Is JPL part of NASA? How a 1936 student rocket test became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

What JPL is today

JPL describes itself as NASA’s only federally funded research and development centre, operated for the agency by Caltech. In other words, NASA sets the missions and pays for them, while the California Institute of Technology manages the laboratory. It covers about 168 acres (68 hectares) next to the site of its first rocket experiments, on the edge of Pasadena. What it builds and operates – Mars rovers, the Voyagers, the Deep Space Network – is described in Institutes & Facilities.

The arrangement is a legacy of history. When NASA was created in 1958, JPL already existed, already belonged to Caltech and already had more than twenty years of rocket work behind it.

Halloween 1936 in the Arroyo Seco

In the mid-1930s Frank Malina was a graduate student of Theodore von Kármán, the Hungarian-born director of Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT), who encouraged his interest in rockets. Malina was joined by two Pasadena rocket enthusiasts, Jack Parsons, a self-taught explosives expert, and the mechanically gifted Ed Forman, and later by fellow graduate students Apollo M. O. Smith and Hsue-Shen Tsien. Around Caltech the group became known as the “Suicide Squad”.

They needed a place where a rocket could misfire safely, and they chose the Arroyo Seco, a dry canyon wash north of the Rose Bowl, above Devil’s Gate Dam. On 31 October 1936 they tested an alcohol-fuelled rocket motor there for the first time. It did not go smoothly. According to JPL’s historian Erik Conway, the first three attempts failed because the powder fuse blew out; on the fourth the motor ignited, but the oxygen hose caught fire and thrashed about on the ground about 40 feet (12 metres) away. No one was hurt and the valves worked, but no thrust measurements were obtained.

Back on campus the experiments were not popular. A rocket-fuel leak rusted metal surfaces throughout the Guggenheim building, and later a test stand mounted on its outside wall exploded and damaged the building. The group moved its work off campus, to the Arroyo Seco.

From student project to Army laboratory

The turning point was military interest. Henry “Hap” Arnold, head of the US Army Air Corps, visited GALCIT in 1938, and in 1939 the National Academy of Sciences – with Arnold behind the funding – gave the group $1,000, followed by $10,000 more, to develop rockets that would help heavy aircraft take off from short runways. This was jet-assisted take-off, or JATO. On 12 August 1941 Army Lieutenant Homer Boushey made the first JATO-assisted flight, in an Ercoupe aircraft at March Field, and in April 1942 JATO rockets lifted a 20,000-pound (about 9-tonne) Douglas A-20 bomber into the air. Von Kármán and Malina set up the company Aerojet to manufacture the motors.

When the Army asked von Kármán to analyse the German V-2 missile programme, the team’s 1943 proposal referred to the organisation for the first time as “the Jet Propulsion Laboratory”. In 1944 the Army Ordnance Corps began to fund the work, and in June 1944 GALCIT Project Number One officially became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By 1945 its staff numbered nearly 300. The laboratory tested small unguided “Private” missiles in the Mojave Desert from late 1944 and first launched its guided Corporal missile in May 1947.

1958: a satellite and a new owner

On 31 January 1958 JPL and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched Explorer 1, America’s first successful satellite. Its main instrument, a Geiger counter built by James Van Allen, discovered belts of radiation trapped around the Earth. JPL calls it the first space experiment.

NASA began operating in October 1958. Two months later, on 3 December 1958, JPL was transferred from Army jurisdiction to the new civilian space agency. From then on it built robotic spacecraft to explore other worlds: the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the Moon, Mariner 2, which in 1962 became the first spacecraft to fly past another planet and return data, and Mariner 4, the first successful mission to Mars in 1965. How missions are chosen and built today is explained in From proposal to launch.

Three common misconceptions

“JPL was founded by NASA.” It was not: it is older than NASA by 22 years and joined the agency as an existing laboratory.

“JPL is a NASA centre like any other.” Not quite: it is NASA’s only federally funded research and development centre and is operated by a university, Caltech, rather than directly by the agency.

“Jet propulsion means jet engines.” In JPL’s case it meant rockets: the laboratory’s first products were rocket motors for take-off assistance and then rocket-powered missiles. The name has stayed the same while the work moved on to planetary exploration.

Ninety years on

JPL turned 90 on 31 October 2026, counting from the first rocket firing in the Arroyo Seco (status as of 3 November 2026). The dry riverbed where the Suicide Squad set up its motor is still next door to the laboratory, and Pasadena’s place in the story is described in City & Region. One of the laboratory’s most demanding everyday tasks – bringing home data from Mars – is explained in How do Mars rovers send their data to Earth?