If anything, I think JPL is probably better than the rest of the aerospace industry in this regard. I think JPL actively tries to shield its technical people from some of the ugly politics playing out behind the scenes. In retrospect, I was definitely shielded from a lot of it for much of my career, particularly early on. That's a big reason my career was able to advance despite being so naive for so long. I think if I had been at Boeing I would have gone down in screaming flames much sooner.

But you also have to keep in mind that this was all a very long time ago. I'm offering my testimony here not so much to inform current events as to vouch for the plausibility of what V_Terranova_Jr said in the root comment of this thread.

I worked for the "Canadian JPL" back in the previous "climate change" panic, "the ozone hole."

Even though it was a government agency, working at a national lab felt even more productive than the private sector.

The reasons are that the departmental leadership is 100% done by research scientists who are ruthlessly efficient at doing science and writing papers about them.

My department had approx. 4 senior scientists, a computer hardware engineer, a payload engineer, a CNC technician, a sysadmin, 2 technical consultants, and one administrative staff.

We did custom payloads for the Shuttle, balloons and rockets which did atmospheric measurements. The software was primarily custom in C for telemetry and HP Basic/etc. for plotting.

I highly recommend working for a national lab for a couple of years. Besides an unlimited budget, it's great having a sense of mission.

Factoid 1: We used Fidonet to copy data from launch sites to the lab for quick turnaround and to ensure the instruments were functioning and calibrated properly.

Factoid 2: Since this we pre-WWW, sample source code was often hard to obtain. So we had the world's shareware on a single optical disk with an index file so people could find sample code.

Factoid 3: But since it was a national lab, if we needed, we had access to SOTA civil and military systems that came with source code. I was familiar with those systems, but we never needed them while I was involved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion

What was more tractable about studying the ozone hole than climate change was that we could make direct observations and reducing CFCs had a fairly immediate effect. There wasn't an issue with "ozone hole deniers."

To see the lab's papers, do a scientific search for Dr. Hans Fast and his co-authors.

Thank you so much for this. I’ve been looking into applying to a few national labs and what you’ve started about the “mission first” culture is exactly what I’m looking for