Space Policy Edition: Whose JPL is it? A historian on the lab’s 90-year search for itself

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy here at The Planetary Society. This is the show that goes into the processes and policies behind space exploration. This month, or maybe let's start 90 years ago, roughly this month, Halloween 1936, some Caltech graduate students haul a small rocket into the Arroyo Seco north of Pasadena, try to light it up and send it up. It doesn't. In fact, it fails, it kind of blows up, but that ignominious moment serves as the unofficial start or the birthday of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which turned 90 years old last month. JPL is, if you're listening to this, I don't need to convince you, a somewhat hallowed institution, a place as a kid that I grew up with, worshiping to a certain degree for the incredible missions of exploration that it has made, Voyager maybe being the most prominent, curiosity, perseverance, rovers, spacecraft that push the boundaries all over the Solar System.

JPL is facing perhaps its biggest identity crisis. This year, NASA announced for the very first time that it would compete the contract to manage JPL. JPL is a weird NASA center in that it's not technically a NASA center. It's an FFRDC, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, one of those kind of unique government institutions that is paid for by government, but managed by a private entity, in this case, California Institute of Technology, Caltech, and it has been for 90 years. Caltech does have a contract that renews every five years until this year, every time had been an automatic renewal. Now, there's nowhere that says Caltech has to run JPL. Competition isn't a bad thing as long as the competition is fair. And I think the fairness and motivation of why now underlies and colors, frankly, the process that Caltech and JPL will be going through here as NASA considers other options.

We know that at least one other university, Texas A&M, intends to submit a bid to run JPL. There could be others. Will they run it better? It's hard to say. What we do know is that it would be very different. So to help me figure out this history of JPL and its relationship with Caltech and its relationship to NASA is Peter Westwick. He literally wrote the book on the history of JPL called Into the Black: A History of JPL from 1976 to 2004. I very much recommend the book. It's incredibly insightful. And then particularly looks into this relationship at times tense between JPL and Caltech. He's also the director of the Aerospace History Project at the Huntington USC Institute on California in the West, faculty member at University of Southern California, author of other books, and just a general expert on the relationship of Southern California to the aerospace program in the United States. We grapple with this question, which has been an open question for a very long time. Is it Caltech's JPL or is it NASA's JPL? Or maybe it's no one's JPL, maybe it's the people's JPL. We'll figure that out.

He'll join me here in just a minute. But before he does, I need to make a pitch for The Planetary Society, the organization that I work for that supports and enables this show. We're a nonprofit and a membership-based nonprofit. So we rely on people like you listening right now to enable us. We don't have big corporate funding. We don't take government money. That independence is critical, truly critical right now and very valuable, but that doesn't happen without individual support. So if you're not a member, please consider joining us. It starts at just four bucks a month, planetary.org/join. If you are a member, first, thank you very much. And then consider, can you up your membership? We have higher membership levels. You can support us more. You can also just donate at planetary.org/donate. Again, without individual support, we would not exist. And now, Dr. Peter Westwick. Peter Westwick, thanks for joining us at the Space Policy Edition this month.

Peter Westwick: Thank you for having me.

Casey Dreier: Let's start at the beginning for those of you who aren't aware with the history of JPL, just the broad initial history. How did JPL start and did it start from Caltech? Did it come from the government? What was its origins?

Peter Westwick: Well, it started as an army lab going back to the 1930s. This group of graduate students at Caltech are working on rockets and some folks in the army got wind of it because they're very connected to some other projects at this aeronautics work at Caltech. And the army got interested in this, started supporting this work under a contract with Caltech. This is before JPL actually exists. They're just supporting this research project at Caltech. World War II comes along and the army ramps up its work, especially for rockets for what they call jet assisted takeoff of airplanes from short aircraft runways and from aircraft carriers to attach rockets to the wings of an airplane and it helps it take off in a short distance. So it wasn't JPL yet, but this project is growing with army support during World War II and actually getting into mass production of these rockets.

And then they formalized this, I think the actual formation date of what they now call the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was in 1944, and they located at a site off of campus after some early rocket experiments had a unfortunate tendency to explode in campus buildings. And that was basically the origins of JPL and then it grows under army support through the early Cold War, working now on rockets for first short range, then intermediate range rockets for the Cold War against the Soviets. And then the space race comes along, split neck the potential for satellites and then spacecraft to the moon and then to other planets. JPL is transferred from the army into this new agency, NASA, and it is the only one of the major centers that was not previously a center under the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA, but NASA swallows up JPL, this army lab, and ever since JPL has been working under NASA, initially focused on planetary spacecraft, and then it's diversified since then.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, that story of diversification I think is one of the key themes I want to explore with you because it's very notable and the lab has had to find ways to survive in a sense over the years. Just going back to this origin of rocketry, so is that why it's called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory because they were actually propelling jets to take off faster by attaching a rocket to them? Is that where that came from?

Peter Westwick: Yeah, there was that and in a sense there was also a bit of branding going on because there's this famous early quote by some of the folks involved that rockets were seen as this Buck Rogers, not entirely worthy of high academic attention at the time. And so there was a sense that rockets were a little bit out there, so to speak. So jet propulsion, I guess, seemed a more appropriate name than saying the rocket propulsion lab. So there was in a sense that I think that was also part of the reason for the name was to spin it a little bit, I guess.

Casey Dreier: Branding from the beginning, I guess.

Peter Westwick: Yes.

Casey Dreier: Do you see a reason is there, could JPL have happened anywhere or was there something about Southern California at that era that led to JPL not just existing, but ultimately thriving?

Peter Westwick: Well, one of the reasons why the army came to Caltech and gave Caltech this initial contract was the army was already working with Caltech very closely on problems of aeronautics and aviation. And this goes back to Caltech in the mid 1920s, decided to make itself into a major center for aeronautics. They hired away Theodore von Kármán, who at the time was one of the world's leading authorities on aeronautics, brought him to the United States, installed him at Caltech, got some funding initially from the Guggenheim Foundation to create what was called the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech. GALCIT was the acronym. And from the outset, because of this, Caltech making itself into a major center for aeronautics. And some of this was very much a conscious effort on the part of Caltech's leaders. They saw aeronautics as one of the future major industries, and together with local boosters around Los Angeles area, they decided to make Southern California the center for this new industry. The way that Detroit was emerging as a major center for the auto industry, they aimed to make LA and Southern California the center for the aircraft industry, and they succeeded.

But Caltech was very much involved in that from this effort in the mid 1920s, this very conscious effort. So the point of this is that the Army at the time was in charge of the American aircraft, the Army Air Services, Army Air Corps. The Air Force is basically under the Army, what we now think of as the Air Force that is. So the Army is working with these local aircraft builders in Southern California. And as part of that, it was a general called Hap Arnold. So General Arnold was very much a presence around Southern California, and he knew von Kármán well and was seeing him constantly. So when von Kármán alerted Hap Arnold, General Arnold, to the fact that these graduate students were working on rocketry, so that was the connection through the aircraft industry in Southern California was Caltech was already engaged with them. The local aircraft firms were testing their aircraft and the wind tunnels at Caltech. So it was, I don't want to say natural, but it is completely understandable how Caltech got army support for this rocket project when these graduate students started working on it.

Casey Dreier: It's astonishing how different that decision process is like, oh, some graduate students are blowing up some rockets. Well, maybe the army should invest and make this a rocket center of excellence.

Peter Westwick: Right. Well, I mean the context of the 1930s, especially the late 1930s, war is looming and the situation in Europe is increasingly dire, and there is a sense that a war might be on the horizon and we need to start mobilizing for it. So that army contract was very much part of that context.

Casey Dreier: You're alluding to this idea that rocketry at the time, it wasn't taken necessarily seriously, that there was at least rockets beyond earth, but missiles must have been something more reasonable. Is that why it starts with this kind of practical implementation? And then was there any kind of initial longer game with Caltech or the founders of JPL to say, "We want to be sending things into space, not just making missiles." or was it just very much resolutely we're going to be building missiles from the beginning and then space came as an opportunity later on?

Peter Westwick: Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. It's a tricky question. I would say that the focus really in the '20s and '30s was aircraft were still very much being developed, and that was seen as we're going to put our resources, we're going to make our investments into making aircraft better and going from wood aircraft to metal aircraft and working on the propulsion systems, working on the flight controls. And the sense was in this next war, aircraft are going to be the major difference maker and rockets are not going to reach a point where they're going to play a role in the next war, unless as this kind of additional technology, which they're actually a part of an airplane where you add them on with the wings and to help an airplane take off in a short distance, but not as a standalone weapon system. Of course, the Nazis had other ideas with the V1 and the V2 rockets, but really in the United States, that was not really so much a thing until, of course, the Nazis demonstrated possibilities.

Casey Dreier: But this wasn't like a von Braun who had ambitions for space flight and then found a way to work with the army or even Goddard who was fantasizing about space travel. Was there any of that bound up into JPL or was this purely-

Peter Westwick: Well, so no, I think the graduate students were working on it definitely and there were amateur groups and Goddard was an example of this, people who were thinking about rockets as a vehicle into outer space, as a way for humans to access outer space. But as far as the army was concerned, that was really, they are focused more on more immediate objectives.

Casey Dreier: I guess I'm asking about this because of this idea of JPL having to adapt throughout its existence and how it became the center for planetary exploration from starting building things for the army. If there is this common thread of space exploration that's looking for ways to express itself or it was more of an opportunistic, here's where specialization can happen, maybe this helps with some discussion of how JPL ended up building Explorer 1 and being responsible for that initial space success.

Peter Westwick: Yeah. Well, I mean the one thing I would say about, I mean, I think apropos York, the gist of your question I think is that from the 1930s through World War II into the early Cold War, the work for the Army was really directed towards rockets for military purposes. And that meant initially in World War II, again, these jet assisted takeoff rockets for airplanes, but then in the early Cold War on this succession of rockets for initially short range and then intermediate range, what would later be called intermediate range ballistic missiles, but ballistic missiles to deliver warheads to targets. And that included, by the way, nuclear warheads, so that the corporal and the sergeant missiles in the 1950s were designed to carry nuclear warheads in an eventual conflict with the Soviet Union. So that was very much, the Army was not paying for this work so that these Caltech folks could explore outer space. The Army was very much, they had their eyes on the prize and the prize was defeating the Soviets in the Cold War.

Casey Dreier: During this period, '50s and '60s of JPL was, well, let's say '50s, this relationship with Caltech, was Caltech faculty happy with that this is part of the army? Because that started to become issues with working with the Department of Defense started to increase tensions later on. But during this period, was that a source of tension that you're aware of or was this just accepted and part of the overall attitudes at the time?

Peter Westwick: So I think in this period, it is safe to say that with very few exceptions, that Caltech and JPL were very much on board with working for the military. Now this was the early Cold War. A lot of Caltech faculty had worked on military projects during World War II, including on actually rocket rockets, another rocket program, not under JPL, but on rockets like attack rockets, assault rockets. And the leadership of Caltech in the early Cold War had some qualms about Caltech's association with military work in general and the implications. But for the most part, they were very much on board with national security is a national priority and we will work towards it.

Casey Dreier: So let's move on then to this question of how JPL got Explorer 1. How did JPL get into the space business finally? And then I promise we'll get to the part of your book that you actually covered, the 1960s, but I want to catch that. Let's get JPL to how we start recognizing it today.

Peter Westwick: Yeah. So I mean, JPL got the job of designing the little vehicle that went on top of the first rocket to launch at American satellite in orbit, the response to Sputnik. And the story here I think is pretty well known. Eisenhower wanted this initially to be a civilian enterprise. The American response to Sputnik should not be a military project, but rather a civilian project. And this might've involved a little bit of sheep dipping. But the initial effort, of course, blew up. It failed. And with the American public and Congress breathing down the necks of the administration, Eisenhower said, "Okay, basically JPL and von Braun, you step up and get us a satellite into space." And the satellite was JPL, that was Explorer satellite. So this is the famous photo of von Braun and Pickering holding up the Explorer model in the auditorium of the National Academy of Sciences.

Casey Dreier: You mentioned this, but let's dwell on this for a second because this is the crux of the ongoing tensions of JPL in itself identity. When JPL becomes a part of NASA, it's not a NASA center in the way that the other NASA, it's not federally directed, federally run. It is its own thing. So why is JPL in a sense unique in that context and what class of system is it in? Because this is not unique in government. There are other institutions I think that are run like JPL, but it's unique within NASA as having this relationship.

Peter Westwick: Yeah. So there are many other, at one point they're called GOCOs, government owned contractor operated, later FFRDCs, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers. And there are examples, especially in the national laboratory system, which was originally under the Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC, and then under the Department of Energy when it was formed in the 1970s. So the labs at Los Alamos and Livermore and Berkeley and Oak Ridge and Brookhaven and Argonne, they're operated by contractors not owned by the federal government. So NASA is a little bit different in that it inherited this network of laboratories, what they called centers, from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, the NACA, which goes back to World War I and work on airplanes. So NASA takes over all of these NACA centers, but then it also wants JPL's capabilities. JPL is working on rockets. It's also developed a bunch of skills in guidance and control and telemetry, radio telemetry to its rockets.

And NASA says, "We really need those capabilities." So NASA goes and basically takes JPL away from the army and basically says, "Okay, your skills in telemetry especially will apply to what we want to do with spacecraft, automated spacecraft, which we're going to have to be able to communicate with and guide and control. And JPL, you're the best ones to take that job." So JPL went over to NASA. At that point, the rocket research was basically being handed off to industry and NASA already had other places also working on rockets. So JPL could say, "Well, the rocket work might be fizzling out, so to speak, but the spacecraft thing looks like a job for the future, so let's do it." So JPL and Caltech were amenable, and NASA basically took JPL off the army's hands wholesale.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. So NASA pays Caltech an annual fee and operations fee basically, and then Caltech runs JPL for NASA, but all the hardware there is paid for by NASA, right? It's a slightly strange setup where NASA's not administrating it directly. So the relationship is JPL has an allegiance to both Caltech and the space agency, and JPL is also its own thing in a way that other NASA centers aren't.

Peter Westwick: Right. And this is really a difficult relationship because it's a three-body problem, as they say, or it's a triangle. So you've got JPL at one vertex and then Caltech and then NASA. And yes, JPL is the only NASA center that's operated under contract with Caltech. And so the idea is that it goes back to, well, JPL has always been a Caltech project going back to this rocket research in the 1930s, and it just grew and grew and grew, and they just maintained this relationship, Caltech's oversight as JPL grew. And then when NASA took it over, Caltech comes along with it as the administrator. So yes, Caltech oversees JPL, all JPL staff, they are Caltech employees. Their paychecks come from Caltech. There's an idea that this helps with retaining staff, with recruiting and retaining staff, with the idea that you are going to be Caltech as your employer.

And Caltech definitely has some cache as one of the leading engineering institutions in the world. The contract provides this kind of elitism by association with Caltech, and the contract also provides a measure of independence from NASA. So in theory, it allows JPL to do stuff without having NASA bureaucrats looking over its shoulder all the time. There's a geographic component here too, and that JPL is about as far away from Washington DC as you can get in the continental US. So there is administrative distance, there are geographic distance, and that allows JPL to be more innovative. And the Caltech environment also, of course, encourages innovation also. So there are these advantages to it. And in return, NASA pays Caltech, as you said, this management fee plus some overhead to cover administrative expenses. And that relationship has continued to this day, but with occasional struggles and tensions and questions from basically every side.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. You have a line that's frequently asked, "Is it NASA's JPL or Caltech's JPL? Whose JPL is it?"

Peter Westwick: And both institutions, I think, would answer that it's theirs. NASA says that it's ours, and Caltech says, "No, you don't. It's ours. That's why you're paying us every year. Why are you paying us if it's not ours?" But Caltech has been the only contractor since the lab's founding going back to, well, World War II and before that, back in the 1930s, but that is now being questioned today. And there's also some other issues here in that JPL eventually grows to be far bigger than Caltech itself. Caltech has always prided itself on remaining really small and really elite with the idea that that way it can be more nimble and it doesn't get bogged down with big stuff. But the problem then from the view of the Caltech faculty is that it becomes the tail wagging the dog. You've got this giant thing, which is JPL, maybe this metaphor isn't quite right, but JPL is far bigger than Caltech, but Caltech is really the administrator for it.

Casey Dreier: There's more JPL staff than Caltech staff.

Peter Westwick: Far more. I mean, thousands. It varies between, depending on when you look, say four to 6,000 staff, which is much, much bigger than Caltech.

Casey Dreier: And I think numbers of the operating fee that Caltech would get at times was roughly 1/5 of its tuition that was coming in from students or operating funds.

Peter Westwick: The accounting gets fuzzy, but basically, depending on what period of time you're looking, but from the 1970s through the 1990s at least, if you add the management fee together with the overhead that Caltech got from NASA, it was about 15% of the budget, of the campus budget, which is substantial. So when some Caltech faculty suggested, "Well, hang on a second. Why are we running this giant laboratory off campus?" The Caltech administrators would say, "Well, if we get rid of it, where are we going to find that 15% of our annual budget?" It's basically equivalent of $100,000 per professor. So the administration would go back to the faculty and say, "Okay, do you each want to take $100,000 haircut? No. Okay, then please be quiet and we will proceed with the status quo."

Casey Dreier: You talked about some of the stated advantages of having a government-owned contractor operated or FFRDC, our Federally Funded Research and Development Centers, of being more nimble, being maybe able to attract more staff, more talent because of its association with Caltech. It's supposed to be less bureaucratic. When you were really studying this, did you see examples of this in practice of JPL that were distinct from other NASA centers? This is something I've heard a lot about, and I'm not saying I don't believe it, but I'm actually curious if you saw that come up in the history of JPL as an institution, as a creator in engineering center of excellence and so forth.

Peter Westwick: Well, I mean, one other advantage that Caltech provides is it does have this world-class faculty, not including, especially in science and engineering. So JPL, for its entire history, has drawn on Caltech students and faculty for its programs, going back to the graduate students who are first working on rockets for the army. But you see this, especially in the project scientist on JPL missions. So Bruce Murray, who's head of the camera team on several of the Mariner projects in the '60s and early '70s, and then becomes the director of JPL, Ed Stone, Caltech professor, is lead scientist on the Voyager mission, the maybe greatest mission in the history of JPL, and Caltech faculty member was the lead scientist on it. And you can multiply these examples several times over. So Caltech faculty have regularly engaged as scientists on JPL missions, Caltech graduate students, postdocs also work on JPL projects.

So there is definitely an advantage there. And here, the proximity helps, I think, in that JPL, yes, it was located at some distance from the Caltech campus after these early rocket experiments blew up, but it's still about maybe 15-minute drive from campus, depending on traffic. So it is entirely reasonable for faculty to be able to pop up to the lab during the course of a day, get back down to campus, go up to the lab, and basically work, collaborate with JPL engineers and scientists on these JPL projects. So there is that collaborative aspect of it, which is also another argument for Caltech having this contract.

Casey Dreier: Right. We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

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Casey Dreier: Your book starts in 19... Well, nominally covers 1976 to 2001. And again, we'll just skip through this era of the '60s. I feel like JPL, they start making lunar missions, they struggle with ranger, they ultimately figure out systems engineering. They start making, as you said, the mariner missions to Venus and Mars and ultimately Mercury, and maybe cap it with Viking and they make the orbiters and then help with the landing. I'm guessing they grew at this point, and that's where an internalization of JPL is a planetary center. We make planetary exploration that seems to be, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems to be really when that identity coalesced for the lab leading up during this era in the 1960s and early '70s.

Peter Westwick: Yes. So one of the things that happens with the transition to NASA is that JPL has been working on these rockets for the army, and there was some pressure to produce. We are in the Cold War of the Soviet Union and the Army says, "We really need these rockets." And JPL got in the habit of with a rocket, you don't want to test fire a whole bunch of rockets, but you can, you go out to White Sands Missile Range and you fire a rocket off and see what happens. And they get into this habit of just like, "Well, we'll test these rockets until they succeed and then we'll test them a little bit more." But of course, when you transition to NASA and building spacecraft that you're sending out into outer space, you can't just test fire them until they work.

You've got one chance to get it right. And of course, when you fire a satellite or a spacecraft out in outer space, if that spacecraft fails, you can't bring it back into the shop and repair it and then launch it again. So JPL learns basically right off the bat when they're making some of the ranger spacecraft to go to the moon, that they experience some failures and they learn the hard way that the nation will not tolerate failures of these very expensive spacecraft. They're very expensive and it's very embarrassing when they fail. So JPL gets raked over the coal in Congress and with NASA, and they develop this discipline in both senses of the word, both in the sense of an intellectual field, an engineering field, and also discipline in the sense of discipline and rigor that they learn to develop this discipline of systems engineering, which is basically this regime to produce these technological systems beyond the outer edges of current possibility, but that won't fail the first time you launch them.

And this regime of systems engineering really becomes the lab's identity. It produces this culture of ruthless attention to detail, these legendary design review boards where an engineer presenting their plans for a particular component of the spacecraft get basically just grilled and reduced to just a quivering puddle, even very seasoned engineers. And this also incredible work ethic of, "Hey, if there's a deadline coming on a particular project to launch and we've got a launch window coming up, you do the work whatever it takes. So if that means 80 hour work weeks or a hundred-hour work weeks, so be it." So JPL develops this culture of very extremely rigorous systems engineering and commitments to the job. And also some of the commitment is also just because you are inspired by the fact that, "Hey, you are building a spacecraft that is going to, whatever it is, land on the moon, orbit Mars, visit all of the outer planets." And there was an inspiration in that, but there's also this, so the transition of NASA brings in this new kind of culture and forges it through these early failures. And that becomes the lab's identity and its success is really basically built on this discipline that developed.

Casey Dreier: Was it really then starting to be in the mid 1970s that the resources that the lab had gotten used to were suddenly appearing to dry up? You referred to this as the bathtub or Bruce Murray referred to it as the bathtub, this idea. The planetary program started pulling back. There's not a lot of work coming down the pathway, the line, and JPL suddenly has to figure out what to do.

Peter Westwick: Right. And NASA is reprioritizing. So it is ironic because it's the moment of greatest triumph for JPL with the Voyager encounters at Jupiter and Saturn, returning these spectacular images and all this incredible data and showing how diverse the outer Solar System is. And at the very same time, NASA is basically threatening to drastically cut JPL's budget, canceling the follow on missions to Voyager to the point where some people are seriously discussing maybe JPL is, I think the quote is, "Surplus to our needs and maybe we can just close it down." And NASA is prioritizing the space shuttle and the spacial economy as well. We're going to be doing a bunch more stuff in near earth orbit and maybe not launching stuff on rockets off of launchpads, but just lobbying stuff out of the space shuttle bay. The space shuttle is the focus for NASA and JPL is seen as maybe it is becoming superfluous. And there's a sense of panic around JPL of like, okay, we've got to do something to save the laboratory and to save what they see as this unique national capability.

Casey Dreier: Now would you call this maybe the second reinvention then of JPL around this era or is that going too far? The first being the transition from missiles to space program because they start having new initiatives to say, "Okay, we're not just going to do planetary stuff. We're going to look for energy." And that was actually for a while, the big focus was solar panels and energy systems, but then earth observing satellites, astronomy, Department of Defense work, national security. It seems like they suddenly are expanding what JPL does and trying to define that and work that in with their identity as well.

Peter Westwick: Right. So what ends up happening with the bathtub, this gigantic dip in JPL's budget is it eventually does recover and NASA agrees to install new planetary projects. Galileo gets rebooted. The Mars Observer project comes online and then subsequent projects come after that, Cassini and so on. So the planetary program eventually rebounds. So it's not so much that this is another gigantic change in identity and mission for JPL. But as you say, the lab did begin diversifying. It had already, even before the bathtub was already diversifying, some of this is a way to diversify its funding sources at a time when NASA was drawing back at the space race ends, Apollo's over, and also there's this sense of almost crisis in the United States in the 1970s, the sense of malaise, the era of limits. And maybe we need to shift our focus, shift our gaze from outer space down to all of these many pressing social problems down here on earth, of which there are many.

So there is a sense of JPL, like maybe we apply our expertise in systems engineering to things like alternative energy sources, to solar energy, to urban transportation, to law enforcement. Even earlier in the 1970s, JPL was working on some of these broader social projects, but then this bathtub comes along and there's a sense of, well, even within the space program, there's other things that we could be doing. Astronomy is a big one, especially infrared astronomy and also earth observing satellites. So instead of sending our spacecraft out to learn all these great things about Jupiter and Saturn and their satellites, how about we learn more about our own home planet and maybe again, it helps us solve some problems through understanding earth a little bit better. So satellites that will understand the oceans.

Casey Dreier: It seems like there was quite a bit of tension though with Caltech around this very same time as JPL was saying, "Well, again, whose lab is it?" Because they said, "We wanted to start doing work for non-NASA agencies and we want to start doing work." And then NASA was worried that they'd be doing too much work with stuff that NASA had paid for. Caltech seemed to be a little worried about some of the top secret or national security work that they were trying to do. So it sounds like at this period there was just a lot of uncertainty about the identity of the lab itself. And I actually really like to hear you talk about, was it the orange study? Because that relationship between Caltech and JPL seemed a little strained during the 1970s, it strikes me as.

Peter Westwick: Yes. And so some of this was, so there's this famous report, the so-called Orange Report, and it was co-chaired... It was a committee, but it was co-chaired by a Caltech faculty member and a JPL engineer, both senior figures on campus. Robbie Vogt was the campus professor and Jack James was the JPL engineer. Robbie Vogt, I think was really maybe a primary driver of that, that came up with all these recommendations for how to improve basically campus lab relations. Let's make it easier. And even some things as easier as like how about just some designated parking spaces for faculty up at JPL? So they'd make this 15-minute drive up to the lab and then they have to circle the parking lot for 20 minutes looking for a parking spot. Now just how about some designated Caltech parking spots up front? Which I'm happy to say were still there when I was working on this book because as a Caltech faculty representative, I got to use them.

Casey Dreier: You got to still use them. But there was also, it seemed like there was at least among some Caltech faculty maybe looked down their nose a bit at JPL as well for not being academic or scientific enough, right?

Peter Westwick: Yeah, it's funny because JPL thinks they are the best of the best and they are the lead and they're the only ones who can pull off these incredible missions, sending spacecraft to Mars and then eventually to outer planets with Voyager and they're doing these incredible things. And meanwhile, the Caltech faculty who have very high opinions of their own, for very good reasons, of their own scientific and engineering attainment, they're looking down at JPL staff. As you know, they're not quite up to the Caltech standards, maybe not the JV, but they're also not the starters on the varsity team here. And also that JPL might eventually do some stuff that embarrasses Caltech either by blowing spacecraft up on launchpads or getting into some of these more socially oriented programs, urban transportation programs. Why is JPL doing this kind of stuff and what does this have to do with systems engineering?

And this diversification in the 1970s raises this question about identity at the lab. And if JPL diversifies, is it going to become a jack of all trades master of none? It's going to lose its claim to this unique capability for planetary spacecraft based on its ability and systems engineering. And it's just going to become one of a multitude of contractors who are working on basically job shops or whatever agency will pay them. So Caltech launches the study, the Orange Report, comes up with these recommendations. Caltech and JPL dually implement some of them. The storm passes. And one of the things the Orange Report does is it's, "Hey, Caltech is getting 15 to 20% of its budget every year from JPL." So there are some very concrete benefits here that would be hard-

Casey Dreier: Can I go back to one thing though that you said that I think I want to dwell on about this identity of JPL as it started to expand what it did into these non-space sectors? You have quotes from people who said that they didn't really find that interesting to work on these as well. They didn't have the same drive or didn't seem as important or changing to do a Voyager-like mission than do solar energy efficiency. And there was something about that that struck me in terms of what makes JPL unique and what does it have to offer, which is almost because it's specialized, you do draw people who want to work, it said a hundred hours to get something done to go through these rigors of systems engineering to build the thing that will land on Mars. And once you start to diffuse that, there's some weird interesting thing where even though it's more practical, because it's more practical, is there's something less exciting about it, at least for some types of engineers.

Peter Westwick: Yeah, and I think that's right. And I think that when you come to JPL, you are joining this organization that has built the Mariners and Voyager and Galileo and Cassini and Mars Pathfinder and the Mars Rovers. We are now decades removed from those missions, but each one of those missions was a revelation to the general public. Mars Pathfinder, we've got this little car, this little micro car, and it's like the size of a little dog and it's driving around on Mars. Mars Rovers, okay, now they're bigger. They actually like the size of car and they're driving around on Mars and sending us back these incredible pictures. So there is this sense that at JPL, if you are an engineer at JPL, you are doing things that few and perhaps no other place on earth can do.

Nobody has come close to repeating the Voyager mission, sending these spacecraft out through the outer planets, past their moons, and returning these incredible photos that also completely changed, transformed our understanding of the Solar System and of humankind's place in the Solar System. So this is in that sense of mission, of purpose, you are exploring outer space, you're transforming our understanding of the Cosmos and our understanding of humankind's place in it. This is a transcendental purpose. And as you say, it's why people dedicate a great sacrifice to their personal lives and their families, why they dedicate such incredible work to these missions.

Casey Dreier: So how would you say relatively quickly, how did JPL survive this era? When people are talking about JPL as a surplus, that's a pretty scary moment. And there was some pretty scary moments in the very early few years of the Reagan administration. It was a combination of JPL and Caltech working together. Did NASA just change its mind? How did the lab make it out of this big squeeze?

Peter Westwick: Right. Well, partly it was by finding these other missions to get it across the bathtub to the other side. The other aspect to this diversification was, as you mentioned, in the early '80s, the Reagan administration comes on board. It is this revival of the Cold War, which had actually begun under the late Carter administration, but Reagan really gooses it, and all of a sudden military space is very much a national priority. And when these people are talking about JPL becoming surplus to NASA's needs, some of those same people are saying, "But the military really needs the kind of capabilities that JPL has. Maybe JPL should just go over and work for the military and basically return to its original sponsor in the military." And JPL has capabilities, space imaging systems, the ability to launch these robotic semi-autonomous spacecraft, and maybe the US military could make good use of some of these capabilities.

So there is JPL in the early '80s begins ramping up its military presence. Now, the military presence has never entirely gone away, and JPL had maintained a really small amount, maybe 5% of its program in the background doing some stuff for the military, monitoring Soviet rocket launches through its telemetry and things like that. And some of its staff had also maintained their security clearances because of that. So in the early '80s, it goes back to working for the military on some of these projects and to the point where maybe up to a quarter, 25% of JPL's budget is coming from various military agencies. So that's another way that JPL gets across the bathtub is by returning to the military. And then when NASA then comes through its own kind of crisis of identity and says, "No, planetary missions actually do belong in our remit and we will resume supporting them." then JPL can then go, "Okay, well we're back to our main purpose and we're back to building Galileo and Cassini."

Casey Dreier: That nimbleness, it seems like, of the lab to be able to do that.

Peter Westwick: It's a very pragmatic approach like, "Hey, we'll do what we have to do to get through this." Since then, the military stuff has never quite gone away. The last time I checked several years ago, military projects were still around five or 10% of the lab program. I mean, one other aspect of this though is, of course, going back to the military, there was the issue of classification and security clearances. And one of the problems for Caltech, which came up in the mid 1970s, and then especially in the early '80s when JPL was talking about getting more heavily into military stuff, is how can Caltech faculty exert oversight of classified JPL projects? And the faculty at Caltech also, they have a particularly strong role in the governance of the institute. And Caltech faculty who don't have clearances, they're going to be in the dark about what JPL is doing. And Caltech faculty say, "No, we really want to know what JPL is doing. Okay, maybe we'll say it's fine, but if it's classified, we'll have no way of knowing and JPL can just go up there and run amuck." And this is also getting back to your earlier question about why Caltech was happy to run JPL as an army lab in the 1950s. But this was in the 1950s, it was just after World War II, the greatest generation, all that stuff. But after the Vietnam War, the US military has a much different image on American college campuses, including Caltech. So when JPL in the early 1980s talks about going back and becoming a military laboratory again, it's in a much different context than it had experienced back in the '40s and '50s. So some Caltech faculty are now opposing JPL doing military work on principled grounds. So JPL at one point talks about acquiring this really major project, basically running a think tank for the army would be an equivalent of the RAND Corporation specifically for the army. It was called the Royal Center. And the Caltech faculty get wind of this, and some of them are just basically over my dead body.

There were some less principled reasons for opposition, one of them being the fact that military officers are now going to be walking around campus in uniform and showing up at Athenaeum, as a faculty club in uniform, which would be a much different vibe from these casual laid back Caltech campus. So that was also an aspect of this is classification and secrecy also inject an issue into the Caltech JPL relationship as far as oversight by faculty. But I mean, against that, there was, on the other hand, an argument from JPL is that we should keep tabs on what is going on in the military just for our own work. We need to know what the military is working on in space technology just because it might help us build spacecraft. So for instance, what is the National Reconnaissance Office, the NRL Display Agency, what is it doing in sensors and imaging systems? Basically, are we JPL reinventing the wheel on some of these technologies where the NRO or some of these military intelligence agencies might be out in front of us?

Casey Dreier: Yeah. And you have some good examples of that in the book. Real quickly, I want to just jump forward into the '90s, which was another big culture shock for JPL with this Dan Golden, the NASA administrator, and Better, Faster, Cheaper, coming on the heels of another embarrassing failure with Mars Observer, a very large and expensive Mars mission that stopped responding right before it went into Mars orbit. So how did the lab manage that shift? Because they would make the bespoke Cadillac missions, and then they suddenly were told to do things for a lot less and a lot faster.

Peter Westwick: Right. So there's this kind of bigger question, I think implicit here in that. So JPL, it's really a Cold War institution. It was born in the late 1930s, really born as JPL during World War II, but kept alive and really grew in the early Cold War against the Soviet Union. When it was first building rockets, it was completely directed towards Cold War with the Soviets. And then when it shifts into planetary spacecraft, the context is the space race and beating the Soviets into outer space and demonstrating US superiority in technological innovation. So what happens to Cold War institutions when the Cold War ends? And JPL is not alone in this. What happens to Los Alamos, the weapons lab at the end of the Cold War?

And there's some soul-searching going on here, and what is now going to be our new justification for JPL if it's no longer the space race with the Soviets? And what JPL lands on is the new kind of, I mean, it's geopolitical, but in a different sense in that the new geopolitics is focused on economic competition, not so much ideological competition, let alone military competition, but more economic competition in the realm of high-tech industry. This is computers and the internet and all this stuff is going on.

So JPL reorients itself as justification to say that what we are doing is first of all, we're promoting technological innovation, which will underpin high-tech industries, and we're also encouraging through our space exploration. Space exploration is one of the way that children get excited about science and engineering, and that we are going to inspire new generations to enter STEM fields, and then those new generations will go out and provide the high-tech innovations that then underpin our economic competitiveness and therefore our geopolitical position and so on and so forth. So it's this new, it's a reorientation of JPL's purpose, still focusing on planetary spacecraft, but now with this new justification.

Casey Dreier: And I imagine that was another driven by survival moment for them to remain relevant and responsive to what NASA needed in order to stay in business.

Peter Westwick: Right. And how do we justify sticking around and continuing to spend spacecraft out into outer space? Well, one is technological innovation and the other one is this public outreach mission. So outreach starts getting a whole lot more emphasis in this period and websites and all this stuff. And it does, you look at the web traffic for JPL planetary encounters, and it's huge. I'm sure The Planetary Society keeps track of this kind of stuff because you're very much interested in those numbers also.

Casey Dreier: I think Pathfinder was one of the top, I think, largest movements of data on the internet at the time when it landed, if I remember correctly. Very last question here, and I know you have to go, but I'm very curious right now as we talk, JPL and his contract is up for competition pretty much for the first time in the history of JPL-Caltech relationship. Do you see a JPL without Caltech from everything that you've studied about it? How would that transition happen? Is it possible to consider JPL without Caltech?

Peter Westwick: Right. Yeah. So just I guess in May, I think it was, NASA announced that it's going to open the JPL contract competition. And actually my campus, USC, I understand, is contemplating making a bid for it. And I think Texas A&M is also shrunk.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, Texas A&M has confirmed that they have submitted a bid.

Peter Westwick: So I mean, the one thing I'd point out here is that there is an analogy here in the National Laboratory system that I mentioned earlier under the AEC and the DOE, the Department of Energy. JPL is unique among NASA centers and being run by a contractor, but all of the national labs have been run from the outset, starting with the Manhattan Project by contractors. So University of California runs Los Alamos, the Weapons Lab Los Alamos, and then eventually a Weapons Lab at Livermore in addition to the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. And then there's other national laboratories at Oak Ridge in Tennessee and Argonne near Chicago, Brookhaven in New York, but all of them are run by contractors, some by universities or university consortia, others by industrial corporations. But those contracts have changed hands, not all of them, but some of them have changed hands multiple times.

So Oak Ridge National Lab goes from initially the University of Chicago to Union Carbide Corporation for a few decades, and then to Martin Marietta and then actually some others. Even the University of California contracts for say Los Alamos, the federal agency, the Department of Energy, got basically dissatisfied enough with the university administration saying, "This great public university, what do you know about running a giant weapons lab? And we're going to force you basically to bring in some co-contractors, defense firms and some others to run these things." So for instance, Los Alamos I think is currently run by this consortium of the University of California. Interestingly, the Texas A&M and the Battelle Institute. For those labs, it has not been that exceptional for a contract to change hands, but this is a first for Caltech and JPL.

So I mean, one thing that would change with this is JPL is still in Caltech's backyard and just geography would, I think, be a factor here in that Caltech faculty is pretty easy for them to collaborate. Caltech faculty and students and graduate students and postdocs, it's fairly easy for them to collaborate on JPL projects because again, the campus is 15 minutes away. And it's also, I think, easier just for Caltech administrators to go up and have a conversation in person with the JPL director when it's just up the hill from Caltech. Maybe not so much the case if the administrator, if the contractor is say Texas A&M. USC, well, again, depending on traffic, this being Los Angeles, I can tell you sometimes it's a half hour drive, sometimes it's much more than a half hour drive to JPL, but it would be at least a little more manageable than say having to fly in from Texas A&M. And so there's a question of collaboration. I'm sure that JPL and NASA are factoring that into their calculus here on.

Casey Dreier: Have there been any studies on performance changes of these national labs when they do change management? Is that a consistent or understood metric or have they been successful?

Peter Westwick: I'm sure they have looked at it and the short answer is I don't know. I would say that it seems to me that when you start having these consortia, so you've got the University of California and Texas A&M and Battelle Memorial Institute all running Los Alamos. That seems to me complicated and it's complicated enough with UC and Los Alamos with the Department of Energy as this kind of triangle. But now if you're introducing additional vertices to this relationship, maybe these other institutions bring particular capabilities, but I would think that would be offset by just the complication of adding more cooks in the kitchen. I mean, the other thing I would point out about Caltech is that JPL is not entirely unique even at Caltech in that Caltech has some other organized research units, as the term of art used to be, ORUs for campuses where a campus will form this dedicated laboratory, usually laboratory or institute on campus or maybe off campus, but as a subset of a freestanding institution within the university.

And many universities have these, but Caltech has a couple of other ones, a couple of which are pretty good size. So Caltech together with MIT manages the laser interferometry gravitational observatory, L-I-G-O, LIGO. Caltech also, in this case together with the University of California, manages the Keck Telescopes in Hawaii. So those are pretty substantial physical facilities. I think they don't have anywhere near the scale just of staff and budget of, well, especially of staff of JPL. So I think JPL is still maybe not exceptional, maybe not unique at Caltech, but exceptional certainly in its size and just its inertia in its relationship with campus.

Casey Dreier: It'd be disruptive if nothing else, I can only imagine.

Peter Westwick: Very disruptive. So it's a very interesting question. Every once in a while NASA I think would float this as a threat to extract better concessions from Caltech in the negotiations over the contract. And there have been successful efforts by NASA to, so at one point it imposes a performance-based fee instead of just a flat fee that automatically gave Caltech every year and says, "No, we're going to base that on performance and we're going to come up with some metrics, and if you don't meet these metrics, then we're going to dock your fee." It ended up being Caltech squabbled about it and squawked about it, but eventually accepted it and it turned out to be not really have too much an effect in the long run. But this is a whole new level of initiative on the part of NASA to exert control over this. So I will be very curious as an interested observer to see what happens with it.

Casey Dreier: I guess I would firmly answer the question, is it Caltech's JPL or NASA's JPL? It seems like NASA's JPL.

Peter Westwick: Yeah. And the triangle has tilted towards NASA over time. It's ultimately a question of this question of whose JPL is it. It's a question of the boundary between the private and the public, the public sector and the private, and ultimately also between independence and public accountability. And over time, the American political system, this balancing act between technical independence and public accountability, well, the US government over time has gotten much more assertive in insisting on public accountability for taxpayer dollars. You can trace this in just the number of audits, the number of general accounting office, GAO audits who are passing through JPL every year, the size of the local NASA auditor staff. NASA maintains a little local office of JPL, which over time became less and less little. So you could see over decades the federal government through NASA and through these other agencies like the GAO exerting stronger and stronger control over JPL. And Caltech and JPL were constantly fighting this, but ultimately the triangle was tilting towards NASA.

Casey Dreier: Peter Westwick, I want to thank you so much for your time and insights. Your book, Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004, I found just fascinating and clearly could have gone on and on with you. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Peter Westwick: Thank you. It's been a very interesting conversation.

Casey Dreier: That's it for this month's episode of Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief Of space policy here at The Planetary Society, also the host of this show. The Planetary Society is a global member-supported nonprofit organization. If you're not a member, please consider joining us, planetary.org/join. If you are a member, thank you. You enable this show and all of our other great work to happen. Also responsible for this show, Rae Paoletta, our producer, Kate Howells, and Mark Hilverda, our associate producers for the show. Sarah Al-Ahmed is also the host of the weekly edition, of course, of Planetary Radio, executive producer, Mat Kaplan, the book club edition. Don't miss that show either. Andrew Lucas is our audio producer and makes us sound good. Thank you so much, Andrew. The theme for this show was written and composed by myself and my colleague at the society, Merc Boyan. Until next month. Ad astra.