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To be clear, the work referenced in this article is all JPL. JPL is not exactly the same as NASA. JPL is an FFRDC administered by Caltech on behalf of NASA. Thi

To be clear, the work referenced in this article is all JPL. JPL is not exactly the same as NASA. JPL is an FFRDC administered by Caltech on behalf of NASA. This is not to say that other NASA centers aren't great; but they do all have their own cultures and processes. The article focuses on JPL's. IMHO, JPL is the greatest engineering organization in human history.

Kephael 8y ago
>> IMHO, JPL is the greatest engineering organization in human history. It's not the 1950s anymore, the smartest are drawn to FAANG and trading firms.
- mrspeaker 8y ago
  Thanks a lot, you just made me laugh out loud in a quiet cafe! I'm sure the smartest are drawn to the big bucks of trading firms - but to think that any of those companies would ever be considered "the greatest engineering organization in human history" is a funny mental image.
  - acpetrov 8y ago
    Yep. NASA has such high standards that it's hard to imagine a private company ever matching its engineering quality, after all why would they need to?
    - mathgladiator 8y ago
      Or afford to? The way most software is built today makes me sad.
      - elviejo 8y ago
        <sarcasm>What aren't Electron and Javascript the pinacle of software development </sarcasm>
- GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  Being the "smartest" is neither necessary nor sufficient for being "the best". To be the best, you have to focus on the most important problems. Decreasing high frequency trading latency or building better stock prediction algorithms are interesting problems, but they aren't in the same league as landing rovers on fucking Mars or sending probes outside the solar system. Five hundred years from now, assuming humans are still around, we'll still be teaching about Voyager in history classes. Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading?
  - sigstoat 8y ago
    > Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading? markets will still want liquidity, so if there's a functioning economy, there will be HFT. JPL can be great without taking digs at other activities.
    - badpun 8y ago
      The entire concept of HFT can be wiped out by a few changes in the rules of a stock exchange...
      - gvhst 8y ago
        JPL can be wiped out by a few changes to congressional budgeting
        arya169 8y ago
        Mars can't, nor can the engineering techniques used by JPL.
    - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
      I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. I'm saying that it isn't as important to humanity. It's like the pitch Steve Jobs gave to John Scully: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” There was nothing wrong with selling Pepsi. Scully could have become very, very wealthy that way. He could have mentored younger executives, he could have done a lot of good with his life. But five hundred years from now, beating Coke wasn't going to leave much of a legacy. And that's the point. Maybe the brightest really are going into high frequency trading. Maybe they're creating a lot of shareholder wealth there. That's all great. But to be considered "the greatest" it isn't enough to be really smart, or even to work on really hard problems. You have to work on really hard, important problems. IMO.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Not the smartest of the smartest, just the greediest of the smartest.
- zarkov99 8y ago
  This is very sad but probably true enough.
- oso2k 8y ago
  As a former JPLer, I'd disagree with you. When I joined in 2002, over 65% of JPL's employees had at least a bachelors. Still, 40% had a secondary degree (MS or MBA). It was not unusual to see people get passed on promotions for Team Leads and/or Managers because they did not have a second degree. Even the Business Administrators (BAMs) were on track to being required to have an MBA when I left in 2010. Think BAMs as Executive Secretaries for a Line of Business (Section) for about 30-50 people. It was severely career limiting if people looking to move up from Group (5-20 people) to Section (30-50), to Division (100-300), to Directorate (100-1000) to Executive Council (strategic direction for all of JPL) without the appropriate experience and/or degree(s). The Director for the Lab (think CEO) for JPL during my tenure was Dr. Charles Elachi; he had 6 degrees. I interviewed with people with PhDs in Astro-Meteorology (literally Space Weather and weather on other planets) who knew 10x more about Compilers and Compiler Theory than I did as a recent CS grade at the time. All the while, almost everyone I worked with was an absolute pleasure to work with. Special, scary smart, and the best of humanity does not begin to describe those amazing people.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    My tour was earlier (1969-1970), when Bill Pickering ran the place. Not sure about the proportion of multiple degree-holders, but regardless, your last sentence fits it as well then as now.
  - Kephael 8y ago
    I worked at a government research organization similar to JPL much more recently than 2002, the pace was far too slow and industry did all the interesting things. The operational staff seemed to exist as part of a jobs program.
starpilot 8y ago
The weird thing is they no longer do any work related to jet propulsion.
- oso2k 8y ago
  Wrong [0][1]. They still do a lot of propulsion. :D They just primarily focus on robotics now with lots of work in landing systems and spacecraft (orbiters). [0] https://sec353ext.jpl.nasa.gov/ep/ https://sec353ext.jpl.nasa.gov/ep/ [1] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/micropropulsion-laboratory-mpl https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/micropropulsion-la...
  - starpilot 8y ago
    That's not jet propulsion. Electric propulsion (ion thrusters) is very different from jet propulsion (air turbines). The NASA facility doing the most work with jets to my knowledge is Glenn in Ohio.
    - zkms 8y ago
      Yeah, and the "Aerojet" corporation never made air-breathing turbomachinery and "JATO units" were rockets, despite "JATO" standing for "jet assisted take off".
ryanackley 8y ago
I came here to say something similar but with my added first hand experience of working for a government contractor at Kennedy Space Center. Almost all of the real engineering done by "NASA" at KSC is done by government contractors. The actual NASA employee pool had a higher than usual proportion of lazy and incompetent members because it's virtually impossible to terminate a federal government employee. The rest were hard core bureaucrats who spent most of their time jockeying for bigger offices, more responsibility, etc.
- oso2k 8y ago
  Kennedy is a different kind of facility, even from some of the other NASA Centers. There's a huge emphasis on compatibility of launch & ground systems. And, you're right about bureaucrats and you could even extend it to lobbyists.
greeneggs 8y ago
No, New Horizons (the recent mission to Pluto, and in 2019 to Ultima Thule) was run through APL, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, not JPL at Caltech. Don't confuse the two; APL is actually becoming quite a rival to JPL. I recommend the book "Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto" [1] if you care to read about some of the politics. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-horizons https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-hor... The following is an extended quote from the book, to give you a flavor: APL had not done many planetary missions—only one, in fact—but it had an impressive, decades-long track record of building and launching Earth observation and military satellites that performed well and were inexpensive. … APL’s Discovery mission was called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.” The craft launched in 1996 and became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, circling for a year around the asteroid Eros. Later, it would even land on Eros, a bonus achievement that was not even conceived of in the original mission proposal. And to top that, the APL team had completed the spacecraft ahead of schedule, and ended up doing the mission for $30 million under budget, giving the money back to NASA. … [After the Bush administration tried to cancel the Pluto mission competition,] I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, and I smelled something fishy. If Europa went forward, JPL would be guaranteed to get the work, because that mission had simply been assigned to JPL—without competition—and it was also a far bigger monetary prize than winning Pluto would be. Alan speculated that JPL had worked behind the scenes to persuade the Bush administration more or less to trade the Pluto mission for a new start on Europa. He also believed that JPL had another interest in killing Pluto, because if APL actually won, APL’s hand would forever be strengthened as a powerful competitor in all future outer solar system exploration. … Tom decided to fight fire with napalm, calling his political ace in the hole—the powerful senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where APL is located, and then chair of the Senate funding committee responsible for space exploration. At Tom’s behest, Mikulski wrote a sharp letter to NASA, demanding that NASA resume the Pluto mission competition …

Kephael 8y ago

>> IMHO, JPL is the greatest engineering organization in human history. It's not the 1950s anymore, the smartest are drawn to FAANG and trading firms.

mrspeaker 8y ago
Thanks a lot, you just made me laugh out loud in a quiet cafe! I'm sure the smartest are drawn to the big bucks of trading firms - but to think that any of those companies would ever be considered "the greatest engineering organization in human history" is a funny mental image.
- acpetrov 8y ago
  Yep. NASA has such high standards that it's hard to imagine a private company ever matching its engineering quality, after all why would they need to?
  - mathgladiator 8y ago
    Or afford to? The way most software is built today makes me sad.
    - elviejo 8y ago
      <sarcasm>What aren't Electron and Javascript the pinacle of software development </sarcasm>
GlenTheMachine 8y ago
Being the "smartest" is neither necessary nor sufficient for being "the best". To be the best, you have to focus on the most important problems. Decreasing high frequency trading latency or building better stock prediction algorithms are interesting problems, but they aren't in the same league as landing rovers on fucking Mars or sending probes outside the solar system. Five hundred years from now, assuming humans are still around, we'll still be teaching about Voyager in history classes. Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading?
- sigstoat 8y ago
  > Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading? markets will still want liquidity, so if there's a functioning economy, there will be HFT. JPL can be great without taking digs at other activities.
  - badpun 8y ago
    The entire concept of HFT can be wiped out by a few changes in the rules of a stock exchange...
    - gvhst 8y ago
      JPL can be wiped out by a few changes to congressional budgeting
      - arya169 8y ago
        Mars can't, nor can the engineering techniques used by JPL.
  - GlenTheMachine 8y ago
    I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. I'm saying that it isn't as important to humanity. It's like the pitch Steve Jobs gave to John Scully: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” There was nothing wrong with selling Pepsi. Scully could have become very, very wealthy that way. He could have mentored younger executives, he could have done a lot of good with his life. But five hundred years from now, beating Coke wasn't going to leave much of a legacy. And that's the point. Maybe the brightest really are going into high frequency trading. Maybe they're creating a lot of shareholder wealth there. That's all great. But to be considered "the greatest" it isn't enough to be really smart, or even to work on really hard problems. You have to work on really hard, important problems. IMO.
coldtea 8y ago
Not the smartest of the smartest, just the greediest of the smartest.
zarkov99 8y ago
This is very sad but probably true enough.
oso2k 8y ago
As a former JPLer, I'd disagree with you. When I joined in 2002, over 65% of JPL's employees had at least a bachelors. Still, 40% had a secondary degree (MS or MBA). It was not unusual to see people get passed on promotions for Team Leads and/or Managers because they did not have a second degree. Even the Business Administrators (BAMs) were on track to being required to have an MBA when I left in 2010. Think BAMs as Executive Secretaries for a Line of Business (Section) for about 30-50 people. It was severely career limiting if people looking to move up from Group (5-20 people) to Section (30-50), to Division (100-300), to Directorate (100-1000) to Executive Council (strategic direction for all of JPL) without the appropriate experience and/or degree(s). The Director for the Lab (think CEO) for JPL during my tenure was Dr. Charles Elachi; he had 6 degrees. I interviewed with people with PhDs in Astro-Meteorology (literally Space Weather and weather on other planets) who knew 10x more about Compilers and Compiler Theory than I did as a recent CS grade at the time. All the while, almost everyone I worked with was an absolute pleasure to work with. Special, scary smart, and the best of humanity does not begin to describe those amazing people.
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  My tour was earlier (1969-1970), when Bill Pickering ran the place. Not sure about the proportion of multiple degree-holders, but regardless, your last sentence fits it as well then as now.
- Kephael 8y ago
  I worked at a government research organization similar to JPL much more recently than 2002, the pace was far too slow and industry did all the interesting things. The operational staff seemed to exist as part of a jobs program.

starpilot 8y ago

The weird thing is they no longer do any work related to jet propulsion.

oso2k 8y ago
Wrong [0][1]. They still do a lot of propulsion. :D They just primarily focus on robotics now with lots of work in landing systems and spacecraft (orbiters). [0] https://sec353ext.jpl.nasa.gov/ep/ https://sec353ext.jpl.nasa.gov/ep/ [1] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/micropropulsion-laboratory-mpl https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/micropropulsion-la...
- starpilot 8y ago
  That's not jet propulsion. Electric propulsion (ion thrusters) is very different from jet propulsion (air turbines). The NASA facility doing the most work with jets to my knowledge is Glenn in Ohio.
  - zkms 8y ago
    Yeah, and the "Aerojet" corporation never made air-breathing turbomachinery and "JATO units" were rockets, despite "JATO" standing for "jet assisted take off".

ryanackley 8y ago

I came here to say something similar but with my added first hand experience of working for a government contractor at Kennedy Space Center. Almost all of the real engineering done by "NASA" at KSC is done by government contractors. The actual NASA employee pool had a higher than usual proportion of lazy and incompetent members because it's virtually impossible to terminate a federal government employee. The rest were hard core bureaucrats who spent most of their time jockeying for bigger offices, more responsibility, etc.

oso2k 8y ago
Kennedy is a different kind of facility, even from some of the other NASA Centers. There's a huge emphasis on compatibility of launch & ground systems. And, you're right about bureaucrats and you could even extend it to lobbyists.

greeneggs 8y ago

No, New Horizons (the recent mission to Pluto, and in 2019 to Ultima Thule) was run through APL, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, not JPL at Caltech. Don't confuse the two; APL is actually becoming quite a rival to JPL. I recommend the book "Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto" [1] if you care to read about some of the politics. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-horizons https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-hor... The following is an extended quote from the book, to give you a flavor: APL had not done many planetary missions—only one, in fact—but it had an impressive, decades-long track record of building and launching Earth observation and military satellites that performed well and were inexpensive. … APL’s Discovery mission was called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.” The craft launched in 1996 and became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, circling for a year around the asteroid Eros. Later, it would even land on Eros, a bonus achievement that was not even conceived of in the original mission proposal. And to top that, the APL team had completed the spacecraft ahead of schedule, and ended up doing the mission for $30 million under budget, giving the money back to NASA. … [After the Bush administration tried to cancel the Pluto mission competition,] I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, and I smelled something fishy. If Europa went forward, JPL would be guaranteed to get the work, because that mission had simply been assigned to JPL—without competition—and it was also a far bigger monetary prize than winning Pluto would be. Alan speculated that JPL had worked behind the scenes to persuade the Bush administration more or less to trade the Pluto mission for a new start on Europa. He also believed that JPL had another interest in killing Pluto, because if APL actually won, APL’s hand would forever be strengthened as a powerful competitor in all future outer solar system exploration. … Tom decided to fight fire with napalm, calling his political ace in the hole—the powerful senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where APL is located, and then chair of the Senate funding committee responsible for space exploration. At Tom’s behest, Mikulski wrote a sharp letter to NASA, demanding that NASA resume the Pluto mission competition …