‘It pulls us to be our best selves’: Exploring space and diversity at JPL

Women at NASA’s storied Jet Propulsion Laboratory literally danced for joy when they learned in January that Laurie Leshin had been appointed JPL’s new director – the first female to lead this center for robotic space exploration in its 86-year history. She’s a barrier breaker in an industry long dominated by white men, but one that’s also rapidly changing.

Last week, the Monitor sat down with Dr. Leshin to ask her about diversity issues and upcoming missions at the lab. The space scientist is an expert in both, coming off eight years as the first female president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and serving in leadership positions at NASA headquarters and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.  

More than 6,000 employees work at this sun-drenched campus in Pasadena, California, seeking answers to big questions like “Are we alone in the universe?” On the horizon are missions to orbit Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and to bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth. Both missions are related to the search for water, and possible life. The lab also devotes more than a third of its effort to tracking and studying Earth’s climate. 

Dr. Leshin, a self-described “water person,” has spent much of her work as a geochemist looking for water in meteorites and on Mars. She was first captivated by the red planet as a young girl, when the Viking landers sent back pictures of Martian rocks that looked like Arizona, where she lived. That interest turned into a career when, as a university student studying chemistry, she saw a notice for a NASA internship. Screwing up her courage, she knocked on the door of a female chemistry professor she did not know – and who dropped everything to help her.

The directorship is a homecoming for Dr. Leshin. She worked on the Mars rover Curiosity and was with the cheering crowd at JPL when it landed 10 years ago – on her birthday. The feeling is apparently mutual. In her office hangs a space-themed quilt sewn by more than 100 “JPLers” after she briefly mentioned at her first town hall that she also was a weaver and knitter. “This is what’s special about JPL,” she says of the quilt. “It’s this fabulous intersection of creativity and total nerdiness.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We’ve had a lot of “firsts” for women over the decades – in politics, in the law, even in aerospace. Why do you think the JPL “first” is important?

It’s a moment in the aerospace industry when we are really getting serious about embracing diversity, embracing difference, and embracing inclusion. And I hope I can be a symbol of that. 

I was fortunate enough to be friends with Sally Ride, and one of the things I love most about her was that she took really seriously the responsibility of being the first American woman in space. I feel the same way about being the first woman director of JPL – that I need to use this opportunity to create space for others, and also to share the message about how important it is to honor diverse voices in this business that is so challenging. We need all the brains. We need everyone who can help us drive the frontiers of knowledge and of technology.  

As a college president, we dramatically increased the fraction of women in our incoming classes. I know it’s possible and lots of places are focused on women; they’re focused on underrepresented people of color, people with disabilities. That excuse of “Well, they’re not available,” I just don’t buy that anymore.  

Here in the LA Basin, we have an incredibly diverse community, an incredibly diverse set of colleges that we can draw from. We’re building pipelines of future workforce at those institutions. I think 23% of our summer interns last year were from Hispanic-serving institutions, for example. Now, once they’re here, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got an inclusive environment for them to thrive. You can’t just throw people together and expect that it’s going to work. You have to actually manage that process. 

To prep for this interview, I took a public tour of JPL. I met a middle school girl, a person of color, from Kern County, which is a pretty rural county in California. She is doing robotics at school. Her dream is to work at JPL. What advice would you give her?

One is don’t let anybody tell you that you don’t belong there because you completely do. And keep up the work on things like robotics teams. Hands-on learning like FIRST Robotics and other after-school activities are really life changing. It helps show the joy of doing STEM in ways that can be harder inside the formal classroom. So keep doing things that excite you, and then come and be a summer intern at JPL because we hire a ton of our workforce from our interns. 

STEM is about discovering something that no one’s known before. That’s what did it for me. It’s like that first time I did actual scientific research as a NASA intern when I was 19. I was like, “Oh my gosh, no one has ever figured this out before. I’m the first!” 

Two big upcoming JPL missions are related to water – on Mars and on Jupiter’s moon. Why is looking for water so important, and what are you hoping to find from these two missions?

Water is so important because wherever we find life, it is associated with water on Earth. It’s almost true that wherever we find water, we find life. So liquid water is a great sort of soup for life to exist within and around. We think it is one of the essential ingredients for life to have gotten started anywhere else. 

When we look at Mars, we see lots of evidence of dried-up riverbeds and dried-up lake beds. We know that Mars today is too cold and the atmosphere is too thin for liquid water to exist at the surface for any prolonged period. But clearly, in the past it did. And those times in the past, which were probably billions of years ago, was the same time that life was getting started on Earth. So it’s very interesting to try and understand whether Mars and Earth were much more alike back then and whether at that time, when there were nascent oceans on the Earth and there was a bunch of liquid water on the surface of Mars, whether life could have gotten started in both places. 

Our plan with Mars is to bring back some rocks that are going to allow us to answer that question. Today, as we speak, the Perseverance rover is drilling little pinky-sized cores of rock and stashing them away in her belly. And we know from the sensors that Perseverance has on board that some of these rock cores are chock-full of organic material. We’ve got to bring these rocks back and get them in the very best labs on Earth where we can tear them apart atom by atom, molecule by molecule, and really understand their history and their origins.  

It turns out this mission is also really hard. To go to Mars, get the stuff, and bring it home, we’ve never done that. It’s the most complex mission JPL will have ever done.

And sending a spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon Europa?

Europa is a whole different class of water worlds. It’s one we’re calling “ocean worlds.” It’s Jupiter’s giant amount of gravity pushing and pulling on Europa’s icy shell that causes some of the ice underneath to melt. We’re fairly confident there is an ocean underneath.  

We’re going to fly by it many times with the Europa Clipper, with nine different sensors to understand what’s happening both at the surface and also to even sense below the ice. From these flybys we’ll be able to tell so much more about what this ocean is like and where there might be spots where the ice is thin – where if, in a future mission, we were able to go and land on the surface and try and get into that ocean.  

So it’s a first mission truly exploring ocean worlds in the outer solar system. And we think there are a lot of them.  

Why is the U.S. government spending so much on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth? 

I think people think that somehow we’ve taken a couple billion dollars and put it on top of a rocket and launched it into space, which is not true. All of that money is actually spent right here on Earth. It is spent on people, inspiring this young middle schooler that you mentioned earlier to pursue STEM. She may or may not end up working in the space business, but, my goodness, she’s going to end up innovating somewhere. We spend it on good, high paying tech jobs. This is really good for our economy. It’s good for the competitiveness of the United States.  

And I would argue worrying only about today’s problems, and trying to solve the thing that’s right in front of you is a disservice to humanity. The beauty of being human beings is we can be long-term as well. We can look over the horizon and dream about what’s possible. We can help people imagine a different world. And I really think space exploration does that. I think it pulls us to be our best selves, and I think there’s huge value in that. 

We do a lot for planet Earth. Our next big launch is a mission called SWOT [Surface Water and Ocean Topography], which is going to revolutionize our understanding of Earth’s surface water. We do not have a global view of Earth’s fresh water. I didn’t know that myself until recently. This mission is going to do a global survey of Earth’s surface water in addition to doing work on the oceans and being able to understand ocean circulation in much greater detail. 

JPL is all about robotic exploration. What do you see as the proper balance between robotic and human missions, and also, should humans go to Mars?

I think having humans in space is part of what makes it real for lots of people. We’re at this really exciting moment where we’re about to venture back beyond low Earth-orbit, sending humans back to the moon. And this time it’ll be a more diverse set of humans, which to me is also really powerful. 

There’s also a ton of places that humans won’t be going any time soon. The outer solar system, these ocean worlds. If you want to try and understand planets around other stars, other star systems, we need robotic observatories to do that science. 

Mars has been on our wish list for generations to send humans to this neighboring world. I think it’s going to happen. Humans can discern and make decisions in real time and explore. And by the way, the systems that you build to support the humans are capable of bringing back way more rocks than the little pinky-sized samples that we will be bringing back with Mars Sample Return. 

You are in a position to put JPL on a course to be a certain kind of institution doing a certain kind of science. What’s your strategic vision?  

In fact, that’s the exact conversation we’re having with thousands of JPLers, because I’m a true believer in co-creation of a future. I don’t think any one person should come in and dictate the answer to that question. There’s brilliant, brilliant people here. And part of this is just about unleashing them on the hardest problems in science and space exploration. 

And we need to lead in this very fast changing and diverse ecosystem that is the space business right now. We need to get much better at being a great partner to others, leading by example with our own work around diversity, equity, and inclusion and accessibility, for example. I have this mantra that I’m talking to everyone about that’s called “succeed, seed, and lead” – mission success, seed the future, lead in the ecosystem. I’m just really proud to get the opportunity to take an incredibly storied institution like JPL and help it have a future that just knocks it out of the park.