Word: labs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sometimes those comments can get downright loopy, and that's how J.P.L. often likes things. Openness to wild ideas goes back to the 1960s, when the lab established an office to dream up plans for future missions, and an engineer crunching numbers one day happened to notice that in 1977, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would fall into a rare planetary conga line that they would not form again for 176 years. This insight set the stage for the spectacular four-planet Voyager flights of the 1970s and '80s. Today the business of blue-skying ideas has become more institutionalized...
...greatest resource J.P.L. brings to the space game, of course, is not good ideas as much as the people who generate them. The lab has always benefited from having its farm team of apprentice scientists right next door at Caltech. The first thing young engineers who come to work at the lab must do is learn the ways of J.P.L. as an institution, something that's easier to do here than at most other places of business. As long ago as the 1960s, J.P.L. embraced a concept known as "each one teach one," under which senior members of any team...
...J.P.L.'s chief engineer for solar-systems exploration. "The depth in the process of building the next generation to go where no one has gone before was a little bit broken." The money spigots opened up again in the '90s, but by then there were gaps in the lab's history chain...
J.P.L. is doing what it can to fix that problem, filling the mentoring hole by compiling painstaking lists of design principles--lessons learned when particular engineering techniques either did or didn't work. That system should serve in a pinch, but the lab is determined never to let the teaching system lapse again. "Mentoring is something we've been doing ad hoc for years," Manning says. "That's allowed us to collectively grow...
...smoothly as the J.P.L. systems run, the true test of the lab's business model comes when something goes wrong. Every time the lab pushes the launch button, billions of dollars, dozens of careers and decades of planning can be on the line. J.P.L. not only accepts the likelihood of the occasional costly flop but also expects it. Such a stomach for setbacks is a legacy of J.P.L.'s first director, William Pickering, a Caltech alumnus who learned his trade setting off rockets in the dry riverbed that is all J.P.L. once was. Dozens of those rockets sometimes blew themselves...