Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off 100 contractors last week and will scale back some of the initial effort to bring parts from Mars to Earth, following a cost-cutting order from NASA that lawmakers called “short-sighted and misguided.”
In an email to staff on Thursday, JPL director Laurie Leshin said NASA is preparing for a federal budget that could limit space spending. Mars Sample Return mission $300 million this fiscal year — just 36% of the previous year’s $822 million budget and less than a third of the $949 million the Biden administration requested for the program.
“It will be difficult to adjust to such a large budget cut in one year,” Leshin wrote to employees at the federally funded La Cañada Flintridge research institution. “It is also becoming more likely that there will be impacts to the JPL workforce in the form of layoffs, and the way such JPL workforce actions are implemented means the impact will not be limited to MSR.”
Layoffs of contract employees and a hiring freeze are part of a labwide effort to reduce expenses, Leshin wrote this week. Additionally, NASA has ordered JPL to cease operations at the end of this month on a key project to return a piece of Mars to Earth, a joint project with the European Space Agency and one of the world’s largest and most complex missions. was carried out in the laboratory.
Work on Mars Sample Return Capture, Containment and Return System It will be halted while an independent review team analyzes the overall design of the highly anticipated mission, which aims to collect dust and rocks from Mars and bring them to Earth for study, Leshin wrote.
“These are painful but necessary adjustments as we work in the current budget environment to preserve our unique capabilities and world-class workforce for NASA and our nation,” JPL said in a statement.
The cuts come as Congress is still debating how to split the fiscal year 2024 budget.
Lawmakers criticized the agency’s decision to reduce staff and science on Mars studies before final numbers are available.
“NASA’s unilateral and unprecedented decision to withhold funding for the Mars Sample Return mission before Congress completes the appropriations process has devastating real-world consequences,” Representative Adam Schiff said in a statement Friday. “This critical mission has been identified as NASA’s highest scientific priority. ten year surveyand withdrawing now would mean relinquishing important American leadership in space science.
The sampler was originally planned to lift off in 2028 and return to Earth in 2033, following the first rocket launch from another planet.
One independent review In the report of the project commissioned by NASA last year, it was revealed that the mission “was not organized to be managed effectively” and that there was a “near zero probability” that the launch date would occur in 2028. Even reaching the delayed launch date of 2030 would require more than $1 billion a year for at least three years, starting in 2025.
The review concluded that the mission’s final price tag could be around $10 billion; This is more than double the $4.4 billion estimated in 2020.
California lawmakers He lobbied to protect JPL’s finances, citing the need to protect jobs and keep the US space program competitive. China has announced a mock repatriation mission to be launched in 2028 or 2030. specified reviewThis “will challenge U.S. technical, engineering and scientific leadership in Mars exploration.”
Inside a November letter NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a bipartisan group of six California lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate, said they were “surprised” by NASA’s preemptive austerity policy before the final budget was released.
Implementing the cuts ordered by NASA means JPL “will not be able to meet its 2030 launch window, billions of dollars of contracts supporting American businesses could be canceled, and hundreds of high-skilled jobs in California would be lost.” “If this uniquely talented workforce is lost to the private sector, it will be nearly impossible to reassemble.”
Last planetary science decade surveyIn a report prepared for NASA every 10 years by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, planetary scientists called the Mars Sample Return mission “the highest scientific priority of NASA’s robotic exploration efforts this decade” and argued that the program should be further developed. It will be completed “as soon as possible without any increase or decrease in its existing scope.”
But the authors warned that this ambitious mission should not come at the expense of other planetary sciences.
“Mars Sample Return is of fundamental strategic importance to NASA, U.S. leadership in planetary science, and international cooperation, and should be completed as quickly as possible.” mentioned in the report. “But its cost should not be allowed to undermine the long-term programmatic balance of the planetary portfolio.”
This story was first published in the Los Angeles Times.