Whats it like leading such a diverse workforce?
Elachi: Having a diverse workforce — from diverse backgrounds, diverse education, diverse gender and so on really enriches a place, because people come with different perspectives, come with different ideas. When you are exploring and doing something new that has never been done before, you want thinking out of the box, you want to be thinking from all different directions of the box. Narrator: You mentioned you encourage out of the box thinking. I mean, JPL has a long history of that kind of thinking. We’re coming up on our 70th anniversary of the first rocket tests on the area that is now JPL. What do you think is the legacy that started 70 years ago with those Caltech students and the professor just coming out here and testing what probably people thought was a really wacky idea, of testing a rocket? Elachi: You know, I think you have a really good point because probably those people 70 years ago, that group of four or five who worked with von Karman at Caltech were considered way
