Another round of layoffs has ripped through La Canada Flintridge’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, leaving 550 employees without jobs, some of whom are already reeling after being impacted by January’s wildfires.
“I was laid off from JPL yesterday,” declared Jenny Kampmeier, a systems engineer on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. “We had two other rounds of layoffs last year that I believe was over a thousand people total.”
Staffing at JPL has gone from around 6,500 employees in early 2024 to around 4,500 following this week’s layoffs. That is a reduction of more than 30 percent that Kampmeier declares leaves a gaping hole in America’s space mission.
“I believe about the brain trust that was lost, people who had been at JPL for 30, 40 years, and had just an incredible wealth of knowledge and experience,” Kampmeier informed Eyewitness News. “Its going to take a long, long time to build that back up.”
But Kampmeier’s layoff isn’t the only setback she shares with her JPL coworkers. Months before she lost her job, she lost her home to the Eaton Fire. It’s still standing, but uninhabitable.
“My houtilize and many around us are extremely contaminated from the smoke,” she declared. “I’ve been displaced since the fires and I’ve been living in another neighborhood.”
In the days after the Eaton Fire, JPL declared more than 200 of its employees either lost their homes to the flames or had to relocate out. How many of those fire victims are now laid-off has not been released.
But for an engineer like Kampmeier who thrives on keeping spacecraft on precise paths, her current trajectory is unsettling at best.
“I find myself feeling very adrift,” Kampmeier declared. “Our job, our home, our
community – when all of that receives taken away over the course of months, you’re left just feeling uncertain about everything and its very, very hard.”
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