Most of the famous robot space probes were built at one place—the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Today, more than 5,000 scientists and technicians work there in a vast complex of buildings and workshops, but JPL started in a dusty, dry riverbed below the San Gabriel Mountains. In the 1930s, Theodore von Kármán and his students from the nearby California Institute of Technology launched small, experimental rockets there. When the United States Army wanted to find a way to help heavy airplanes take off from short runways, they hired the students to study the idea of propelling a jet by rockets. The technique was called Jet-Assisted Take-Off, or JATO. That’s how JPL got started.
When NASA was put in charge of all space travel in 1958, JPL was working with the Army to build simple satellites. The entire project was transferred to NASA. JPL continued to develop unmanned space probes, and their reputation has been growing ever since. Once a year, JPL has an open house so that young people and their parents can visit the laboratories and see how real rocket science works.
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