Word: labs
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...company R&D is a secretive thing, often taking place in isolated Skunk Works closed off from the rest of the company, to say nothing of the world. That's not the way things work at J.P.L. The lab is not owned by NASA but rather is a nonprofit, federally funded research center managed by the California Institute of Technology and does its work for NASA under contract. The academics who work there come from the world of peer review, in which even theoretical work isn't considered sound until a lot of objective eyes have had a chance...
...never have made it to the surface if someone who saw the plans had not begun fretting about the Martian winds the ships would encounter and argued for additional thrusters to counteract them. The thrusters were added, and the design change made all the difference. More recently, the lab was planning the less publicized Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)--a twin-satellite pas de deux designed to measure Earth's gravitational field and its effect on ocean currents. A critical step was eliminating any wobble between the ships. J.P.L. staff members had been working with engineers at Stanford University...
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...