November 13 news, the Jet Prosperity Laboratory (JPL) under the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) launched layoffs again on Wednesday local time, and last time it was only nine months.
JPL is located in California, USA, and is mainly responsible for developing robot space detectors for NASA.On Wednesday, JPL announced that it would fire 325 employees, accounting for about 5%of the total number of laboratory employees.
JPL主任劳瑞·莱辛（Laurie Leshin）在周二上午发给员工的备忘录中表示：“这是我本不愿发布的消息。”她补充道，"Although this is extremely difficult for our team, the number of layoffs is lower than expected a few months ago. This is due to the hard work of many employees of JPL."
In February this year, JPL has cut 530 employees due to multiple factors such as Mars sample return mission.After this layoff, the total number of layoffs of JPL this year has reached one -eighth of the total number of employees.
Course budget challenges
Laisin pointed out in the memorandum that JPLs management has always faced "continuous continuity"Fund challenges" and need to re -examine the positioning of JPL in the process of responding to changes in NASA deep space exploration.After reviewing the latest budget forecast, JPL had to conduct a second round of layoffs this year.After this round of layoffs, the number of official employees of JPL will be reduced to about 5,500.
Lysin wrote: "Although we cannot predict the future budget of 100 %, we will be fully prepared for future work." "At such a difficult time, this may not be impossibleHow much comfort is brought, but I really want to express my opinion and position clearly.>
JPL employees are notified to work at home on Wednesday and will notify their positions through emails.
Ledin wrote: "This layoffs involve almost all areas of the laboratory, including technology, projects, business and support departments."We have carefully examined the necessity of reducing the size of employees.
This years layoff decision was made after NASA decided to re -evaluate the Mars sample led by JPL to return to the mission.The billions of dollars costing billions of dollars were judged by the independent review team in September 2023 that it was not feasible, and it was expected that it would spend 8 billion to 11 billion US dollars.
Environmental changes
At NASA evaluate other research centers and private companies (such as SpaceX and Rocket Lab)While the alternative, the budget of Mars sample returned to the mission has been reduced from nearly $ 1 billion in the fiscal year to less than $ 300 million.In addition, whether JPL will continue to dominate the improved Martian sample to return the task is not conclusive.
The layoffs also reflect the current situation: After the Muwei Two detector task costs $ 5 billion in wooden trials, JPL is currently not responsible for other major deep -space detection tasks.Another larger task is NASA-Isros synthetic aperture radar project, which is expected to be launched from India next year.JPL is responsible for some small projects, but none of them have the huge budget and huge manpower support required by the flagship task.
JPL has a long and brilliant history, and has managed NASAs most important planet detection projects, such as "Traveler", "Galileo", "Cassini", and multipleA Martian detection task.However, in recent years, research centers such as John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, as well as private enterprises such as Lockheed have performed well in the project competition and surrendered well.
The work of Lisin and other NASA executives is to ensure that JPL has a bright future in the field of changing planet exploration.She wrote in the statement that the layoffs this week were for this goal.She added: "We are a very tough team. The glorious history, the current achievements, and the persistent pursuit of exploration and discovery make us full of confidence in the future." (Chen Chen)
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