NASA's Iconic Jet Propulsion Laboratory Could Change Hands for the First Time
NASA has announced it will not renew its contract between its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Caltech, saying it will open the contract to competitive bidding when the current deal expires in 2028.
This is potentially the biggest change NASA has seen since the beginning of the current White House push to transform it, and also one of the biggest overall changes in the agency's history.
NASA's JPL has always been a bit of an oddity. It was founded by Caltech scientists in the 1930s and sought funding from NASA, establishing itself as a team of outside researchers. Many referred to the team as the "Suicide Squad" because of the inherent dangers in much of their work involving explosive fuels.
When World War II started, JPL and Caltech's expertise in rocket design became much more valuable to the government, and the group's funding skyrocketed (no pun intended). From then on,...
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