No, New Horizons (the recent mission to Pluto, and in 2019 to Ultima Thule) was run through APL, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, not JPL at Caltech.

Don't confuse the two; APL is actually becoming quite a rival to JPL. I recommend the book "Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto" [1] if you care to read about some of the politics.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36031228-chasing-new-hor...

The following is an extended quote from the book, to give you a flavor:

APL had not done many planetary missions—only one, in fact—but it had an impressive, decades-long track record of building and launching Earth observation and military satellites that performed well and were inexpensive.

…

APL’s Discovery mission was called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous.” The craft launched in 1996 and became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, circling for a year around the asteroid Eros. Later, it would even land on Eros, a bonus achievement that was not even conceived of in the original mission proposal. And to top that, the APL team had completed the spacecraft ahead of schedule, and ended up doing the mission for $30 million under budget, giving the money back to NASA.

…

[After the Bush administration tried to cancel the Pluto mission competition,] I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, and I smelled something fishy. If Europa went forward, JPL would be guaranteed to get the work, because that mission had simply been assigned to JPL—without competition—and it was also a far bigger monetary prize than winning Pluto would be. Alan speculated that JPL had worked behind the scenes to persuade the Bush administration more or less to trade the Pluto mission for a new start on Europa. He also believed that JPL had another interest in killing Pluto, because if APL actually won, APL’s hand would forever be strengthened as a powerful competitor in all future outer solar system exploration.

…

Tom decided to fight fire with napalm, calling his political ace in the hole—the powerful senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, where APL is located, and then chair of the Senate funding committee responsible for space exploration. At Tom’s behest, Mikulski wrote a sharp letter to NASA, demanding that NASA resume the Pluto mission competition …

I came here to say something similar but with my added first hand experience of working for a government contractor at Kennedy Space Center.

Almost all of the real engineering done by "NASA" at KSC is done by government contractors. The actual NASA employee pool had a higher than usual proportion of lazy and incompetent members because it's virtually impossible to terminate a federal government employee. The rest were hard core bureaucrats who spent most of their time jockeying for bigger offices, more responsibility, etc.

Kennedy is a different kind of facility, even from some of the other NASA Centers. There's a huge emphasis on compatibility of launch & ground systems. And, you're right about bureaucrats and you could even extend it to lobbyists.

The weird thing is they no longer do any work related to jet propulsion.

Wrong [0][1]. They still do a lot of propulsion. :D They just primarily focus on robotics now with lots of work in landing systems and spacecraft (orbiters).

[0] https://sec353ext.jpl.nasa.gov/ep/

[1] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/micropropulsion-la...

That's not jet propulsion. Electric propulsion (ion thrusters) is very different from jet propulsion (air turbines). The NASA facility doing the most work with jets to my knowledge is Glenn in Ohio.

Yeah, and the "Aerojet" corporation never made air-breathing turbomachinery and "JATO units" were rockets, despite "JATO" standing for "jet assisted take off".

Thanks a lot, you just made me laugh out loud in a quiet cafe!

I'm sure the smartest are drawn to the big bucks of trading firms - but to think that any of those companies would ever be considered "the greatest engineering organization in human history" is a funny mental image.

Yep. NASA has such high standards that it's hard to imagine a private company ever matching its engineering quality, after all why would they need to?

Or afford to?

The way most software is built today makes me sad.

<sarcasm>What aren't Electron and Javascript the pinacle of software development </sarcasm>

As a former JPLer, I'd disagree with you. When I joined in 2002, over 65% of JPL's employees had at least a bachelors. Still, 40% had a secondary degree (MS or MBA). It was not unusual to see people get passed on promotions for Team Leads and/or Managers because they did not have a second degree. Even the Business Administrators (BAMs) were on track to being required to have an MBA when I left in 2010. Think BAMs as Executive Secretaries for a Line of Business (Section) for about 30-50 people. It was severely career limiting if people looking to move up from Group (5-20 people) to Section (30-50), to Division (100-300), to Directorate (100-1000) to Executive Council (strategic direction for all of JPL) without the appropriate experience and/or degree(s). The Director for the Lab (think CEO) for JPL during my tenure was Dr. Charles Elachi; he had 6 degrees. I interviewed with people with PhDs in Astro-Meteorology (literally Space Weather and weather on other planets) who knew 10x more about Compilers and Compiler Theory than I did as a recent CS grade at the time. All the while, almost everyone I worked with was an absolute pleasure to work with.

Special, scary smart, and the best of humanity does not begin to describe those amazing people.

I worked at a government research organization similar to JPL much more recently than 2002, the pace was far too slow and industry did all the interesting things. The operational staff seemed to exist as part of a jobs program.

My tour was earlier (1969-1970), when Bill Pickering ran the place. Not sure about the proportion of multiple degree-holders, but regardless, your last sentence fits it as well then as now.

Being the "smartest" is neither necessary nor sufficient for being "the best". To be the best, you have to focus on the most important problems.

Decreasing high frequency trading latency or building better stock prediction algorithms are interesting problems, but they aren't in the same league as landing rovers on fucking Mars or sending probes outside the solar system. Five hundred years from now, assuming humans are still around, we'll still be teaching about Voyager in history classes. Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading?

> Will we be teaching about high-frequency trading?

markets will still want liquidity, so if there's a functioning economy, there will be HFT.

JPL can be great without taking digs at other activities.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. I'm saying that it isn't as important to humanity.

It's like the pitch Steve Jobs gave to John Scully: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

There was nothing wrong with selling Pepsi. Scully could have become very, very wealthy that way. He could have mentored younger executives, he could have done a lot of good with his life. But five hundred years from now, beating Coke wasn't going to leave much of a legacy.

And that's the point. Maybe the brightest really are going into high frequency trading. Maybe they're creating a lot of shareholder wealth there. That's all great. But to be considered "the greatest" it isn't enough to be really smart, or even to work on really hard problems. You have to work on really hard, important problems. IMO.

> I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do. I'm saying that it isn't as important to humanity.

and i'm saying you can extol the virtues of JPL without taking a shit on anything else. i don't even particularly disagree with you, just your rhetorical need to keep talking about why other things don't matter quite as much, instead of talking about why JPL does matter.

Getting what you need, when you need it is extremely important to humanity. Middle men aren't glamorous but there's a reason they've existed since the beginning of organized human society. They are offloading the task of planning for the future for you by predicting your needs. This allows you to think about more important problems - Like landing a robot a Mars.

The entire concept of HFT can be wiped out by a few changes in the rules of a stock exchange...

JPL can be wiped out by a few changes to congressional budgeting

Mars can't, nor can the engineering techniques used by JPL.

Not the smartest of the smartest, just the greediest of the smartest.

This is very sad but probably true enough.