Thank you to Congress for not having finalized the agency’s yearly budget just yet.
Even NASA is not exempt from the possibility of layoffs. Due to the unpredictability of the budget, the government has announced that it will be laying off approximately 530 staff from its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) located in California. This constitutes eight percent of the total workforce at the site. Another forty contractors are being let go by JPL, just a few weeks after the company imposed a recruiting freeze and terminated the employment of one hundred other contractors. Today is the day that workers are being notified of their futures.
“After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs,” according to NASA in a statement obtained by Gizmodo. It is expected that the repercussions will be felt in both the technical and support sectors of the laboratory. Despite the fact that these modifications are difficult, they are necessary because they will allow us to adhere to the budget allocation that we have been given while continuing our important job for NASA and our nation.
Uncertainty regarding the final budget that Congress will allot to NASA for the year 2024 has been a significant contributor to the reductions that have been made. For the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, which is an ambitious endeavor in which NASA intends to deploy a lander and orbiter to the red planet in 2028 and bring back soil, it is anticipated that the agency will receive approximately $300 million. Just under $950 million was the amount that NASA asked for the project in their budget proposal for the year 2024.
“We are now in a position where we must take further significant action to reduce our spending,” wrote JPL Director Laurie Leshin in a memo. “While we still do not have an FY24 appropriation or the final word from Congress on our Mars Sample Return (MSR) budget allocation, we are now in a position where we must take some additional significant action.” “In the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait.”
Despite the fact that NASA has not yet been able to produce a comprehensive cost estimate for MSR, an independent analysis estimated that the price will range between $8 billion and $11 billion. The Senate Appropriations subcommittee requested that NASA provide a funding plan for MSR that was broken down into individual years as part of their proposed budget for the year 2024. A warning was issued by the panel that the mission might be scrapped if the agency does not comply with the request.
In spite of the fact that MSR has been successful up to this point. It has been discovered that the Perseverance rover has dug up several soil samples that indicate indications of organic stuff. If NASA were to be able to bring these samples back to Earth, they would require further scientific investigation. Scientists may be able to discover more about Mars, such as whether or not the planet has ever been home to life, with the help of the samples.