Management: Management Tips From the Real Rocket Scientists

It's got so you can't tell the celebrations apart at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (J.P.L.) in Pasadena, Calif. They back-slapped and high-fived when the Pathfinder lander bounced down on Mars in 1997 and when the Spirit and Opportunity rovers followed in 2004. They cheered when the Cassini probe went into orbit around Saturn last summer and when the Huygens lander reached the surface of the planet's moon Titan months later. If it's possible to grow tired of popping corks and raising glasses, the J.P.L. engineers may be getting close.

Such high spirits--and the successes behind them--don't always make headlines. The world has long had a weak spot for spaceships that carry astronauts, often overlooking the robot craft that fly out on their own. And yet in the long history of space travel, it's the robots that have gone the farthest and done the most. And it's J.P.L. that has sent the majority of them on their way.

In the four decades it has been affiliated with NASA, the lab has dispatched probes to seven of the planets and dozens of their moons and has tossed in the sun, our own moon and a comet for good measure. "We do interplanetary," says Pete Theisinger, a deputy director of Mars exploration. "We're not the only people who can do it, but we're the only ones who have done it for 40 years."

The question for both science types and business types is, Why? What is it about J.P.L. that has made it the little space engine that could? The lab is undeniably a science center first. But it's a business of sorts too, facing all the challenges that confront any going concern. Industry could learn something from six straightforward rules J.P.L. has always taken care to follow, rules that may have done more than anything else to make it such a thriving operation.

CULTURE OF CRITIQUE

Big-company R&D is a secretive thing, often taking place in isolated Skunk Works closed off from the rest of the company, to say nothing of the world. That's not the way things work at J.P.L. The lab is not owned by NASA but rather is a nonprofit, federally funded research center managed by the California Institute of Technology and does its work for NASA under contract. The academics who work there come from the world of peer review, in which even theoretical work isn't considered sound until a lot of objective eyes have had a chance to look at it. When smart people ask questions of other smart people, often as not they get smart answers. That has saved more than one J.P.L. mission.