by The Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off 100 contractors last week and will scale back part of its first-ever effort to bring pieces of Mars to Earth, following a cost-cutting order from NASA that lawmakers called “short-sighted and misguided.”
In an email to staff Thursday, JPL director Laurie Leshin said NASA is preparing for a federal budget that could limit spending on the Sample Return Mission to Mars at $300 million this fiscal year—just 36% of the previous year’s $822 million budget and less than one-third of the $949 million the Biden administration requested for the program.
“Adjusting to such a large budget cut in one year will be painful,” Leshin wrote to employees at the federally funded La Canada Flintridge research institute. “It is also increasingly likely that JPL’s workforce will be impacted in the form of layoffs, and the manner in which JPL’s workforce actions are implemented means that the impact would not be limited to MSR.”
This week’s layoffs for contract employees as well as a hiring freeze are part of a lab-wide effort to reduce spending, Leshin wrote. In addition, NASA ordered JPL to cease operations at the end of this month on a key project within the mission to return a piece of Mars to Earth, a joint project with the European Space Agency and one of the largest missions and is complicated. done at the laboratory.
Work on Mars Sample Return Capture, Custody and Return System be paused while an independent review team analyzes the overall design of the much-anticipated mission 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 through the current budget environment as we seek to maintain our unique skills and world-class workforce for NASA and our nation,” JPL said in a statement.
The cuts come as Congress is still debating how it is going to complete the 2024 fiscal year budget.
Lawmakers have criticized the agency’s decision to cut staff and science on the Mars effort before the final numbers are in.
“NASA’s unprecedented unilateral decision to cut funding for the Mars Sample Return mission, before Congress has completed its appropriations process, has dire consequences for the wider world,” Rep. Adam Schiff said Friday. “This critical mission was recognized as NASA’s highest scientific priority by the ten year surveyand to go back now will cease important American leadership in space science.”
The prototype recovery lander was originally scheduled to take off in 2028, and planned to return to Earth in 2033 after the first rocket launch from another planet.
The independent review of the project commissioned by NASA last year found that the mission was “not set up to be effectively piloted,” and that there was “little likelihood” that it would meet its 2028 launch date. More than $1 billion per year for at least three years from 2025 would be needed to meet a postponed launch date of 2030.
The mission’s final price tag could be nearly $10 billion, the review concluded — more than double the $4.4 billion estimated in 2020.
California legislators after lobbying to preserve JPL funding, citing the need to protect jobs and keep the US space program competitive. China has announced a sample return mission of its own to launch in 2028 or 2030 – expect, state the reviewwhich would “challenge US technical, engineering and scientific leadership in Mars exploration.”
I November letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a bipartisan group of six California legislators in the US House and Senate said they were “mystified” NASA’s belt-tightening before a final budget was announced.
If the NASA-ordered cuts are implemented, JPL “will be unable to meet the 2030 launch window, billions of dollars in contracts supporting American businesses will be subject to cancellation, and hundreds of high-skilled jobs will be lost in California,” he wrote they. “If this uniquely talented workforce is lost to the private sector, it will be nearly impossible to regroup.”
In the latest one decennial planetary science surveyreport prepared by NASA every 10 years at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, planetary scientists named the Mars Sample Return mission as the “highest scientific priority for NASA’s robotic exploration efforts this decade” and argued they that the program should be there. completed “as soon as possible without any increase or decrease in its current scope.”
But the authors cautioned that the ambitious mission should not come at the expense of other planet science.
“The Mars Sample Return is of fundamental strategic importance to NASA, US leadership in planetary science, and international cooperation and should be completed as quickly as possible,” the report stated. “However, its cost should not be allowed to undermine the long-term program balance of the planetary portfolio.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
