JPL and the Local Economy

Mike Kobeissi’s earliest job in the United States was at Ralph’s Grocery in La Cañada, and this index widens from that neighborhood store to the institution that anchors much of the employment in the foothills, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and to the aerospace economy around it.

The laboratory began with rockets. Space.com describes a lab founded in the mid 1930s in the San Gabriel Mountains after students at the California Institute of Technology, following an accidental explosion on campus, were urged to take their rocket experiments somewhere more isolated. It developed rocket technology for the Army in the 1940s, joined the newly formed NASA at the end of the 1950s and develops many of the scientific payloads for NASA missions, while its Deep Space Network brings in data from antennas in California, Australia and Spain.¹

The Center for Land Use Interpretation sets the laboratory in a regional story: Southern California aviation grew through the 1920s, the region became the nation’s largest producer of military aircraft during World War II, and after the war its factories turned to jets, missiles, rockets, radar and satellites, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, east of downtown Los Angeles, described as the birthplace of American rocketry and space missions.² The City of Pasadena’s economic development strategy of 2024 builds on the same base, aiming at deep tech industries around institutions such as Caltech, pointing to the expansion of Motiv Space Systems, and recording employment near the city’s pre pandemic peak of 80,000 jobs.³

Seven entries complete the subject: The Founding of JPL, Explorer 1, The Deep Space Network, The Voyager Missions, Mars Rovers Built at JPL, JPL and Caltech and Aerospace in Southern California.