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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a bureaucratically sprawling organization with more rules than you can shake a stick at. Everyone from the top down agrees, so much so that management is working to eliminate many of them. INSIDE JPL This is part of a four-week series looking at problems inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the hope that the place can be revived. See the main page of the series THE EARLY YEARS From left to right: William H. Pickering, former JPL Director, Theodore von Karman, JPL co-founder and Frank J. Malina, co-founder and first director of JPL. Click to enlarge PHOTO GALLERY Click here to see the history of JPL, including this image of the original rocket boys. Browse six decades of success and failure, in black-and-white and color. But it wasn't always that way. In JPL's renegade youth, rules were not the rule. Herman Bank joined JPL in 1947, expecting the job to be temporary. He retired 37 years later, long after helping engineer America's first space flight, a brief rocket trip above Earth's atmosphere. In a telephone interview from his home in Pasadena, Bank remembered when JPL was lean and mean. "At that time, things were much more experimental, and we took some experimental risks that we wouldn't do these days," the 84-year-old Bank said.
Approximate Word count = 835
Approximate Pages = 3.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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