Mr. Elachi’s Neighborhood. It’s getting more diverse all the time. Clockwise, from bottom left, the first glimpse ever of the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan taken by the Cassini spacecraft’s Huygens probe; Cassini’s time-elapsed images of Saturn’s G-ring; spaceborne imaging radar (SIR) view of the Arabian desert’s Empty Quarter; Titan imaged at three different wavelengths; SIR image of China’s Great Wall; Cassini view of Saturn’s F-ring; companion galaxies, imaged in the ultraviolet by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) Telescope. Top: Panoramic view of Mars taken by the Opportunity rover and named “Rub al Khali” (“Empty Quarter” in Arabic) after its terrestrial counterpart.

On Top of the Worlds

It’s been almost five years since Charles Elachi, PhD ’71, accepted what he calls the “best job in the world,” that of directing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In fact, the position seems almost tailor-made for the dedicated space scientist, who has spent his entire career at JPL, starting with a part-time job he took while working on his Caltech PhD in the late 1960s. He signed on full-time straight out of graduate school and in the early 1980s, after a series of pioneering contributions in the field of radar remote sensing, began a gradual move into the upper ranks of JPL administration, culminating in his appointment to the executive council in 1987. As director of the space and Earth science programs, Elachi oversaw the planning and development of the lab’s flight instruments and numerous flight missions. He also continued to teach a radar remote sensing course on campus and had just concluded a class lecture in January 2001, when Caltech president David Baltimore called him to his office and offered him the JPL director’s job.

On Elachi’s watch, JPL has achieved some stunning successes, among them the Spirit and Opportunity explorations of Mars, the Cassini mission to Saturn, the Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1, and the cosmic surveys carried out by the Spitzer and GALEX telescopes. His tenure has also been marked by priority shifts and cost-cutting at NASA, developments that have led to the deferral of a few JPL missions and prompted Elachi to enact a hiring freeze this past September in an effort to save jobs and hold down costs.

“In spite of the near-term budget reductions, we still have a healthy portfolio of exciting flight projects,” he said in a letter to the JPL community at that time. “Our recent successes have been tremendously helpful in keeping the impact on us to a moderate level. I am confident that the future of the lab remains a positive one.”

In this interview, conducted this past summer with Caltech News editor Heidi Aspaturian, Elachi talks about the extraordinary trajectory that brought him from the mountains of his native Lebanon to the highlands of Mars, and offers his views on the current and future state of JPL and space exploration.

In previously published interviews, you’ve talked about how you were interested in space and space exploration from a very young age. You’ve also mentioned that your parents did not have advanced educations. Yet, you went to the University of Grenoble for your undergraduate work, then came to Caltech for your PhD. How did all this come about?

I grew up in a very small village in the mountains of Lebanon, with probably no more than a thousand people. Our house had a big patio, and at night I used to sleep there—I would pull out a little mattress and some camping gear, and I always used to look at the sky and at those beautiful stars and think, “Are we alone in this place? Or is there somebody else watching us?” To this day, I can remember very clearly when the first Sputnik was launched and how, as a kid, I first heard the sound of the beeping broadcast on the radio. So, from an early age I was fascinated with space exploration, but I never thought that I would end up in a place like JPL.

But, then I did very well in school and was always at the top of my class in math and science. Neither of my parents had gone beyond middle school, but they saw education as extremely important and put everything they could into educating their children. In Lebanon we have a system very much like that in France, where every graduating high-school student takes a national exam to assess their readiness for university. I took that and scored the highest in the country in math and science, which led to my getting a fellowship from the ministry of education to go anywhere in the world to study science or engineering. Having grown up in Lebanon, I was more a product of French schools, so I decided to go to the University of Grenoble, and I majored in telecommunications and physics there.

While I was there, I became friendly with some American exchange students, and eventually somebody said, “Gee, I hope you can come to the U.S. to study.” I figured I had nothing to lose so I applied to study in the United States. I was accepted at several universities, but Caltech offered me a very attractive Ford Foundation Fellowship. And, of course, being a naïve college student, I thought, “Gee, it looks like this is in California, next to Hollywood.” That seemed very appealing.

So I went to the director of my school and talked with him and with another professor who had spent a year at Harvard. The Harvard professor just happened to have had as his roommate at Harvard, Charlie Papas, who had gone on to become a professor at Caltech. He said Charlie was working in the same fields that interested me, and that Caltech would be a great place for me. That, along with the idea of being next to Hollywood, sold me. I knew about JPL because I followed the news reports about planetary missions—in fact I knew more about JPL than I knew about Caltech. I even knew that they were in the same town, but I never made the connection that they were affiliated until I arrived at the Institute. So that’s the set of circumstances that led me here.

Whom did you work with at Caltech? What was the adjustment like for you?

The key people were Charlie Papas—who became my PhD adviser—Roy Gould [’49, PhD ’56], and Nicholas George. Gould was doing work on waves in plasma, and Nick George was doing research on optics. I also remember taking a class from Amnon Yariv. In general, technically I did very well because I had acquired a very good math and science background, but I did have to work on my English (my wife still thinks I need to work on it). Also, the fact that Caltech was so family-friendly really made it easy for me. At the time I was accepted, Caltech had a program where they offered to place foreign students with American families for a month—I don’t know if that program still exists. I was invited to spend a month living with a family in Palos Verdes. The wife was of Lebanese descent, and her husband had worked at Hughes Aircraft—he was the technical side of the family—so it was a very comfortable situation for me and a great introduction to American culture and society. So that really helped tremendously.

The fact that Caltech is small, with friendly faculty, also helped a lot. I was very impressed that one of my professors invited all of his students to his home for Thanksgiving. That kind of hospitality was not very common in Europe; the professors were on more of a pedestal there and you didn’t socialize with them. The fact that the professors here were so easygoing and the social milieu quite relaxed really made the transition very easy. Overall, the whole Caltech experience was a very positive one for me, and I think that is reflected in my attachment to the Institute, even now, 30 years later. I still remember very clearly my arrival in America in August 1968—I had $100, a suitcase, my fellowship at Caltech, and that was it.

How did you happen to come to work at JPL?

During my second summer at Caltech, I decided to see if I could get a job at JPL. I contacted people there and went for an interview. I had already started on my thesis, which was on wave propagation in periodic media, and the group I interviewed with was working on imaging radar and wave propagation and so on. They hired me for the summer to do some modeling on the wave propagation in the ionosphere of Jupiter, and I liked it so much that I asked if it would be possible to get a part-time job during the academic year. They said, “Sure,” but then it turned out that I couldn’t keep my Ford Foundation Fellowship if I was working. So I dropped the fellowship—it was such fun and so exciting to work at JPL.

Then in 1971, shortly before I graduated, my group told me that they had received funding to do a feasibility study about a mission to Venus. They offered me a permanent position as lead technical person on that project. So as soon as I got my PhD, I started on that mission. I was responsible for writing up the report on that study, which was a $300,000 proposal—a fortune in those days. The idea was to look at the concept of putting a synthetic aperture radar into orbit around Venus and mapping the planet. Fortunately, in a Caltech class I had taken with Nick George, there were a couple of chapters in the textbook about synthetic aperture radar—and that was all, at the start, that I knew about it. So I started from there.

I remember that with my first full paycheck from JPL, I went and bought a cream-colored Mustang. I bought it for $750 from an old lady in Pasadena.

Radar remote sensing was a small field when you first went into it, but has since evolved into a pretty significant aspect of space exploration. Did you sense this potential when you started?

Not exactly. You almost never are aware of these things when they’re happening. At that time, all the people working on radar at JPL used to fit in one office. There were probably about 10 or 12 of us, and we did most of our work on an airborne radar instrument that we put on a jet based at Ames Research Center up in Menlo Park. We used to fly all around the world doing science with that radar, which of course was a great experience. We knew that it would take at least a decade to get our Venus mission approved, and, in the meantime, suddenly there was interest in using radar to do space-based ocean mapping—the SEASAT mission. That was in 1978, and I was a member of the SEASAT team. The team began expanding, and we decided to form what we called a radar science group, which would focus on the science and the theory of the radar observations rather than on building the hardware.

Because of my theoretical background, they made me head of that team, which I mostly built from scratch. I went and hired a couple of geologists, a couple of oceanographers, a couple of people who understood electromagnetic waves, a planetary scientist—they were all effectively recent graduates. So here we all were—a group in which almost all of us, including me, were in our 20s. It was a very exciting time. Many of those people are still at JPL and some are in very senior positions.

Then things got really interesting. The space shuttle was scheduled to start flying just before the first SEASAT flight. NASA’s original plan had been that except for the astronauts, the shuttle would fly completely empty the first four times. Then somebody in Washington, D.C., had the bright idea of putting an inexpensive payload that was already available on the second flight. So they solicited proposals from researchers who already had instruments available for flying, and our group decided to submit one. We had, fortunately, built two copies of the SEASAT radar: one to fly and one as an engineering model that was supposed to stay on the ground for testing. We proposed to fly some of that engineering hardware on the shuttle, and our idea went through a peer review and was selected.

So, because you had been scrupulous about building redundancy into your project, you had this option?

That’s right. Sometimes that just happens—a decision or development opens whole new doors that you haven’t thought about. The upshot was that I ended up being the principal investigator on that instrument—Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-A—it was the first in a series), which flew on the shuttle in 1981.

I remember that when the shuttle landed, we had to go to Edwards Air Force Base to get all the data, which we had on an optical recorder, and that we then stayed up all night processing the images. The next day NASA flew a bunch of us to D.C. so we could show our footage to the NASA administrator, helping to showcase the value of the shuttle. And within two weeks, they had approved flying our next experiment, SIR-B.

After the discovery that SIR-A had penetrated beneath surface sand to reveal ancient river channels in the Sahara desert, Elachi took part in a field trip to the region in 1982, which succeeded in locating those long-buried channels.

How did you decide what you were going to look at for both these missions?

Our choices were primarily based on geologic interests. We wanted to study the geologic history of a variety of areas: tectonic regions, arid regions, and so forth. But what happened after that was totally unexpected. We had taken many images in the Egyptian desert, and when they came down, some of the USGS people who were doing research into that area looked at the maps and said, “You must have labeled these wrong. There aren’t river beds and channels like that in Egypt. We’ve been on the ground in that region, and there is absolutely nothing.” So we double-checked our output and verified that we had it labeled correctly. And then it began to dawn on us that we were actually imaging below the surface.

It had not occurred to anyone ahead of time that this might happen?

No, but once we thought about it, we said, “Of course it’s obvious. When you have a dry desert terrain with no water, of course the radar should penetrate.” I knew this in theory from my background in electromagnetic waves, but it had never occurred to me before to think about it in this context. But that’s what had happened. We were seeing channels and river beds a few meters beneath the surface, dating back to a period when North Africa was wetter than it is now, and during the epoch of the pharaohs, when it was more inhabited.

So we ended up doing a field trip to the region. We actually camped for a couple of weeks in the middle of nowhere in the Sahara, and we did trenching, where we dug down and actually found those river channels. So that was a real voyage of discovery—a combination of armchair adventure, exotic travel, and new science, all wrapped in one package

What did that do to your perception of this particular project? You must have realized you’d opened a door to the past.

Oh, we did. It was also the kind of thing that got a lot of attention from both the scientific community and the media—we even made the cover of Science magazine. Then we started getting approached by a lot of people about whether we would use this technology to find, say, the lost continent of Atlantis, or a missing family treasure that somebody’s grandmother had supposedly buried in the backyard. There were all sorts of wacky extremes like that. Then there were the more credible inquiries, like the one that ultimately led us to discover the ancient trade routes across Arabia to the vanished city of Ubar, an ancient frankincense center. We also did some archaeological work in China.

While all this was happening, in the early ’80s, we got approval for the Venus mission, which was eventually named Magellan. But then the Reagan administration cancelled it, along with a lot of other missions, and we had to struggle to figure out whether we could convince Washington to revive the mission if we scaled it back to make it less expensive. We did, and it ended up being launched in May 1989. By then we had flown radar instrumentation on two shuttle flights, and we had flown SEASAT.

A series of synthetic aperture radar mosaics of Venus, taken by the Magellan orbiter, were mapped onto a computer-simulated globe to create this image of the planet in 1991. Originally cancelled as part of the Reagan administration’s budget cuts, the mission was restored, says Elachi, “after we scaled it back to make it less expensive,” and launched in 1989.

Looking back at your involvement with radar imaging, including your work on the Cassini mission to Saturn, is there a particular highlight?

I would have to say it was really the SIR-A work, partly because it was my first mission and partly because it took us in so many unexpected directions. It had a special attraction, like your first experience in anything that you do. Here we were—a group of very young people who suddenly became key players in the space shuttle, which at the time was THE major NASA mission. And then came the science—the big discovery about the subsurface radar penetration in Egypt. So that one mission had all these aspects that made it unique. Magellan was very exciting from the standpoint of the science—getting the first high-resolution images of a planet, where we had essentially no idea of what was happening on the surface. As for Cassini, I was the key advocate for putting a radar instrument on the mission. But by then, I was in a senior JPL leadership role, so it was, in the end, perhaps, less of a hands-on role. However, now that Cassini is in orbit around Saturn, new discoveries are being made every time we get a radar image strip from Saturn’s moon Titan.

How did your move into higher-level lab administration come about?

After the success of SIR-A, I was asked to become program manager for all the radar activity at JPL. Then, after we flew SIR-B in 1984, I was asked to head the lab’s science division. Then in 1987, Lew Allen, who was director at that time, asked me to join the executive council, which essentially helps lead the lab. That came about because JPL was getting so involved in doing advanced instrumentation that the lab decided to create a director for space science and instruments, with oversight over all of that work at JPL. They asked me if I was interested in that job, and that’s when I moved from doing full-time research to actually being more involved in JPL leadership.

It must have become clear at some point that you’d be leaving more and more of the science behind. How did you react to that?

That was a tough challenge. For a long time, I insisted on keeping an office in the building where I had been doing my radar research, and I worked very hard to spend one day a week there, so that I could continue my science. I also kept my connection with Caltech—for a number of years I maintained a position as a research fellow on campus, working with Papas, and then I started teaching a class on the physics of remote sensing. It gradually became harder to continue my research, but I continued the teaching, because it was both a lot of fun and a way to keep up with new ideas. I now take a lot of pride that many of my students are key members of the JPL team.

What were the circumstances that led to your accepting the job as head of JPL?

While I was on the executive council of JPL, there were changes and additions to the scope of my responsibilities. For a while it was purely science and instruments that I was overseeing. Then some flight missions were moved into that directorate, although not the Mars missions because Mars had its own directorate. As time went on, the directorate grew to the point where we decided to divide it. So my directorate kept Earth science and astrophysics, but not the planetary missions. The great advantage of all this for me was that when the search committee interviewed me for the job of JPL director, I had gained experience and familiarity in all the different aspects of what we do at the lab. I remember when someone came to my class to tell me that David Baltimore would like to see me afterward. It was on Friday, January 26, 2001. When I entered his office he said, “I am going to make this brief. I and the Board of Trustees would like you to become the next director of JPL.” We walked out of his office, and there was a group outside with a bottle of champagne. Then on January 31, Baltimore and Dan Goldin, the NASA administrator, who flew from D.C. for the occasion, made the public announcement at a JPL all-hands meeting.

As director, you’ve overseen some outstanding successes—the Spirit and Opportunity missions to Mars, Cassini’s arrival at Saturn, and the Spitzer and GALEX space-based observatories. What has this meant to you personally?

It has really brought home to me how important it is in our work to be prepared for the ups and the downs. I was sitting in the mission operation room when the Mars Climate Orbiter failed in 1999, and I was in that same room when we landed Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in 2004. In the early days of JPL’s Ranger and Surveyor missions, we had several failures, and in 1992, we lost the Mars Observer, a billion-dollar project. We also had monumental successes, like the Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and Topex missions. As I keep telling my people, space exploration is not easy. You have to accept that there are periods when you are going to have setbacks. It’s one of the unique aspects of JPL that when that happens, we don’t bury our heads in the sand and feel sorry for ourselves. We immediately jump in and learn from our mistakes. When I became director, we had just come from a period of setbacks, including the loss of both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. Effectively our reputation was on the line.

Elachi, then-NASA director Sean O’Keefe (directly behind Elachi), and Mars Exploration Rover project manager Pete Theisinger ’67 (front, right) react with joy as Opportunity lands safely on Mars on January 24, 2004. Behind Theisinger (front to back) are NASA officials Ed Weiler, Firouz Naderi, and Orlando Figueroa.

When you say “reputation,” do you mean in the eyes of the public?

It was in the eyes of everybody—the public, NASA, the JPL employees. For many of us here at the lab, these failures came as a big shock, particularly since we were looking ahead to launching two space-based observatories and two Mars rovers—extremely complex, challenging missions. And I can tell you that although we had some nerve-racking moments during that first year or two after my appointment, I had no doubt that we were going to be successful. We had the best, most dedicated people in the world working on those projects, and when these missions succeeded, the public could clearly see how true that was. On the Mars missions, particularly, the whole world was watching, which made those successes even more memorable and rewarding. In the last five years we have launched 10 successful missions and now we have 18 spacecraft exploring across the solar system.

What lessons do you think may have been learned and implemented from the loss of the Orbiter and Polar Lander?

Immediately after those missions failed, we all collectively sat down with Ed Stone, who was then JPL’s director, and said, “Okay, what are we going to learn from this?” One of the key things to emerge was that we had perhaps underappreciated how challenging it had become to do some of these missions in NASA’s new “faster, cheaper, better” environment. We had been successful with so many planetary missions, and when that happens, the danger is that you let your guard down. What we learned is that we can never do that with planetary missions—they’re not like flying an airplane every day. You have to treat every mission as if it was the first one you’d ever done.

We also realized that under NASA’s new guidelines, our number of missions had been increasing significantly, and that in this environment we had not yet developed sufficient expertise to properly support and evaluate each and every thing we were doing. So at the end of Ed Stone’s era, which had also had great successes such as the Mars Pathfinder and Galileo, and at the start of mine, we tried to put safeguards in place. The first was to establish a supporting infrastructure to help project managers. This involved taking a highly disciplined approach to implementing projects and making sure that we had the appropriate checks and balances to catch errors and verify that we’d made the necessary corrections. Doing this required more funding, but it was well worth it. We also put more emphasis on mentoring, so that new project managers could benefit from the expertise of more experienced ones. So that was the foundation of our new approach, and even now, after these recent successes, my biggest concern continues to be that we shouldn’t let our guard down.

The critical message that I think comes out of all this is that when you do exploration, you never know what surprises you are going to get. There’s no way you can plan for all of them. Some are pleasant and some are not. The key thing is to learn from them, move on to the next step, and not shy away from doing something bold because we are afraid a mistake will happen, or that we will fall on our face. It’s not exploration when the only sure safety comes from staying on the ground. You can be 100 percent successful by doing absolutely nothing.

Under NASA’s new administrator, Mike Griffin, there has been a clear shift in the agency’s priorities, along with renewed emphasis on cost-cutting. What lies ahead for JPL? How do you see its role evolving over, say, the next decade?

I think that Mike Griffin came to NASA with a couple of fundamental objectives. One is to phase out the shuttle, because just staying in Earth’s orbit is not a viable or visionary program for human space exploration. He’s indicated that we need to go beyond, to the moon and then to Mars. His second idea is that while doing space science is a fundamental element of NASA, there has been a bit of imbalance in how that research is supported. The overwhelming successes on Mars have drawn a lot of interest and funding into the Mars program, some of which, unfortunately, has come at the expense of other disciplines. Even at JPL, we have been concerned that the funding for Earth science and astrophysics was taking a major hit.

So Mike wants to rebalance to make sure we have a broad science program. I agree with his basic principle, even though I love Mars and the excitement of going there. But there are other places that are pretty exciting—Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Saturn’s moon Titan—and, like Mars, hold out the possibility that life might have evolved there. Another aspect of this search-for-life question is investigating how nearby stars formed and whether they have planetary systems. So from that standpoint, I am feeling positive about what Mike Griffin is doing, as long as we are keeping a strong, balanced science program, which he promised. I think JPL will fare very well in that environment because we already do a fair amount of Earth science and astrophysics. We have Topex/Poseidon and Jason doing oceanography from space. We have the Spitzer telescope imaging the universe in the infrared, and GALEX, which is studying it in the ultraviolet. I think that NASA’s advocacy of a balanced program will play to our advantage in the long term, even though there are some negative impacts in the short term.

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this haunting image of sunset on Mars as the sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on May 19, 2005. Launched in January 2004 for a projected 3-month reconnaissance of the planet, both rovers have continued operating long past their JPL handlers’ expectations.

In a lecture that you gave on campus about two years ago, you foresaw four major developments in space science by 2014. They were robotic outposts on Mars; the first steps toward searching for the building blocks of life on planets within and outside the solar system; taking what you call the stellar family portraits; and an Interplanetary Internet information network. Do you still stand by that forecast?

Yes, I think these are still feasible projections. There’s always a margin for error in these predictions. Some things happen a bit earlier than you think they will, and some a bit later. But there is no doubt in my mind that we will be looking at these developments in the next decade. We are already moving rapidly toward a permanent scientific presence on Mars that will provide us with a much deeper understanding of the planet and that we hope will answer the question of whether life ever evolved there. We currently have two orbiters circling Mars, which will be joined by a third one in 2006. We have two landers on its surface. We never expected that they would go on working this long. It’s even possible that one or both of them might survive until we send the next lander. That’s Phoenix, which is scheduled to be launched in 2007, and then we will send the Mars Science Laboratory rover in 2009.

As for searching for the chemical compounds of life in neighboring solar systems—as well as on Titan and Europa in our own system—we might not have all the missions in place by 2014, but we will definitely undertake some of them in the next decade. Before 2015, we will have the Space Interferometry Mission to study nearby stars, as well as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, and they will provide us with what I call the family portraits—a detailed look at neighboring stars and their planetary systems.

We are making real progress on the Interplanetary Internet, and I do think that by the next decade, people will be able to access our planetary spacecraft from their home computer. Whether it will happen in 2012 or, say, 2016, remains to be seen. But these things are clearly within our reach. And of course the new technology we
develop for these missions, we will also apply to studies of Earth to help us better understand earthquakes on a global basis, tectonic motion, ocean circulation, and other phenomena.

In terms of your professional career, you’re essentially the product of two cultures: Caltech—the ultimate research university—and NASA, a federal government agency. As director of JPL, how do you perceive those two institutions, and how do they affect your approach to the job?

JPL and Caltech are really a unique combination. I usually tell people how fortunate the lab is to have the two greatest parents in the world that you can imagine: NASA, which gives us the opportunity to reach for the stars, and Caltech, which anchors us in a foundation of academic excellence and integrity. You can’t do better than that when you are engaged in scientific exploration—really, it creates a very fortunate situation for us and for the country. As part of NASA, we take very seriously the fact that we are in a sense a public trust, supported by the taxpayers. We are here not only to do what we want, but to do what both the broad scientific community and the country want to do in exploring space.

As for Caltech, I think that our connection with a leading academic institution is tremendously helpful. One-third of the Institute’s faculty is involved in what we do at JPL, and they bring with them a lot of originality and imagination. A lot of new ideas and technology grow out of that relationship. We also have a unique resource in the Institute’s graduate and undergraduate students—some of the brightest young people in the world come here and interact with us and help keep our outlook fresh. You know how old—that is, older—people tend to become more traditional and conservative in their thinking, but this way we have all these youthful perspectives coming in. The engagement of the Caltech president and Board of Trustees is not to be underestimated—here we have some of the most successful people in the world helping to oversee what we do, and taking a genuine, serious interest in our work. They get monthly reports on our activities, and spend a day twice a year at JPL, getting a firsthand look at what’s going on. I meet with David Baltimore every other week and get calls from trustees regularly and sometimes I call them to ask for advice or assistance—they’re a great resource in that regard.

Overall, I find it amazing that this country and its government have entrusted planetary and deep-space exploration to a university, and to a private one at that. That combination is rare—you don’t see it in any other country—but for JPL and our nation, it’s been largely a recipe for success. So hopefully, the American public sees it in the same way and can appreciate the value of bringing academia, industry, and the government together as a team to do what would be very hard for any of these partners to do individually.

How about the elected officials, particularly congressional representatives, with whom you work? Are their views and votes influenced by this same appeal of space exploration?

In general, I find that selling what we do is relatively easy, first because people are genuinely excited about space, and second because our work has a variety of spinoffs. Just to name two, numerous technological advances have grown out of the space program, and a healthy space program helps sustain public interest in science. I think there’s a widespread belief, particularly among members of Congress, that space exploration is something that will draw young people into science and technology. That’s what happened to me—the Apollo program got me excited about going into science. It’s certainly in the national interest to have a scientifically literate population and to stimulate enthusiasm for studying science and engineering among young people. The economic welfare of our country is grounded in our technological leadership, and anything that helps us retain that edge is obviously beneficial. It is important to note that at almost every mission encounter, many members of Congress come and join us at JPL to be part of these events. Our two local congressmen, David Dreier and Adam Schiff, are great friends and genuine supporters of what we do, and take great pride in what JPL does.

So, if a kid were to come up to you and say, “I want to have a career like yours,” or even, “I want to be where you are now,” what advice would you give?

I would say, great. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it and work hard at it. I usually tell the kids, “Make sure you are good at your science and math. Make sure you have ambition. Make sure you have a passion for what you do. Don’t shy away from attempting great things even though you might fail. That’s how you learn.” One thing that I tell people has probably helped me to where I am today is this: I can’t think of a single day when I didn’t look forward to coming to work here, and when I didn’t look forward to going home and telling my wife and my two daughters about the exciting things we’re doing here. You have to have that excitement about what you are doing, along with the technical savvy and the passion to do exploration. Another key thing is to acknowledge that you are always part of a much larger effort involving many talented, hardworking people. What JPL achieves does not happen because of me. It happens because of 5,000 people who know what they are doing and are passionate about it. We all feel bad when any one of us fails, and when anyone succeeds, we’re all part of that success.

What about your job as director has turned out to be most revealing or unexpected?

I think it was the breadth of the things that you have to handle. It’s not only doing the strategic thinking, leadership, and the planning for missions. There are issues with parking, with personnel, and with travel, to name a few. And they all have to be addressed. Not necessarily directly by me, but as part of the ongoing management of this place. The employees here look to the lab director and to their senior managers for hands-on leadership of all aspects of the lab. Over a single day, my responsibilities can range from meeting with Nobel Prize winners to landing on Mars, to calling congressmen, to dealing with parking.

That’s the second time you’ve mentioned parking. Is it easier to land on Mars than to manage on-lab parking?

Oh yes. As I always tell people, parking is one problem I still don’t have a solution for. And most likely I never will. I will leave it as a challenge for my successor.