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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is preparing to lay off hundreds of employees this week, Director Laurie Leshin said in a memo sent to staff Tuesday afternoon.
La Cañada Flintridge Research Institute plans to lay off about 325 employees across the organization, or about 5% of its workforce, on Wednesday, according to the memo.
“Based on the reduced budget and anticipated work ahead, we have had to tighten up across the board,” Lesin wrote. “This is a message I wish I didn’t have to write.”
This is the third reduction in personnel at JPL this year, driven primarily by significant budget cuts to the Mars sample return mission that JPL manages.
NASA spent $310 million this year on efforts to bring Martian rocks back to Earth, a sharp drop from the $822.3 million it spent on the program the previous year.
In January, 100 JPL field contractors were laid off after NASA told the lab to cut spending in anticipation of significantly tighter budgets. In February, the institute laid off 530 employees, about 8% of its workforce, and an additional 40 contractors.
This week’s layoffs bring JPL’s total workforce to about 5,500, and management expects that number to remain stable “for the foreseeable future,” Lesin told staff.
The cuts have been in the works since before the U.S. presidential election and “will occur regardless of recent election results,” she wrote.
The memo instructed staff to work from home on Wednesday. Employees will be notified of their work status via email.
Last year was a crisis for Mars Sample Return, which aims to collect rocks from Mars’ Jezero Crater and return them to Earth for study.
In July 2023, the U.S. Senate issued an ultimatum to NASA in its budget bill. Either present a plan to complete the mission within the $5.3 billion budget or risk cancellation.
Two months later, a solemn independent study says there is “nearly zero” chance that Mars sample return will meet the proposed 2028 launch date, and there is no “credible” way to accomplish the mission within current budgets. It was determined that there was no. As planned, the mission will likely cost up to $11 billion and the samples will not return to Earth until at least 2040, according to the review committee’s research.
In response, NASA requested alternative proposals from all centers and the private sector, effectively putting JPL in the position of having to compete for its own project.
Lawmakers lobbied to keep JPL funded, citing the need to protect jobs and keep the U.S. space program competitive. China has announced that it will launch its own sample return mission in 2028 or 2030.
But overall NASA funding, adjusted for inflation, has fallen sharply from its Apollo-era highs and has remained roughly flat for decades.
NASA’s budget has hovered around 0.1 percent of gross U.S. product for many years, less than one-eighth of its budget in the mid-1960s.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine announced earlier this year that the agency is struggling with a budget far below what it needs to support its ambitions.
In a September report commissioned by Congress, experts from the National Academies found that many of the agency’s technology resources, including the Deep Space Network, a huge international conglomeration of radio antennas overseen by JPL, It was identified that the industry was in decline due to lack of funds.
The authors concluded that either the U.S. needs to increase funding to NASA, or NASA needs to cut some missions.
“This is not a business-as-usual time for NASA,” lead author Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin executive, said in September. “The concerns it faces have been building up for decades.”
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