Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) can now breathe a collective sigh of relief. After a year-long delay, the lab’s Psyche mission finally launched in October to visit a metal-rich asteroid with the same name. The mission is a huge win for scientists who hope to better understand the role that these bizarre objects played in assembling the early solar system. And its liftoff is also a redemption for JPL itself, which faced a number of challenges as it prepared Psyche for launch—chief among them the waves of skilled-worker resignations that left the lab understaffed.
That is no small snag. It is also rather surprising. Sure, NASA as a whole already wears the crown of being the highest-ranked federal agency to work for, but JPL is widely seen as one of its most brilliant jewels. Where else can one’s work involve flying an aircraft across Mars or building a spacecraft to explore a watery moon of Jupiter for conditions suitable for extraterrestrial life? To many, it is a dream job. So why have some of JPL’s most vital workers jumped ship? To find out, Scientific American interviewed more than a dozen current and past employees who blame much of the brain drain on the high-stakes, high-stress atmosphere of the lab. Missions, not people, are the lab’s top priority, they say.
Although JPL declined to comment on a number of these issues, the lab is pursuing fixes: beefing up efforts to attract and keep top talent, making management changes and ensuring that any revisions made clear from the Psyche delay percolate throughout the entire lab.
Overstuffed and Understaffed
After Psyche’s slip last year, the space agency formed an independent review board to examine the misstep. The resulting “I think there are going to be bigger hiccups as time moves forward,” says one past employee. And those issues might percolate beyond MSR. Another employee who worked on Europa Clipper—a different hard mission ahead that will orbit around Jupiter and repeatedly sweep past the ice-covered moon for which it is named—is not optimistic that Clipper will launch in 2024. Although staffing issues were temporarily alleviated when Perseverance launched, she argues that many of those engineers will now naturally gravitate toward the lab’s official top priority—returning samples from Mars—and siphon personnel from Clipper and other projects. This could in turn force JPL to hire new employees to fill those voids, perpetuating the trend of relying too much on engineers with too little experience to solve a plethora of hard problems—the exact stumbling block that led to Psyche’s setbacks. But Leshin insists that the findings from the Psyche review have been applied to both MSR and Europa Clipper. And Figueroa, who chaired the MSR independent review and is currently chair of Clipper’s standing review board, has been keeping a watchful eye over both missions. He argues not only that Clipper is on track to launch next year but also that JPL as a whole is at capacity—meaning that it has the workforce it needs to deal with the work at hand. That is huge, given the number of empty positions during the Psyche troubles. It does not mean every problem has been solved, however. “For me to tell you that the workforce has been taken care of—that there is nothing to worry about—well, I would be lying if I said that,” Figueroa says. JPL has adapted well, he says, by bringing in new hires at a rate that roughly equals that of outgoing employees (at least in number), yet turnover remains an issue. Training new hires to get up to speed on an organization as complex as JPL and missions as daring as MSR and Clipper adds time and cost, he says—two things that cannot be taken for granted when missions must launch on schedule and on budget. “We have reached a stable environment,” Figueroa says. “But we need to be vigilant because it could be perturbed quickly.” Many argue that this is simply a new reality. “There is always going to be a demand between the commercial sector and NASA—they are drawing from the same source,” Figueroa says. And Lee agrees. “What we’re seeing is a problem that exists throughout the aerospace industry,” he says. “The number of people who can employ the kind of talent that we need to do this kind of work has increased drastically in the last half-decade to decade. And quite frankly, we can’t pay as much as these private companies can. And so we have to keep our people happy by giving them the joy of working on something that nobody else can do and try to do the best we can to keep them fired up.” In other words: dare mighty things. But Scientific American’s reporting suggests that might not be enough—especially if employees continue to feel like they are “cogs in the machine” (as one past employee put it) working horrendous hours for compensation they deem insufficient. It might even backfire. One past employee argues that young engineers will accept a position at JPL to add an impressive entry to their résumé while knowing they will soon move on. “They just look at JPL as a stepping stone,” she says. “In the space industry, you want people that are going to be around 20, 30 years to hold that longevity and train the next generation, but younger engineers know their value now. It’s not worth toughing out.” As such, many sources do not think that retention will dramatically improve. “You’re seeing that bleeding of talent because we’re not dumb—we know our worth,” Liam says. “And sorry, JPL, but we don’t get paid enough to keep suffering.”
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