

Engineers are outnumbered about 10 to 1 (I kid you not) at most JPL project meetings by managers. I once had a friend of mine (who was the only person doing any actual design work on the project) get so pissed off because he was the only engineer (and the only one doing any real work on that part of the project) in a meeting full of managers complaining about him not working fast enough, that he told them to get off their lazy asses and do some of the work themselves. He wasn't fired because not one of the managers could do anything useful. JPL used to be a great place to work twenty or thirty years ago, but now all the bullshit bureaucracy just causes frustration and ulcers. Personally, I think the place would be a lot more fun to work at if it were smaller like it used to be, because projects were truly team efforts that people cared about before the place was inundated with blundering ignorant managers that don't do a damn thing except get in the way and complain. A few years ago, top level management spend thousands of dollars on a report that was no more than a pretty picture of the visible light spectrum. Their "report" was so ludicrous it even made it into one of the Dilbert cartoons - and believe me, a lot of JPLers were submitting a lot of material to Scott Adams because there was so much inane BS going on at JPL at that time ("Faster, Better, Cheaper" was one classic example which led to three failed spacecraft missions to Mars). JPL always seems to have some damn new management fad they try to force on the engineers and scientists, and the management fads are constantly changing.

There are still a few good people there, and one of them was in charge of MER. I think that's primarily why it was a success, but don't look for many more successful projects out of JPL until they dump a few hundred bureaucrats.

Re:Why?

[KeensMustard]

Do you understand the difference between traveling, and looking at travel books?

Well, yes. Yes I do. I also understand that I'm not going to travel in space - therefore, regardless of whether or not a (different) human goes or a robot, all I'm going to see is photos. And so are the vast, vast majority of other humans. It makes no difference to me whether a human takes those photos or a robot. What matters is what they take pictures of, the rest is irrelevant.

The reason to explore space is to find a place to go, not to collect photographs.

What rubbish. "Finding a place to go" is a valueless, meaningless exercise without a goal. Exploration is not goalless. All explorers have a goal - to find an inland sea, to map a coastline, make money for their financier, observe the transit of venus, etc. And in space, robots make better explorers (on our behalf) then fragile humans. It's absurd to scale back real exploration for meaningless ego driven exercises.