This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bacher. Bob Zimmerman is here. He keeps the website behind the black. JPL, my favorite part of NASA. Layoffs. How bad, Bob?

JPL, it's interesting. JPL is really supposed to be a private operation, but it's been attached to NASA for all its life and all its funding comes basically from NASA.

So you can't really call it a private organization. It's really an agency of NASA.

JPL announced a layoff of 325 workers this week. That's about 5% of its workforce, but it's the third major layoff they've imposed this year.

And all these layoffs have to do with budget cuts from NASA, and all those budget cuts have to do specifically with the Mars Sample Return Project.

NASA has put a halt on any construct, has been cutting back on spending any money on that project

as they review the project to try to find out what they're going to do, because the way the

project was designed was really chaotic and incoherent and impossible to get done even close

to the budget they were proposing. and so there's been a pushback

against that and so NASA has agreed that they need to review everything and they're now looking

at possibilities but in the result is that JPL don't do any more work because you might all

the work you're doing might not happen and so they've there's been a cutback now JPL's had

a great deal of management problems over the last few years and I suspect

very strongly that JPL's role in Mall sample return is going to be significantly reduced

because of these problems.

It's not all their fault of problems but they are contributing to the problems and their management issues

have been of issue. So yes, their budget has been reduced and they continue to lay off

people, John. And of course, the press release makes it sound like these are the end of the

world, but you know, in the private sector, this kind of stuff happens all the time, and JPL

should not treat itself as a government agency it should

treat itself as a private company and therefore work hard to do things right you

don't do things right you're gonna get layoffs that's all and you say this the

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