Dave Gallagher’s office at JPL is filled with the things you might expect. Rover models. Photographs of planets and moons. Reminders of the machines humans have built to reach places we cannot.
But the photograph that caught my eye was different.
A black and white portrait of a Navy captain in service dress blues. Dave’s father. A Naval Aviator who flew P-2V Neptunes.
That picture seemed to explain something about Dave.
There is a tradition of service in the Gallagher family, particularly service when the stakes are high. Dave has spent most of his professional life carrying that tradition into a very different kind of institution.
He joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1989 after earning an electrical engineering degree from Purdue, working at IBM, and running his own software consulting company. Over the decades that followed, he became one of those people whose career touches an extraordinary amount of space history.
Early on, he managed the Drop Physics Module experiment flown aboard the Space Shuttle. He worked on an instrument for the Mars 1998 mission and became project manager for Deep Space 3, an ambitious attempt to demonstrate precision formation flying between spacecraft.
Then there was Hubble.
When the Hubble Space Telescope reached orbit in 1990, engineers discovered that its primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. Dave led the JPL team responsible for the development, integration, and testing of Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The instrument incorporated corrective optics that helped restore Hubble’s vision and went on to produce some of the most important astronomical images ever made.
He later held leadership roles on the Spitzer Space Telescope and rose through JPL as manager of the Advanced Optical Systems Program Office, deputy director and then director for Astronomy, Physics, and Space Technology, and eventually associate director for Strategic Integration.
By 2025, Dave had spent 36 years at the laboratory. He was preparing to leave.
Instead, he got another call to serve.
On June 2, 2025, Dave Gallagher became the 11th director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He inherited one of the hardest moments in JPL’s recent history. The laboratory had already endured major reductions driven by declining budgets, including the loss of roughly 530 employees in February 2024 and another 325 that November. Under Dave, JPL undertook another broad restructuring in 2025, reducing its workforce by approximately 550 people while trying to preserve the technical capabilities that make the laboratory unique.
Those are brutal decisions for any leader. At JPL, where many people spend entire careers together building machines that can take a decade or more to reach another world, the numbers represent colleagues, friends, mentors and entire bodies of institutional knowledge.
Dave’s job was to make the laboratory smaller without diminishing what it was capable of doing.
A little more than a year later, there are signs of movement in the other direction.
This week NASA selected PRIMA, the Probe far Infrared Mission for Astrophysics, to advance into Phase B development. JPL will manage the mission. If confirmed for implementation, the observatory is targeted for launch in 2033 and will study some of the coldest and most obscured regions of the universe, searching for clues to the origins of planets, galaxies, black holes and even the water that eventually found its way to Earth.
For Dave, there is a certain symmetry in that. Much of his early career was spent building astronomical instruments and helping rescue Hubble’s view of the universe. Now, as director, he is helping position JPL to build the next generation of machines that will look outward again.
I photographed Dave in the library at Caltech and at JPL, surrounded by the rovers and spacecraft that have defined much of his professional life.
I kept thinking about that photograph of his father.
Different uniform. Different kind of mission. Same idea.
When things get difficult, you stay at your post.
