- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.
Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
We had a working system. It was the current administration that slashed NASA's budget and castrated the JPL aerospace employment pipeline. NASA's talent shortage is a self-inflicted wound.
Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.
It's funny to me how much this administration gets the blame for everything. NASA would had been widely regarded as schlerotic and archaic before these most recent budget cuts. Filled with beaurocrats who didn't even know what their job was. But, the budget gets cut under Trump and now the rot in the organization is forgotten.
I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.
It's funny to me how quickly people leap in front of the train to pretend like this fixes everything. NASA still has an anemic culture, and opening the door to interns is not a replacement for their failing talent acquisition. Budget cuts, revoked contracts and fired personnel will not stimulate positive change either.
> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.
> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.
I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.
I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...
That’s not what it was, and you have to have been exclusivity ingesting only the most biased media to believe that it was ‘fat-trimming’. It was muscle-trimming. Then again, why would I expect anyone working in tech to understand how an organisation is meant to function. Maybe the government should’ve just had another funding round instead?
Genuinely sorry he let you down and you're left holding the bag dude. But please understand people aren't going to accept your weak rationalizations anymore.
This is the problem. It's as if everything has to crash and burn for people like the person you responded to finally get some sense. By that point, it will be too late to catch up to our competitors overseas. The race will be over. I honestly don't know how to reconcile this seemingly unsolvable problem. They have no perspective whatsoever of the kinds of people that are real innovators in engineering & tech. This field is super open to alternative lifestyles because that's where a lot of out of the box thinking happens. They just don't get it. In the past, it seemed easy to just ignore them. They could live their lives. But now they're running the ship and its sinking.
> they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"
You can always tell when someone is embarrassed to defend something (especially hurting people), when they have to mask it in ambiguous, impassive terms and stale euphemisms.
He didn't fire thousands of good people, human beings who have to worry about putting food on the table now, for purely ideological reasons, while vilifying them as "woke", unqualified, doing work not worth doing (only to open the same positions back up now, because it turns out it was). No, he just "trimmed the fat".
Oh, did people get hurt? Did we waste money and lose expertise for nothing? No, we just "trimmed the fat". Gotta "trim the fat", right? "Trimming the fat" is normal and necessary, and if I say something is just "trimming the fat", that's all it is.
That is indeed how it is supposed to work. But things haven't exactly been working like they're supposed to lately.
For FY26, when we had a PBR proposing massive cuts followed by a government shutdown with a long stretch where NASA didn't know what their real budget was going to be, we saw a bunch of layoffs and project cancellations in preparation for a budget that might resemble what the president was requesting. Whether or not that was legal is in question:
That is true, but in all fairness, every politician has at one time, or another requested all sorts of nonsense to appease the base, not just presidents hence the term "political lobbying".
If you look up the definition of 'politics," it's the method or strategy: sometimes used to describe the tactics, schemes, or "art" used to gain influence, sometimes carrying a negative connotation of manipulation or intrigue. Everybody has done it since the beginning of time :|
Congress also declares wars, and we know how well that has worked out for everyone.
First year civics: the legislative branch passes the budget, the executive branch is the one that actually spends it. Or doesn’t, in which case you have a constitutional crisis.
It’s a technical distinction. The last true “budget” was FY1997. Otherwise, CRs are used until some kind appropriations bill can be passed. The problem is, that appropriations bill isn’t a true budget as money was already spent via CR.
24.4 in 2026 is less than 19.2 in 2016. I wouldn't call it a giant squeeze or anything though, but these raw numbers almost imply the opposite kind of misunderstanding.
Congress sets the budget not the president. The administrations budget is aspirational, and if they want to force it they are required to use political savvy and whatever influence they have built up. Yeah so zero influence as all of that is towards cover ups, stock manipulation, and incompetence.
The executive has the veto and a willingness to leave the government non-functional (funny how anti-government types are often okay with kneecapping government). They're not powerless.
Technically true, but the president also selects the administrator of NASA, and this presidency isn't terribly fussed about following laws about how allocated money can be used.
So don't be surprised if suddenly half the NASA budget is used to pay for a second ballroom or more missiles to CENTCOM.
Yes, but this President has decided that he can move money around or just not spend the money, regardless of the budget, and this Congress has let him.
Yes, as we know this Congress is famous for doing its own independent thinking and not rubber stamping everything that arrives with a little bit of mango colored makeup on it.
This part: Let's now adjust for inflation so you can see the budget squeeze.
$19.2 billion in 2016 dollars is worth $26.4 billion and change, once adjusted for inflation, in March 2026. Feel free to do it yourself. Magic of compounding.
24.4 for 2026 is notably less than 26.4. Budget squeeze.
You're just scrambling to be technically correct now that you've been shown the data that their budget hasn't really changed much.
Politicians and pundits lie and exaggerate this stuff all the time. Don't take the bait.
This administration certainly isn't the most pro-science, but they did just complete a spin around the moon, something that will get more kids interested in science than anything NASA has done in the last 40 years.
That's like 4 times the ESA budget, and still insignificant compared to the money poured into AI. Several companies could cover that budget with quarterly profits.
REQUEST: coupon for positive thinking;
STATUS: DENIED, NON-NEW USER NEW BETTER HAHAHA
std::process::exit(sarcasm)
seriously though, this is HN. I'm done complaining about it. I'd like to encourage different behavior, yet my experience has taught me the opposite: Be open to offering feedback in the case feedback is requested or required. In any other case, disengage.
There are a fair number of engineers at centers (Stennis, Ames, Kennedy, etc.) that are government employees. When I was NASA-adjacent, it seemed they wrote the specs and testing regimes. I think the government even did some of the testing with government-employed test engineers and technicians. But yeah, a lot of the manufacturing is done by contractors.
There's a joke in the aero world that F-16s are designed by people Ph.D.'s, manufactured by people with Masters degrees, flown by people with a Batchelor's degree in History and maintained by people with a High School Diploma.
It turns out you have to make jobs for people at all levels of education and experience.
Each NASA center maintains in-house engineers and scientists, if for no other reason than to oversee and critique contracted work.
But in reality they do significant amounts of directed research using "burden" funded research for their on internal needs, and grant work for NASA and other agencies (like DOE).
I worked at JPL, and worked with folks at Ames for various reasons. Both centers try to carve out enough internal time to research new mission concepts, new ways of accomplishing existing mission concepts, or new basic technologies that have dual use for missions/commercial appliations. All of this would qualify as basic research similar to what would happen at Caltech or Stanford, the nearby official/unofficial partners.
I attended all kinds of conferences and agency-level meetings with researchers from many other agencies / nasa centers as well, all mostly aimed at finding out how to better explore space (new missions), or improve our existing exploration capabilities, either with new or by adapting existing tech.
NASA has an entire reporting pipeline called "New Technology Reports" that makes all of this research immediately public, and a deep tradition of spinning off commercial businesses to carry it forward if it turns out to be a good idea.
That’s not even remotely true and is a trite dismissal of legitimate criticism. Further, even though this might be an exciting concept, when put in the context of the massive budget cuts to nasa specifically it’s hard to fully celebrate what might be more a PR stunt than a meaningful commitment to science and exploration.
I don't think Jared Isaacman is interested in PR stunts. He actually seems to care about the science and exploration parts of NASA. Actually, he seems to care about all of NASA.
The $20 billion dollar moon base didn't seem like an announcement grounded in reality, although maybe that was less a PR stunt than the fact that NASA must (literally) shoot for the moon to stay politically relevant.
- If moon dust can be converted to oxygen reliably, the first company or country to set up shop on the moon can sell that service to countries and commercial entities.
- Unique manufacturing and science activities because of the low gravity
I read enough HN to know what it is -absolutely- true. HN comments, including this thread, often just read like BlueSky screeds half the time the US, US government or Sam Altman/Elon Musk/etc are mentioned.
They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.
There are users or bots that post political headlines on here with an obvious one-sided bias and do it to farm points, similar to Reddit. It'd be nice to have an impartial forum but it always seems to devolve into an echo chamber.
Your statement that it's humans and dismissing botted activity is a blanket statement, whereas I never used absolute language.
If it's a human getting up and rushing to to write about promoted ragebait content devolving a forum into an echo chamber, of course someone takes the bait and lists grievances in hysterical language unsolicited. Such emotionality is totally uncalled for on a tech forum, and proves my point.
Maybe I can ask ChatGPT to reply to this concern trolling because apparently I can dismiss humanity very easily that way. "hey grok give tip this person over the edge on this AI-induced psychosis screed."
And from my side of politics it seems like every thread about that group has a handful of dick riders who will stand for zero criticism of their cult leaders.
It's intriguing because little tech as well as big supported the current admin, and installed J.D. Vance to make good on Thiel's $15 million to his campaign.
It would be remarkable if random flailing didn't result in at least one good outcome, and sure enough Trump seems to have unblocked Federal action to eliminate pennies, which is one of those "obviously a good idea but..." things you would never get by ordinary Presidents.
However "Finally deleting the worthless penny" is not a big achievement and so it's understandable that you mistook "Trump constantly does incredibly bad things nobody likes" for them disapproving universally of all US Federal government activity.
It’s not reflexive criticism. Why would anyone work for sn organization where the CEO continuously criticizes its workers and treats them badly. Would you work for Twitter?
I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.
Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?
Suspicion, doubt and negativity is the default for this administration not the exception, for legitimate reasons.
It's always hard to get tell with you people whether your attempt at trolling is based on willful ignorance, maliciousness or immaturity. Probably all three.
It’s not that you’re willfully ignorant of the critique, you already know what it is. It’s TDS. Case closed.
Pre-sorting all criticism as reflexive and not necessarily justified is a rationalization for you not trying to understand other perspectives.
Edit: it seems like my message was ambiguous. Fuck Donald Trump, I’ve got a bottle to pop when he dies and I’ll never let you fuckers live down what you’ve done.
"TDS" is not a thing. It's a made-up term that people accuse others of, because they can't cover up a felonious president's many failings, lies, graft, and corruption. You use it to try to discredit a person who is rightly criticizing criminality, but you only discredit yourself when you use "TDS".
>EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
Why bother? Americans clearly don't believe in science anymore, and the American government can't be trusted to fund it properly, or to not rewrite or defund research because of wrongthink or "DEI."
If I were working for NASA, or even a possible candidate for working for NASA, I'd get my passport in order and look for greener pastures. Sure, the pay may not be the best but at least you aren't working for Nazis and pedophiles who believe in space demons and miasma theory.
> Americans clearly don't believe in science anymore
There's about a third that lean that way or atleast they don't care, and they have gained control of the government because of various factors, namely,
part of the middle third disillusioned with economics (left behind) and wanting a change,
another part of the middle third staying home because of geopolitics,
and yet another part of the middle third falling prey to media biased by right-wing billionaire/corporatist capture.
Any suggestions for a long-term fix for this problem?
I don't know what the long term fix is, because that presupposes the ability to plan long term, which is something I don't think the US is capable of anymore.
Part of the solution has to be breaking down the aggressive selfishness and individualism of American society and establishing the ideal of a common American cultural identity and civic duty. This used to exist, but only within the framework of racial and cultural homogeneity. We need that but without the Christian nationalism and white supremacy. That means Americans will have to believe in society and government and each other, rather than only their own immediate interests. It means some dirty words for Americans, a bit more "socialism" and "multiculturalism", maybe "regulations" and "taxes."
We need strong science and civics curriculum in our schools, which means we need to fund schools, which means we need to stop seeing schools as dens of atheist communist mind control, which will be a problem for a lot of the country. We need to establish separation of church and state as an explicit Constitutional principle. We need to remove tax exempt status for religious institutions. We need to repeal the Electoral College so that conservative Christian votes don't count more than everyone else. I don't think that keeping slave states in the union is still a problem worth worrying about.
But I don't know. How do you make people give a damn? How do you convince people that an objective reality exists? How do you convince people that empathy isn't a sin? Maybe it's just a generational thing. Maybe enough bastards just need to die out.
> the ability to plan long term, which is something I don't think the US is capable of anymore.
It may seem that way, but this lack is temporary until the pendulum swings back the other way. What is needed some mechanism to keep progress and planning going even when the pendulum is unfavorable.
> the aggressive selfishness and individualism of American society
It's an error to think the loudest voices are the majority. Also, selfishness and individualism are not necessarily cojoined twins, though it may seem that way at the moment. Americans are generous with their time and money as one can see from donation stats. [1] The comparative data at [2] is especially eye-opening.
> This used to exist, but only within the framework of racial and cultural homogeneity
This might be a myth. See [2]. Also, cooperative/pro-social behaviors are well documented across a spectrum of biological species, including humans. It might be innate to structured biological life, individual pathologies notwithstanding. "Society" is a thing, after all.
> It means some dirty words for Americans
I think this is an artifact of media capture. We the people need to wrest back control of the medium.
> Maybe enough bastards just need to die out.
There's always new ones being minted, unfortunately. Hence the need for a long-term solution.
> How do you make people give a damn?
Maybe we just need to organize those who do. Any suggestions how?
When you frame it like that it sounds like some kind of vanguard of class-conscious people should try to rebel and establish a, I don't know, dictatorship of the proletariat? Maybe they could give themselves some kind of Russian name to sound cool.
> When you frame it like that it sounds like some kind of vanguard of class-conscious people
Less class-conscious and more reality-conscious - there's always going to be a group that's anti-science/anti-rationality because of religion, views, etc. It's when they get into power and stop the progress of science that it becomes an issue.
> should try to rebel and establish a, I don't know, dictatorship of the proletariat?
No need for anything quite as drastic. And that would be effective only for a duration of time until the pendulum swings the other way. Also, I'm sure from the anti-science folks' perspective it's the pro-science folks that are oppressive when the latter are in government.
There must be some long-term solution to insulate science from the swings of the pendulum, without devolving into chaos or oppression. Maybe the internet hive-mind can brainstorm a solution. We also need a forum where like-minded people can have this discussion without getting downvoted into oblivion. Any options?
"Build a website - it's almost like you got the job done already" - Someone in the White House OEOB
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
The copy also doesn't seem to be written by someone with a good command of English, even ChatGPT would do better
>technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery. You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them, and your contributions move from concept to operation. For a few days, access is granted to this work. The number is extremely limited. The window only lasts four days. Will you answer the call?
This was the first thing I noticed. The first sentence is not a grammatical or sensical sentence as far as I can tell.
Also who are they expecting to get with a hiring window open for 4 days? People susceptible to manufactured urgency I guess... these are the tactics that phishing scams use.
It's scattered and disorganized like this administration.
You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them
OK alongside, but not ON, the teams building them? So apparently not actually building them myself? And also, does anyone build missions, or do they perhaps build systems?
For a few days, access is granted to this work.
Access is granted to whom? And to what work, the work I'll supposedly be doing? Hopefully yeah I have access to my own work. Or do you mean the work of the people alongside whom I'll be working on missions (the builders of the missions that is)?
The number is extremely limited.
What number?
The window only lasts four days.
Oh now there's a window analogy too. And they already said "a few days" so one of the two is redundant.
Its prob some H1B Indian Contractor poop skin that wrote this tbh. Gotta love the charity jobs that the USA gives out to all of unqualified India. Our tax dollars hard at work...
I knew a bunch of folks from 18F and the USWDS team. You could not find a more capable team of designers, developers and true user experience professionals. They cared about the users and they cared about good design.
It is a definition; the transition between the logotype and normal text has an implicit [:}, NASAFORCE: technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Though its an odd choice that they run it in with the paragraph of normal text rather than making that a heading. Of course, with a four day hiring window its a website that exists as pro forma evidence that there was a public website about the hiring effort, the people actually intended to be hired were almost certainly notified in advance out of band, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of effort put into this.
Unfortunately, many American English speakers will conjugate verbs in the singular for a collective noun like "NASA", so that doesn't sound quite as perfect as it should.
We lean so hard into incorporation that we see it grammatically as an entity, rather than as multiple people behind the entity's mask.
You can't put a period on that (in gramatically-correct English) because it isn't a sentence. You can't have a sentence without a verb. There's no verb here. If you look through a real dictionary you'll also notice that the definitions are not period-terminated sentences, and this is why
Mildly amusing that "◶NASAFORCE technologists" sounds like a natural enough string in context that it becomes a garden path sentence leading away from that interpretation.
If you want to me to care about what you have to say, I'd prefer if you cared enough to write it yourself. Especially on on taxpayer money. If I can spot it as slop, you have a problem.
Yikes, they are pushing their low-level employees into the rocket nozzles and fuel tanks? There's no room inside an RTG to fit an intern... Hopefully it means welders, metrologists, inspectors, etc.
Yes, it's a subject without a predicate. So it's not a complete sentence.
That doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. Let's say there's an image with the caption "A man looking at a fish in a tank." That's similarly a subject without a predicate, but it still makes sense as a photo caption.
Why is this called Nasa Force when the linked job is for an Areospace Engineer? The usa.jobs site only shows 15 open reqs for Nasa, and they are almost all engineering roles, save a few accounting/finance ones.
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.
I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.
i doubt it's that great, NASA is a huge government organization. There may be a handful of people/teams doing cool things but I suspect much of it is infuriating slow and bureaucratic. However, it's probably a good place to retire from if you're willing to put in the 30-40 years.
I have a buddy at JPL who loves it. It's a reasonably fast paced atmosphere where you can have a lot of responsibility relatively early in your career. Unfortunately everything is mission centric so there's pretty much always a Sword of Damocles hanging over you if the mission gets axed due to budget cuts. Good place to work on cool stuff, bad place for job security.
> I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa
Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.
Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees
Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.
Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
That's largely a Mechanical Engineering, Applied Math, and Applied Physics subfield now, not computer science. Most CS majors don't even know what an IVP is, let alone PDEs, nonlinear simulation, etc.
Most CS programs no longer require numerical methods and analysis classes which are critical for this as well as other adjacent subfields like AI/ML theory.
> embedded software
That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now. Most CS programs don't require OS classes anymore let alone embedded programming.
> even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering
The job posting on USAJobs is clear. And most people who are serious about working in the space also know how federal hiring works.
Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.
Fair. I think this is about the extent of my training, which was as an Applied Mathematics and Econ undergrad about 15 years ago: Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss
> https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/1093497/TOC
Maybe my idea of NASA was too encompassing. I figured that, apart from the engineering work, general sim would require optimizations and productionalization similar to how we have AI Engineers focused on the practical implementation of ML systems apart from the core model R&D.
I got a bit hooked on Econ for awhile which held my attention through an MS, which is when I learned about computers and then applied that into DS and development.
Most of my simulation experience is in stochastic systems and modern digital twins where agents sometimes have asymmetric information. I can see how I'm of no practical use to NASA now, but it still stings. What a bummer existing and not doing anything cool with life. A warning to youth!
I think you are underestimating your ability to contribute and also putting NASA on too much of a pedestal.
I'd argue your background is extremely valuable, but not easily traversible to NASA at the moment.
If you are deeply interested in the space, working with the newer startups in geospatial/hyperspectral imaging (be it climate or defense usecases) or CV space.
In a lot of cases, NASA is basically just acting as a coordinator between multiple vendors who are doing "the cool stuff" with less bureaucratic minutiae and stress from what's going on in DC.
Lots of interesting players in the ClimateTech and DefenseTech space who would like your background, and indirectly or directly they all work with NASA anyhow.
Thanks. I did find a space jobs site last week, and some jobs looked like they aligned closely. That's probably why I was surprised the nasa reqs weren't as broad.
I wasn't really looking for a change; I have 1 and 3 year olds and am fully remote, and the flexibility with sicknesses is really a benefit. I think it was mostly a shock to my system that I may never do anything "cool" with my life.
Not in undergrad (a single upper division class), but yes in grad school. I did a lot of applied mathematics in undergrad and only took the min required upper division probability/stats class. I didn't find it interesting at the time. But when I got to Econ grad school there was a massive focus on econometrics, and I learned it from first principals.
For languages: SAS in undergrad econ/Matlab for math classes, STATA primarily in grad school, and I pivoted to R and then python when I hit industry.
Aerospace isn't a sacred discipline either, and education in CS has very little to do with writing practical software or conducting business.
I think you're about to find out in the next few years how much work it takes to develop a moon base and that dismissing those people as "monkeys" is absurd.
NASA "Force?" It sounds very similar to Space Force and Air Force and adds a militaristic tone to NASA. Maybe that is the intent. I know that NASA and the military are closely linked but the general brand of NASA is a the science-focused civilian side while something like Space Force would be the military side.
Strange, it works here in Firefox on Linux using the internal GPU (I don't use primusrun for the browser). Normally I'm the first to notice a particularly heavy website or bad FPS in even pretty old games! Wonder how they managed to make it sluggish on a very expensive GPU but get my crappy setup to run it nicely
Odd. My laptop seemed to do fine with a 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile [Discrete]' using CachyOS. It could have been a little smoother but it rendered fine. There were a couple spots where it was a little herky-jerky-laggy that maybe needs optimization.
It choked on my M5 Max MBP w/ 128GB of Unified Memory connected via a TB5 dock over 10GbE directly to my router, which is backed by 5Gbit symmetric fiber. My measured average latency to nasaforce.gov was under 13ms.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
I got the impression that despite using terms like "mission critical", this isn't about the hardcore technical wizardry behind propulsion and safety.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
The top of the page says "For a few days only" and a little later on it says something like "Early to mid career engineers with terms of 1-2 years"
So what is the time limited part? The application window? Also, how is this different from the regular government hiring process? NASA already posts job openings and takes applications for open positions. I'm pretty sure they aren't actually getting around the federal rule of "to hire someone you must have an open billet to put them in." So what is the NASA Force and what is different? It takes weeks to months to finalize the paperwork and make someone a federal employee. So we're making the application window open for a limited time for what reason?
The website is cool but I'm not really sure what the program is. They've already been able to hire eager people willing to take a mediocre salary compared to the rest of the space industry.
A term hire is still a federal employee, just with the uncertainty of your term being renewed or extended. I’m not really sure what they are hoping to get out of this- even if they were hiring at the highest step, this is trying to hire an engineer from the space industry with significant experience for 200k. That’s total comp because you don’t get options as a federal employee and the retirement matching for a short term is insignificant.
It really seems like they haven’t done anything to change the value proposition of being a government employee, they just made a cool name and website.
But the _qualified_ people who are willing to work for the government in the space industry would already be familiar with their options. Anyone who wasn’t already willing to work for NASA probably isn’t swayed by the fancy name and website. As soon as they get into the actual paperwork process and talk to someone they’ll realize it’s not that different from having applied through the regular process.
It seems to me like they are trying to find good people without having to struggle to fire bad ones. They get automatic churn because of the term and can offer the good employees permanent roles.
Given how difficult it can be to fire government employees, I think that's a good strategy.
Experience necessary. From Assessment 1, which you only get to after spending $16 ordering your college transcript...
> I have 1 year of directly related specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-13 level in the Federal service that included: Performing program/project management of space, aeronautical flight systems or experimental aircraft/aircraft systems that involve planning, researching, designing, developing, testing and evaluating, or completing cost analyses; Analyzing, designing, or operating space flight systems, aeronautical flight systems, experimental aircraft/aircraft systems, or structures operating throughout the earth's atmosphere; Developing requirements and integrating aerospace or flight/ground systems (e.g., payloads, hardware/software, scientific instruments, communication equipment, cargo, or any other specialized equipment).
I answered honestly that I didn't and it didn't block my submission.
I have the specific Computer Science/Engineering degree they spell out in length in one question (30 credit hours CS, 16 credit hours math/calculus/stats) so I feel like that gives me a chance on top of the narrow window.
Glad I skipped ahead on the optional essay section. YOLO.
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
It kinda sounds like a post-doc, in that it provides an on-ramp to working in the industry/institution. But without having to waste your time getting a PhD.
Try making a webpage using an LLM when you don't explicitly tell it to optimize for page weight. Not that developers get to spend much time optimizing, but they can actually think and make reasonable choices of how to build it and will notice if it's noticeably slower in e.g. the integration environment compared to localhost (even if I'm sure they have good machines and connections compared to 90% of users, at >10MB you start to notice, whereas token predictors do not have a concept of time while fetching the page in a test run)
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
Casey Dreier and the Planetary Society drove the halt to last year's proposed NASA science gutting insanity. Please help them do it again. There are things us normies can do about this 2026 proposed inefficiency.
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
I initially thought this was a call for technologists to commit to volunteering on a deep technical project for four days. That’s not enough time to design a component. But it might e.g. let some minor work on a protocol advance.
That has been the assumption in most of these cases. The agency must already have a list of people they want, so a short window keeps the risk of someone else jumping to the front of the queue.
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
Ya, I don't understand the calculus. If it's important enough for a big website, why not promote the site for a week first. Too many applications seems more desirable than missing the right people who are 'heads down building' or just not terminally online.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
Guys, I figured it out. This isn't just a 4-day window for an Aerospace Engineer position, that's just the beta test. They're preparing for calling up a wave of volunteer civilians who want to spend a few months on Mars (and maybe even come back).
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
Normally I would agree but I get it with regards to NASA. They do life and death stuff that has like zero margin of error. They probably shouldn't be in the business of hiring people who's edible might be lasting longer than they expected.
I envisioned a tactical unit like For All Mankind. I can’t imagine that China would allow the US to colonize the moon. It’s effectively an infinite nuke factory. Any Heinlein fan would recognize that.
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
The early versions of this design arrived in 2008, though it has a sweet sweet flash header complete with audio until 2021.
An even more irrelevant side note: it appears that archive.org has a javascript based flash emulator built in to run old flash websites, which is pretty amazing.
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
I would personally give anything to work with, next to, alongside, or near Chelsea Gohd, aka Foxanne, the foxiest ever NASA spokeswoman and outreach narrator
This, THIS is how any org signals they don't have a budget. Build a "fancy" high-concept paper-thin-veneer website that's adjacent of their extant canonical DNS.
Also, it really, really doesn't help that they're attempting to riff off of the "Space Force" BS.
FWIW, the NRO https://www.nro.gov/ has been the actual "space force" for over half a century.
The entirety of the government doesn't turn over every 4 years, especially at a technical org like NASA. You're still going to be working at NASA with a team of NASA people. Plus if they're hiring you know your team in particular won't be a target of layoffs.
> The appropriated FY2026 budget has the largest discrepancy from the White House Request since 1987 at nearly 30%.[3] The request, submitted in May 2025, proposed a 24% cut to NASA's overall budget.[4] In January 2026, Congress passed the final budget, rejecting nearly all of the proposed cuts.
From wikipedia. The white house is pushing for major cuts to Nasa
I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it), but we want the opposite to be true. Let's find ways to support good people who step up.
Edits (in case my meaning above is not clear):
1. When I write "but we want the opposite to be true" I mean this: if only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. When I write "I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it)" I mean: from an individual point of view, I fully grant that many people would be better off seeking work elsewhere.
3. My experience and scientific research shows that people are not merely selfish actors. While individual incentives matter a lot, perhaps even predominantly, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior with exclusively narrow individualist framings.
4. Many of us act selfishly much of the time, and this is indeed reasonable and even beneficial at times. But taken to an extreme it can be worse overall, even for those individuals. See: game theory, social connections, morality, and so on.
5. When I write "Let's find ways to support good people who step up" I do mean concrete things such as "let's crowdfund ethical people's legal fees" to survive the Trump administration.
Given what we're facing, I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time. There's a lot of nationalist language on this site. Even if your motivations are for science, do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
> I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time.
I'm sure this wounds them deeply.
Given what we're facing worldwide, I'd say more people are skeptical of anyone that works in tech at this moment in time.
>There's a lot of nationalist language on this site.
Incredibly the US government isn't anti-US. This may come as a surprise to some in certain online bubbles.
>do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
The goals of going to the moon? You're right, it's a giant waste of money when there are problems to be solved on earth. Something many people have been saying for a long time. Glad you're coming around.
I think it's a bit of, "Be the change you want to see". It may not be a bad thing to get tech folk with sense into these roles. They probably tend to have enough of a cushion to be able to refuse unethical work without worrying about the immediate consequences.
NASA had a nationalist origin and has always kept those undertones even in the modern day, but I don't think anyone's ever accused it of being partisan. I don't believe many Americans associate NASA with any particular president, except maybe JFK, and I don't believe they'd conflate working for NASA with working for Trump.
I think part of the point of OP was that this isn't a good way to support people to step up. It's frankly bizarre and has dubious future prospects like any other federal program under the current administration.
This is so cringe. Who are the people behind this god awful "national design studio", and how are they related to MAGA / Trump? Assuredly yet another insider cronyism deal that degrades trust in the US government.
Claude:
The National Design Studio (NDS) is a new White House agency that Trump created by executive order on August 21, 2025, as part of an initiative called "America by Design." It lives inside the White House Office of the Executive Office of the President.
The setup
The executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United States
Trump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design Officer
Gebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperwork
The stated goal: overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites and physical government interfaces to be "both usable and beautiful" — Gebbia has compared the target experience to "the Apple Store"
Initial results are required by July 4, 2026 (the US 250th anniversary), and the temporary organization within NDS is scheduled to sunset after three years
Yet another US Job application where you need to answer "How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?". Instant pass.
Isn’t the Office of Personnel Management still under the control of DOGE? I’m wondering if this is an actual internship program or a way to sneak Elon Musk’s SpaceX buddies into NASA.
If I’m not misunderstanding; Its not a complex project, and allows them bootstrap a recruitment campaign fast to take advantage of Artemis hype. I don’t understand why being vibe coded or reusing/recycling other designs matters?
I partially agree, but my problem is it's visibly vacuous. It's not hard to design a web page like this, and with a proper workflow, design system/components, and staff it's trivial for an organization to assemble as is without resorting to AI slop.
That just feels disrespectful to the reader when what you expect me to read may or may not have been a single prompt.
Two things:
- I like the rolling Moon animation very much.
- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
> I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.)
...usually it's the other way around.
May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?
Not OP. Sounds like he was considered to be a manager and wasn't allowed to get into the weeds. So instead of just managing the off shore team, he wrote some of the code for them and then let them take credit for it.
Which also means that he wasn't doing his job (management) and instead micromanaging his staff by doing their job.
This is such a common problem with highly technical managers because they can't seem to understand how to change focus or scope and do their jobs better. Instead they fall back on trying to ship features thinking that this is productive and to pat themselves on the back for staying technical.
We did nothing and it’s not getting better. Do nothing harder.
If you go in expecting you can do nothing and you can’t change the world around you then congrats, you will succeed in all you do.
We had a working system. It was the current administration that slashed NASA's budget and castrated the JPL aerospace employment pipeline. NASA's talent shortage is a self-inflicted wound.
Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.
It's funny to me how much this administration gets the blame for everything. NASA would had been widely regarded as schlerotic and archaic before these most recent budget cuts. Filled with beaurocrats who didn't even know what their job was. But, the budget gets cut under Trump and now the rot in the organization is forgotten.
I don't think they should have their budget cut but they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
A program like this, targeting younger people for short stints sense like a great way to bring in some new blood and ideas. Hopefully they can do something innovative that gets people thinking that investing in NASA is worth it.
It's funny to me how quickly people leap in front of the train to pretend like this fixes everything. NASA still has an anemic culture, and opening the door to interns is not a replacement for their failing talent acquisition. Budget cuts, revoked contracts and fired personnel will not stimulate positive change either.
> they weren't a great agency before and were still declining.
"Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities. This is this administration's problem as much as it was Biden's, Trump 1's, and Obama's. You don't have to come in here with a chip on your shoulder just because I'm blaming the current iteration of the disaster.
> "Were"? They are. You're again giving premature credit to a policy that hasn't worked yet and ostensibly throttled NASA's capabilities.
I didn't assert otherwise. In fact, I clearly stayed that I _hoped_ this move would help. The status quo certainly wasn't working and I could see a way for this move to be helpful.
I'm not saying it's a great idea and it'll for sure work but, I guess, fuck me for trying to be optimistic about a decision made by this administration...
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That’s not what it was, and you have to have been exclusivity ingesting only the most biased media to believe that it was ‘fat-trimming’. It was muscle-trimming. Then again, why would I expect anyone working in tech to understand how an organisation is meant to function. Maybe the government should’ve just had another funding round instead?
Genuinely sorry he let you down and you're left holding the bag dude. But please understand people aren't going to accept your weak rationalizations anymore.
They fired talented engineers and technologists because they were trans.
It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.
This is the problem. It's as if everything has to crash and burn for people like the person you responded to finally get some sense. By that point, it will be too late to catch up to our competitors overseas. The race will be over. I honestly don't know how to reconcile this seemingly unsolvable problem. They have no perspective whatsoever of the kinds of people that are real innovators in engineering & tech. This field is super open to alternative lifestyles because that's where a lot of out of the box thinking happens. They just don't get it. In the past, it seemed easy to just ignore them. They could live their lives. But now they're running the ship and its sinking.
The entire DOGE program was an exercise in vilifiaction.
> they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"
You can always tell when someone is embarrassed to defend something (especially hurting people), when they have to mask it in ambiguous, impassive terms and stale euphemisms.
He didn't fire thousands of good people, human beings who have to worry about putting food on the table now, for purely ideological reasons, while vilifying them as "woke", unqualified, doing work not worth doing (only to open the same positions back up now, because it turns out it was). No, he just "trimmed the fat".
Oh, did people get hurt? Did we waste money and lose expertise for nothing? No, we just "trimmed the fat". Gotta "trim the fat", right? "Trimming the fat" is normal and necessary, and if I say something is just "trimming the fat", that's all it is.
>> budget squeeze
>> will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again
2026 budget - 24.4 billion
2025 budget - 24.8 billion
2024 budget - 25.3 billion
2023 budget - 25.3 billion
2022 budget - 24.0 billion
2021 budget - 23.2 billion
2020 budget - 22.6 billion
2019 budget - 21.5 billion
2018 budget - 20.7 billion
2017 budget - 19.6 billion
2016 budget - 19.2 billion
What part of these numbers are you interpreting as some sort of insane budget restriction?
2027 White House proposed budget[1]: $18.8 billion
2026 White House proposed budget[2]: $18.8 billion
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...
[2] is represented as deltas, explainer here https://spacenews.com/white-house-budget-proposal-would-phas...
Congress passes the budget since they have the power of the purse. Presidents have requested all sorts of nonsense to appease the base.
That is indeed how it is supposed to work. But things haven't exactly been working like they're supposed to lately.
For FY26, when we had a PBR proposing massive cuts followed by a government shutdown with a long stretch where NASA didn't know what their real budget was going to be, we saw a bunch of layoffs and project cancellations in preparation for a budget that might resemble what the president was requesting. Whether or not that was legal is in question:
https://democrats-science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/SST%20Mino...
That is true, but in all fairness, every politician has at one time, or another requested all sorts of nonsense to appease the base, not just presidents hence the term "political lobbying". If you look up the definition of 'politics," it's the method or strategy: sometimes used to describe the tactics, schemes, or "art" used to gain influence, sometimes carrying a negative connotation of manipulation or intrigue. Everybody has done it since the beginning of time :|
Congress also declares wars, and we know how well that has worked out for everyone.
First year civics: the legislative branch passes the budget, the executive branch is the one that actually spends it. Or doesn’t, in which case you have a constitutional crisis.
Congress has granted the president a lot of power to conduct wars on its own
This same president wanted a Mars landing by 2028.
It has been 30 years since Congress last passed a budget.
Congress passes a budget every year, what are you talking about?
It’s a technical distinction. The last true “budget” was FY1997. Otherwise, CRs are used until some kind appropriations bill can be passed. The problem is, that appropriations bill isn’t a true budget as money was already spent via CR.
24.4 in 2026 is less than 19.2 in 2016. I wouldn't call it a giant squeeze or anything though, but these raw numbers almost imply the opposite kind of misunderstanding.
The admin has tried two times in a row to cut the total budget by 20%, and the science budget by 50%
So, probably that squeeze?
Congress sets the budget not the president. The administrations budget is aspirational, and if they want to force it they are required to use political savvy and whatever influence they have built up. Yeah so zero influence as all of that is towards cover ups, stock manipulation, and incompetence.
The executive has the veto and a willingness to leave the government non-functional (funny how anti-government types are often okay with kneecapping government). They're not powerless.
Technically true, but the president also selects the administrator of NASA, and this presidency isn't terribly fussed about following laws about how allocated money can be used.
So don't be surprised if suddenly half the NASA budget is used to pay for a second ballroom or more missiles to CENTCOM.
Yes, but this President has decided that he can move money around or just not spend the money, regardless of the budget, and this Congress has let him.
Yes, as we know this Congress is famous for doing its own independent thinking and not rubber stamping everything that arrives with a little bit of mango colored makeup on it.
Are these numbers adjusted for inflation? $19.2B in 20216 dollars would be $26.4B in 2026 dollars.
This part: Let's now adjust for inflation so you can see the budget squeeze. $19.2 billion in 2016 dollars is worth $26.4 billion and change, once adjusted for inflation, in March 2026. Feel free to do it yourself. Magic of compounding.
24.4 for 2026 is notably less than 26.4. Budget squeeze.
An 8% budget cut isn't a crisis.
You're just scrambling to be technically correct now that you've been shown the data that their budget hasn't really changed much.
Politicians and pundits lie and exaggerate this stuff all the time. Don't take the bait.
This administration certainly isn't the most pro-science, but they did just complete a spin around the moon, something that will get more kids interested in science than anything NASA has done in the last 40 years.
Accounting for inflation the 2026 budget is 2 Billion less than the 2016 budget.
That's like 4 times the ESA budget, and still insignificant compared to the money poured into AI. Several companies could cover that budget with quarterly profits.
The part that the dollars are worth about 35% less now compared to 2016?
You’re kinda implying that there’s a few people standing around in a shed, and that really don’t cost too much.
REQUEST: coupon for positive thinking; STATUS: DENIED, NON-NEW USER NEW BETTER HAHAHA
std::process::exit(sarcasm)
seriously though, this is HN. I'm done complaining about it. I'd like to encourage different behavior, yet my experience has taught me the opposite: Be open to offering feedback in the case feedback is requested or required. In any other case, disengage.
Still no idea what 'NASA Force' is but they do have a slick looking website.
Thanks for your positive framing and pushback against (possibly knee-jerk) cynicism.
Unrelated tangent: saw HackerSmacker in your profile, plan to try it out, wish it supported iOS.
> Unrelated tangent: saw HackerSmacker in your profile, plan to try it out, wish it supported iOS.
I need this! I once tried building something like this but got busy.
Manually curated lists with the addition of "information hygiene" agents will make the internet wholesome again.
Isn't most of the actual aerospace R&D work contracted out?
No
What kind of research happens outside academia-attached labs like JPL and outside MIC firms like lockheed/boeing?
There are a fair number of engineers at centers (Stennis, Ames, Kennedy, etc.) that are government employees. When I was NASA-adjacent, it seemed they wrote the specs and testing regimes. I think the government even did some of the testing with government-employed test engineers and technicians. But yeah, a lot of the manufacturing is done by contractors.
There's a joke in the aero world that F-16s are designed by people Ph.D.'s, manufactured by people with Masters degrees, flown by people with a Batchelor's degree in History and maintained by people with a High School Diploma.
It turns out you have to make jobs for people at all levels of education and experience.
Makes sense. What about on the basic research side? Is that done mostly through academia grants or are there in-house folks in the centers?
Each NASA center maintains in-house engineers and scientists, if for no other reason than to oversee and critique contracted work.
But in reality they do significant amounts of directed research using "burden" funded research for their on internal needs, and grant work for NASA and other agencies (like DOE).
I worked at JPL, and worked with folks at Ames for various reasons. Both centers try to carve out enough internal time to research new mission concepts, new ways of accomplishing existing mission concepts, or new basic technologies that have dual use for missions/commercial appliations. All of this would qualify as basic research similar to what would happen at Caltech or Stanford, the nearby official/unofficial partners.
I attended all kinds of conferences and agency-level meetings with researchers from many other agencies / nasa centers as well, all mostly aimed at finding out how to better explore space (new missions), or improve our existing exploration capabilities, either with new or by adapting existing tech.
NASA has an entire reporting pipeline called "New Technology Reports" that makes all of this research immediately public, and a deep tradition of spinning off commercial businesses to carry it forward if it turns out to be a good idea.
makes sense, thanks
Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) had researchers at Ames and Langley Research Centers, for example. Super cool IMHO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
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That’s not even remotely true and is a trite dismissal of legitimate criticism. Further, even though this might be an exciting concept, when put in the context of the massive budget cuts to nasa specifically it’s hard to fully celebrate what might be more a PR stunt than a meaningful commitment to science and exploration.
I don't think Jared Isaacman is interested in PR stunts. He actually seems to care about the science and exploration parts of NASA. Actually, he seems to care about all of NASA.
The $20 billion dollar moon base didn't seem like an announcement grounded in reality, although maybe that was less a PR stunt than the fact that NASA must (literally) shoot for the moon to stay politically relevant.
> The $20 billion dollar moon base didn't seem like an announcement grounded in reality
While I can't comment on the cost per say, there are both military and capitalistic reasons for the race to the moon.
is there?
- Deep space surveillance
- Logistics Hub
- "Get there quickly and set legal precedent"
- Resource extraction (helium-3, gold, platinum, etc)
- If moon dust can be converted to oxygen reliably, the first company or country to set up shop on the moon can sell that service to countries and commercial entities.
- Unique manufacturing and science activities because of the low gravity
- "Space Tourism"
Isaacman definitely did not pass up his golden opportunity on Pesach to light the most epic menorah the world has ever seen!
I read enough HN to know what it is -absolutely- true. HN comments, including this thread, often just read like BlueSky screeds half the time the US, US government or Sam Altman/Elon Musk/etc are mentioned.
They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.
There are users or bots that post political headlines on here with an obvious one-sided bias and do it to farm points, similar to Reddit. It'd be nice to have an impartial forum but it always seems to devolve into an echo chamber.
> There are users or bots that post political headlines on here with an obvious one-sided bias
So, humans that are extremely upset with the current state of things.
> and do it to farm points
I'm sure some do, but have you seen how many people across the US have been having protests? People are pissed.
I'm pretty sure your analysis of the motivations would not at all be accurate with such a blanket statement.
Your statement that it's humans and dismissing botted activity is a blanket statement, whereas I never used absolute language.
If it's a human getting up and rushing to to write about promoted ragebait content devolving a forum into an echo chamber, of course someone takes the bait and lists grievances in hysterical language unsolicited. Such emotionality is totally uncalled for on a tech forum, and proves my point.
> Such emotionality is totally uncalled for on a tech forum
Only when the robots fully take over. It's one of many things that separate us from the machines. Dismissing emotions is dismissing humanity.
Maybe I can ask ChatGPT to reply to this concern trolling because apparently I can dismiss humanity very easily that way. "hey grok give tip this person over the edge on this AI-induced psychosis screed."
And from my side of politics it seems like every thread about that group has a handful of dick riders who will stand for zero criticism of their cult leaders.
Some times facts have a political bias. Realty doesn’t care that you wish it was different to fit your political ideology.
It's intriguing because little tech as well as big supported the current admin, and installed J.D. Vance to make good on Thiel's $15 million to his campaign.
It would be remarkable if random flailing didn't result in at least one good outcome, and sure enough Trump seems to have unblocked Federal action to eliminate pennies, which is one of those "obviously a good idea but..." things you would never get by ordinary Presidents.
However "Finally deleting the worthless penny" is not a big achievement and so it's understandable that you mistook "Trump constantly does incredibly bad things nobody likes" for them disapproving universally of all US Federal government activity.
Not true; I'm a huge fan of USAID
It’s not reflexive criticism. Why would anyone work for sn organization where the CEO continuously criticizes its workers and treats them badly. Would you work for Twitter?
I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.
Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?
Suspicion, doubt and negativity is the default for this administration not the exception, for legitimate reasons.
It's always hard to get tell with you people whether your attempt at trolling is based on willful ignorance, maliciousness or immaturity. Probably all three.
You can certainly like it, it's just hard justifying your stance when things go sideways (eg. DOGE and the leaked Social Security data).
It’s not that you’re willfully ignorant of the critique, you already know what it is. It’s TDS. Case closed.
Pre-sorting all criticism as reflexive and not necessarily justified is a rationalization for you not trying to understand other perspectives.
Edit: it seems like my message was ambiguous. Fuck Donald Trump, I’ve got a bottle to pop when he dies and I’ll never let you fuckers live down what you’ve done.
Well said, although there are legitimate critiques of the admin to be had even from the well-adjusted, especially recently.
"TDS" is not a thing. It's a made-up term that people accuse others of, because they can't cover up a felonious president's many failings, lies, graft, and corruption. You use it to try to discredit a person who is rightly criticizing criminality, but you only discredit yourself when you use "TDS".
I, the person you replied to, was mocking the concept of TDS. I apologize if my intent was unclear to you, I’ll try harder in the future.
Hysterical nonsense like this just lends credence to TDS
>EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
Why bother? Americans clearly don't believe in science anymore, and the American government can't be trusted to fund it properly, or to not rewrite or defund research because of wrongthink or "DEI."
If I were working for NASA, or even a possible candidate for working for NASA, I'd get my passport in order and look for greener pastures. Sure, the pay may not be the best but at least you aren't working for Nazis and pedophiles who believe in space demons and miasma theory.
(oops I did a cynicism.)
> (oops I did a cynicism.)
That's not cynicism, that's... something else.
[dead]
> Americans clearly don't believe in science anymore
There's about a third that lean that way or atleast they don't care, and they have gained control of the government because of various factors, namely,
part of the middle third disillusioned with economics (left behind) and wanting a change,
another part of the middle third staying home because of geopolitics,
and yet another part of the middle third falling prey to media biased by right-wing billionaire/corporatist capture.
Any suggestions for a long-term fix for this problem?
I don't know what the long term fix is, because that presupposes the ability to plan long term, which is something I don't think the US is capable of anymore.
Part of the solution has to be breaking down the aggressive selfishness and individualism of American society and establishing the ideal of a common American cultural identity and civic duty. This used to exist, but only within the framework of racial and cultural homogeneity. We need that but without the Christian nationalism and white supremacy. That means Americans will have to believe in society and government and each other, rather than only their own immediate interests. It means some dirty words for Americans, a bit more "socialism" and "multiculturalism", maybe "regulations" and "taxes."
We need strong science and civics curriculum in our schools, which means we need to fund schools, which means we need to stop seeing schools as dens of atheist communist mind control, which will be a problem for a lot of the country. We need to establish separation of church and state as an explicit Constitutional principle. We need to remove tax exempt status for religious institutions. We need to repeal the Electoral College so that conservative Christian votes don't count more than everyone else. I don't think that keeping slave states in the union is still a problem worth worrying about.
But I don't know. How do you make people give a damn? How do you convince people that an objective reality exists? How do you convince people that empathy isn't a sin? Maybe it's just a generational thing. Maybe enough bastards just need to die out.
[1] https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-g...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96009-3
When you frame it like that it sounds like some kind of vanguard of class-conscious people should try to rebel and establish a, I don't know, dictatorship of the proletariat? Maybe they could give themselves some kind of Russian name to sound cool.
> When you frame it like that it sounds like some kind of vanguard of class-conscious people
Less class-conscious and more reality-conscious - there's always going to be a group that's anti-science/anti-rationality because of religion, views, etc. It's when they get into power and stop the progress of science that it becomes an issue.
> should try to rebel and establish a, I don't know, dictatorship of the proletariat?
No need for anything quite as drastic. And that would be effective only for a duration of time until the pendulum swings the other way. Also, I'm sure from the anti-science folks' perspective it's the pro-science folks that are oppressive when the latter are in government.
There must be some long-term solution to insulate science from the swings of the pendulum, without devolving into chaos or oppression. Maybe the internet hive-mind can brainstorm a solution. We also need a forum where like-minded people can have this discussion without getting downvoted into oblivion. Any options?
"Build a website - it's almost like you got the job done already" - Someone in the White House OEOB
The new National Design Studio that replaced the USDS does not seem to be capable of building a website that is accessible, performant, and not overly bombastic / hyperbolic.
Completely unreadable. Animation fails at the top, on a decently provisioned Mac laptop with 16GB of RAM.
Either way - it's unfortunate that the Technology Fellows, GSA, and other programs that brought folks into industry for roles exactly like this were unceremoniously destroyed in quite cruel and silly ways. Why would I apply for this? Fool me once...
The copy also doesn't seem to be written by someone with a good command of English, even ChatGPT would do better
>technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery. You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them, and your contributions move from concept to operation. For a few days, access is granted to this work. The number is extremely limited. The window only lasts four days. Will you answer the call?
This was the first thing I noticed. The first sentence is not a grammatical or sensical sentence as far as I can tell.
Also who are they expecting to get with a hiring window open for 4 days? People susceptible to manufactured urgency I guess... these are the tactics that phishing scams use.
I don't see any big trouble with the quoted text. The language is a bit nerdy, and a bit bureaucratic, but that's exactly what I'd expect from NASA.
It's scattered and disorganized like this administration.
You work on real missions, alongside the teams building them
OK alongside, but not ON, the teams building them? So apparently not actually building them myself? And also, does anyone build missions, or do they perhaps build systems?
For a few days, access is granted to this work.
Access is granted to whom? And to what work, the work I'll supposedly be doing? Hopefully yeah I have access to my own work. Or do you mean the work of the people alongside whom I'll be working on missions (the builders of the missions that is)?
The number is extremely limited.
What number?
The window only lasts four days.
Oh now there's a window analogy too. And they already said "a few days" so one of the two is redundant.
You would make a good technical writer!
Are you serious? Those aren't even coherent sentences!?
No, its literally written using ChatGPT
This has got Russell Vought's fingerprints on it, mark my words.
There's some way this is enshittified.
The Slop Cop finds it highly LLM-y:
https://awnist.com/slop-cop#technologists%20inside%20the%20s...
Its prob some H1B Indian Contractor poop skin that wrote this tbh. Gotta love the charity jobs that the USA gives out to all of unqualified India. Our tax dollars hard at work...
I knew a bunch of folks from 18F and the USWDS team. You could not find a more capable team of designers, developers and true user experience professionals. They cared about the users and they cared about good design.
Pixel 10 absolutely ate shit when I opened the page!
Pixel 7a on Graphene using Vanadium browser worked just fine.
> NASA Force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
It is a definition; the transition between the logotype and normal text has an implicit [:}, NASAFORCE: technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Though its an odd choice that they run it in with the paragraph of normal text rather than making that a heading. Of course, with a four day hiring window its a website that exists as pro forma evidence that there was a public website about the hiring effort, the people actually intended to be hired were almost certainly notified in advance out of band, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of effort put into this.
You skipped a word.
"NASA Force: Technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery".
NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery?
Unfortunately, many American English speakers will conjugate verbs in the singular for a collective noun like "NASA", so that doesn't sound quite as perfect as it should.
We lean so hard into incorporation that we see it grammatically as an entity, rather than as multiple people behind the entity's mask.
I could be wrong but I think "NASA Force" is the name of the team, like Space Force.
Whoosh :)
You can't put a period on that (in gramatically-correct English) because it isn't a sentence. You can't have a sentence without a verb. There's no verb here. If you look through a real dictionary you'll also notice that the definitions are not period-terminated sentences, and this is why
"Wow."
Mildly amusing that "◶NASAFORCE technologists" sounds like a natural enough string in context that it becomes a garden path sentence leading away from that interpretation.
This website is vibe coded
...and equally substanceless as anything coming out of National Design Studio.
Here's an almost identical one (design-wise): https://genesis.energy.gov/
And another one: https://techforce.gov/
And another one: https://safedc.gov/
All basically the same one-pager with different vibe-coded graphics and like 500 words of text.
This administration does love "force".
When you're a celebrity, they just let you do it.
I thought it was about a military space unit.
The hard looped animations are so painful to look at
No cross site scripts so they have that going for them. Better then 99% of the web already.
I am trying to understand, are you saying marketing always needs to be hand-rolled?
Seemed to work okay back in the day.
Great, we should never change anything ever again then
When the change makes something worse all around, then that change should not be favored.
it didn't make the amount of tax payer money spent on the webpage worse.
Nothing ever happens
whats next? luddites demanding that book contents be hand-rolled by meatbags?
If you want to me to care about what you have to say, I'd prefer if you cared enough to write it yourself. Especially on on taxpayer money. If I can spot it as slop, you have a problem.
Yikes, they are pushing their low-level employees into the rocket nozzles and fuel tanks? There's no room inside an RTG to fit an intern... Hopefully it means welders, metrologists, inspectors, etc.
It is not a sentence unless “to technologist” is a verb.
I don't think it actually a sentence.
"Force" is the verb.
Agreed. It proves that LLMs can be subtle.
There's a missing 'are' before 'inside'.
I mean, I can make sense of it, but it's written like it's describing a picture or something. As a standalone sentence, it is weird.
I can't. It is a subject without a predicate. It doesn't look like valid English to my eyes.
Yes, it's a subject without a predicate. So it's not a complete sentence.
That doesn't mean it doesn't make sense. Let's say there's an image with the caption "A man looking at a fish in a tank." That's similarly a subject without a predicate, but it still makes sense as a photo caption.
or a headline about coercion. even that would be "forces"
r/titlegore
Why is this called Nasa Force when the linked job is for an Areospace Engineer? The usa.jobs site only shows 15 open reqs for Nasa, and they are almost all engineering roles, save a few accounting/finance ones.
Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees?
I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa?
And the pay range for the aerospace engineer is okayish, but it's not really out-competiting more senior tech folks in any capacity.
> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.
Maybe a visiting scholar kind of thing.
Yeah, there definitely needs to be more transparency about the whole initiative.
Either it's "We're hiring ~1000 IT/Engineering specialists across multiple domains" or it's "Hey, just apply on USAJobs for the open positions".
Otherwise it just feels like throwing an application into the black hole of some kafkaesque talent management system.
You'll have better luck visiting the various center's websites.
I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.
Why would the president that created space force want to screw with it? Was there some recent bad blood or something else I missed?
I doubt the president of the united states is personally reviewing the wording of low level job postings.
GP was discussing the overall name “nasa force”, not the wording of the job postings
The name of the job posting is part of the wording of the job posting, and very likely not reviewed by the president.
I'm saying people at NASA may want to skew the results for Space Force, not Trump.
15 open roles for nasa is disturbing. I’m sure every post has 3000 applicants.
Open roles != open positions. NASA probably has use for more than one aerospace engineer.
I'm sure they do, but do they have the budget for more than one aerospace engineer?
> I'd love to work for NASA
i doubt it's that great, NASA is a huge government organization. There may be a handful of people/teams doing cool things but I suspect much of it is infuriating slow and bureaucratic. However, it's probably a good place to retire from if you're willing to put in the 30-40 years.
I have a buddy at JPL who loves it. It's a reasonably fast paced atmosphere where you can have a lot of responsibility relatively early in your career. Unfortunately everything is mission centric so there's pretty much always a Sword of Damocles hanging over you if the mission gets axed due to budget cuts. Good place to work on cool stuff, bad place for job security.
> I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa
Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.
Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees
Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.
Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
> simulation
That's largely a Mechanical Engineering, Applied Math, and Applied Physics subfield now, not computer science. Most CS majors don't even know what an IVP is, let alone PDEs, nonlinear simulation, etc.
Most CS programs no longer require numerical methods and analysis classes which are critical for this as well as other adjacent subfields like AI/ML theory.
> embedded software
That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now. Most CS programs don't require OS classes anymore let alone embedded programming.
> even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering
The job posting on USAJobs is clear. And most people who are serious about working in the space also know how federal hiring works.
> embedded software
> That's a computer engineering and MechE subfield now.
Do you mean EE subfield? I don't know many ME's working on embedded software.
Back in my college days, embedded control was required for both ECSE and mech. E.
Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.
Fair. I think this is about the extent of my training, which was as an Applied Mathematics and Econ undergrad about 15 years ago: Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss > https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/1093497/TOC
Maybe my idea of NASA was too encompassing. I figured that, apart from the engineering work, general sim would require optimizations and productionalization similar to how we have AI Engineers focused on the practical implementation of ML systems apart from the core model R&D.
I got a bit hooked on Econ for awhile which held my attention through an MS, which is when I learned about computers and then applied that into DS and development.
Most of my simulation experience is in stochastic systems and modern digital twins where agents sometimes have asymmetric information. I can see how I'm of no practical use to NASA now, but it still stings. What a bummer existing and not doing anything cool with life. A warning to youth!
I think you are underestimating your ability to contribute and also putting NASA on too much of a pedestal.
I'd argue your background is extremely valuable, but not easily traversible to NASA at the moment.
If you are deeply interested in the space, working with the newer startups in geospatial/hyperspectral imaging (be it climate or defense usecases) or CV space.
In a lot of cases, NASA is basically just acting as a coordinator between multiple vendors who are doing "the cool stuff" with less bureaucratic minutiae and stress from what's going on in DC.
Lots of interesting players in the ClimateTech and DefenseTech space who would like your background, and indirectly or directly they all work with NASA anyhow.
Thanks. I did find a space jobs site last week, and some jobs looked like they aligned closely. That's probably why I was surprised the nasa reqs weren't as broad.
I wasn't really looking for a change; I have 1 and 3 year olds and am fully remote, and the flexibility with sicknesses is really a benefit. I think it was mostly a shock to my system that I may never do anything "cool" with my life.
One way of viewing this is that to a moderate degree, NASA has largely been outsourced to SpaceX.
Were you in an Econ program that required tons of Matlab, SAS, R?
Not in undergrad (a single upper division class), but yes in grad school. I did a lot of applied mathematics in undergrad and only took the min required upper division probability/stats class. I didn't find it interesting at the time. But when I got to Econ grad school there was a massive focus on econometrics, and I learned it from first principals.
For languages: SAS in undergrad econ/Matlab for math classes, STATA primarily in grad school, and I pivoted to R and then python when I hit industry.
Aerospace isn't a sacred discipline either, and education in CS has very little to do with writing practical software or conducting business.
I think you're about to find out in the next few years how much work it takes to develop a moon base and that dismissing those people as "monkeys" is absurd.
> Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
Aerospace can be done remotely. I was working remotely as an aerospace engineer before the pandemic.
Portland has a 1 million sq ft Boeing factory and dozens of other aerospace companies.
Cool website, Big Balls. Where's our social security data?
Just in case a reader has blissfully managed to not-remember last year: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/doge-musk-edward-cor...
A more recent update confirming he likely worked on the website: https://www.wired.com/story/where-the-doge-operatives-are-no...
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NASA "Force?" It sounds very similar to Space Force and Air Force and adds a militaristic tone to NASA. Maybe that is the intent. I know that NASA and the military are closely linked but the general brand of NASA is a the science-focused civilian side while something like Space Force would be the military side.
It is a word with multiple meanings. One such meaning is "a group of people brought together and organized for a particular activity."
Or perhaps "to compel someone to act against their will or to break through resistance."
But knowing this administration, "an energy field created by all living things that surrounds, penetrates, and binds the galaxy together."
[flagged]
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this administration thinks it sounds more manly.
The first sentence isn't even a sentence.
Sure it is. You can fit a lot of technologists inside space flight and aeronautics systems if you push hard enough.
"fit" - you added a verb. That makes it a sentence.
I was thinking we verb the second word:
NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
This really screams and reads like a crypto scam or something, also why would they not use the official NASA logo ?
This is so strange.. I'm still not even clear on what it's for..
It reads like it received no proof-reading or editing, and it looks like it was vibe coded.
Intern project?
My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..
It's an OS thing. My Pixel 9 handled it just fine.
Windows by any chance?
Strange, it works here in Firefox on Linux using the internal GPU (I don't use primusrun for the browser). Normally I'm the first to notice a particularly heavy website or bad FPS in even pretty old games! Wonder how they managed to make it sluggish on a very expensive GPU but get my crappy setup to run it nicely
Odd. My laptop seemed to do fine with a 'NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti Mobile [Discrete]' using CachyOS. It could have been a little smoother but it rendered fine. There were a couple spots where it was a little herky-jerky-laggy that maybe needs optimization.
Ran smooth on both my iPhone and my 13-year-old thinkpad x230.
what OS is on the thinkpad?
Fedora linux
My MBP M5 couldn't handle it with Firefox but it was fine on Safari, betting it's a WebGL issue or something
My run of the mill notebook computer is showing the Jennifer Lawrence meme clip to you right now, and still performant.
Probably WebGL is using integrated iGPU for whatever reason. Happened to me on Windows+Brave.
ohhh... right, clearly, they only expected Mac users to open the web page or to apply.
It choked on my M5 Max MBP w/ 128GB of Unified Memory connected via a TB5 dock over 10GbE directly to my router, which is backed by 5Gbit symmetric fiber. My measured average latency to nasaforce.gov was under 13ms.
So, yeah.
it chokes on my mac also
Spaceflight requires relentless deliberate progress.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
I got the impression that despite using terms like "mission critical", this isn't about the hardcore technical wizardry behind propulsion and safety.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
The top of the page says "For a few days only" and a little later on it says something like "Early to mid career engineers with terms of 1-2 years"
So what is the time limited part? The application window? Also, how is this different from the regular government hiring process? NASA already posts job openings and takes applications for open positions. I'm pretty sure they aren't actually getting around the federal rule of "to hire someone you must have an open billet to put them in." So what is the NASA Force and what is different? It takes weeks to months to finalize the paperwork and make someone a federal employee. So we're making the application window open for a limited time for what reason?
The website is cool but I'm not really sure what the program is. They've already been able to hire eager people willing to take a mediocre salary compared to the rest of the space industry.
Both. There's a narrow application window and the positions are also for fixed terms (rather than permanent employment).
Not really sure there's any benefit here to the applicant. Perhaps NASA is just trying to capture a bit of the Artemis 2 hype for recruiting.
A term hire is still a federal employee, just with the uncertainty of your term being renewed or extended. I’m not really sure what they are hoping to get out of this- even if they were hiring at the highest step, this is trying to hire an engineer from the space industry with significant experience for 200k. That’s total comp because you don’t get options as a federal employee and the retirement matching for a short term is insignificant.
It really seems like they haven’t done anything to change the value proposition of being a government employee, they just made a cool name and website.
But the _qualified_ people who are willing to work for the government in the space industry would already be familiar with their options. Anyone who wasn’t already willing to work for NASA probably isn’t swayed by the fancy name and website. As soon as they get into the actual paperwork process and talk to someone they’ll realize it’s not that different from having applied through the regular process.
It seems to me like they are trying to find good people without having to struggle to fire bad ones. They get automatic churn because of the term and can offer the good employees permanent roles.
Given how difficult it can be to fire government employees, I think that's a good strategy.
"NASAFORCE technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery."
First hire should a verb.
Experience necessary. From Assessment 1, which you only get to after spending $16 ordering your college transcript...
> I have 1 year of directly related specialized experience equivalent to at least the GS-13 level in the Federal service that included: Performing program/project management of space, aeronautical flight systems or experimental aircraft/aircraft systems that involve planning, researching, designing, developing, testing and evaluating, or completing cost analyses; Analyzing, designing, or operating space flight systems, aeronautical flight systems, experimental aircraft/aircraft systems, or structures operating throughout the earth's atmosphere; Developing requirements and integrating aerospace or flight/ground systems (e.g., payloads, hardware/software, scientific instruments, communication equipment, cargo, or any other specialized equipment).
They want my college transcript? From the early 00's? I would like to think I've grown a bit professionally since then.
It's the government. They care more about creating objective standards so they can't be sued for bias than they do about hiring the best people.
I answered honestly that I didn't and it didn't block my submission.
I have the specific Computer Science/Engineering degree they spell out in length in one question (30 credit hours CS, 16 credit hours math/calculus/stats) so I feel like that gives me a chance on top of the narrow window.
Glad I skipped ahead on the optional essay section. YOLO.
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
[1]: https://www.lenis.dev/
Truly the "maximum lethality" of web design. And that's ignoring how terrible "NASA Force" is as a name. It's like it's all out of a bad 80s cartoon.
It misbehaves on Android FF, as well.
It works on my Android FF.
Is this gig-workification of the space industry?
It kinda sounds like a post-doc, in that it provides an on-ramp to working in the industry/institution. But without having to waste your time getting a PhD.
> But without having to waste your time getting a PhD
Ah yes, that 'waste of times' having to learn things in aeronautics and physics..
Betteridge's law of Hacker News comments.
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10.5MB page weight for a landing page? This national design studio is...not great.
Try making a webpage using an LLM when you don't explicitly tell it to optimize for page weight. Not that developers get to spend much time optimizing, but they can actually think and make reasonable choices of how to build it and will notice if it's noticeably slower in e.g. the integration environment compared to localhost (even if I'm sure they have good machines and connections compared to 90% of users, at >10MB you start to notice, whereas token predictors do not have a concept of time while fetching the page in a test run)
> More opportunities will be posted here in the coming months. Click here to sign up for updates to stay informed when new roles open.
Which links to: https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/su/sKWkWfp
Would anyone like to do some citizen journalism and see if the Constant Contact data handling is done above-board. I've done some Claude research -- enough to make me suspicious -- but I Am Not A Lawyer.
I am confused or misinformed. I thought the administration has severely gutted nasa, did it not? Yet they are doubling down on the brand?
Here is what is likely the authoritative piece on what is actually happening:
https://www.planetary.org/articles/nasa-2026-budget-proposal...
Casey Dreier and the Planetary Society drove the halt to last year's proposed NASA science gutting insanity. Please help them do it again. There are things us normies can do about this 2026 proposed inefficiency.
Did anybody else peep this? https://ndstudio.gov/
That's the AirBnB / DOGE guy's web design grift.
you can tell this was generated with Gemini, the way it loves to do those "enter on scroll" sentences
My key indicator is if I scroll right on mobile and see horizontal bleed over. For some reason models still fail at this so it's clearly vibe coded.
Do you mean the "highlight more words as you scroll down the text" effect?
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
I initially thought this was a call for technologists to commit to volunteering on a deep technical project for four days. That’s not enough time to design a component. But it might e.g. let some minor work on a protocol advance.
That has been the assumption in most of these cases. The agency must already have a list of people they want, so a short window keeps the risk of someone else jumping to the front of the queue.
I’m sure it’s based on merit
Why does the application window last four days?
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
I'm not saying you're wrong but then why do a big website and branding push. If they had someone in mind they'd bury it on a regular job posting.
They specify early to mid career. Imo they're anticipating a ton of applications and bounding it makes reviewing them tractable.
Ya, I don't understand the calculus. If it's important enough for a big website, why not promote the site for a week first. Too many applications seems more desirable than missing the right people who are 'heads down building' or just not terminally online.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
[1]:https://www.meritalk.com/articles/nasa-opm-kick-off-drive-fo...
[2]:https://meritalk.com/articles/opm-launches-us-tech-force-to-...
Cheesy, with "join the Army" vibes, but maybe it'll appeal to some dude out there, I guess
The previous version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cktmS-yaxM
Guys, I figured it out. This isn't just a 4-day window for an Aerospace Engineer position, that's just the beta test. They're preparing for calling up a wave of volunteer civilians who want to spend a few months on Mars (and maybe even come back).
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
Normally I would agree but I get it with regards to NASA. They do life and death stuff that has like zero margin of error. They probably shouldn't be in the business of hiring people who's edible might be lasting longer than they expected.
Frankly, drug screenings for employees can only benefit NASA given the kind of work they do.
As if the job of NASA wasn’t to get some select people as high as possible.
Who needs MDMA when you got UDMH?
I envisioned a tactical unit like For All Mankind. I can’t imagine that China would allow the US to colonize the moon. It’s effectively an infinite nuke factory. Any Heinlein fan would recognize that.
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
Irrelevant side note:
If you looked at https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/ and thought, wow this webpage must 25 years old, you would be incorrect! In 2000, they had a very 1990s website with the option for a flash version and non-flash version: https://web.archive.org/web/20000407212204/http://asrs.arc.n...
The early versions of this design arrived in 2008, though it has a sweet sweet flash header complete with audio until 2021.
An even more irrelevant side note: it appears that archive.org has a javascript based flash emulator built in to run old flash websites, which is pretty amazing.
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Yes, our stretched thin controllers watching the feed from a satellite field makes total sense.
Maybe they could try a pilot program somewhere like LGA?
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
its an air administration
the space part gets the most attention
>> In-situ resource utilization (ISRU) plant development for a sustainable lunar outpost
The image is clearly Mars.
What is it about? I can't get past this "scrolling" website formats. Makes my brain hurt.
I'm currently reading Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest and clickin on this website gave me the chills.
NASA FORCE: When you want to figure out how your stargate works, but have a limited budget for the research.
I think the hint of violence was deliberate.
Why anyone would willingly leave the private sector to work for this administration of charlatans, rapists, drunkards and grifters is beyond me.
Wait till there’s a new administration. Vote for sanity first. Then let government stabilize. Then join. Not now.
So is this collecting signups for new GS-12s? Or is this program able to offer more competitive compensation?
NASA should have co-opted "Space Force" from the get-go; funding might not have been such an issue
It's already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
Wonder what the job security is like.
Negligible. You'd be a fool to apply. Let alone accept.
I would personally give anything to work with, next to, alongside, or near Chelsea Gohd, aka Foxanne, the foxiest ever NASA spokeswoman and outreach narrator
https://youtu.be/gNwkawLGDkg?si=tY6FCMtTsOQNRfHG
Not a thirsty rocket
Lol. Gross. Weird comment.
The initial lightspeed animation lags on my beefy gaming desktop.
Official Government Age Discrimination
Such urgency. They're definitely racing China to the moon.
the timer and urgency of this reminds me of the movie Armageddon where they had limited time to form a crew for a space mission.
Searching for more DOGE-boy wrecking balls?
So are they defunding NASA or not?
This, THIS is how any org signals they don't have a budget. Build a "fancy" high-concept paper-thin-veneer website that's adjacent of their extant canonical DNS.
Also, it really, really doesn't help that they're attempting to riff off of the "Space Force" BS.
FWIW, the NRO https://www.nro.gov/ has been the actual "space force" for over half a century.
How do they have budget for this but not for decent production values on the Artemis 2 livestream?
It looks like this come from the White House, not NASA's defunded communication budget
Based on the name I’d thought it was going to be another militarization project, thank god it isn’t.
I had the same thought.
But can we really rule out it being part of such a strategy?
I'm just gonna leave this here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC-Marconi_scientist_deaths_c...
> ...for a few days, access is granted to this work. The number is extremely limited. The window only lasts four days. Will you answer the call?...
What? This sounds like a phishing email from before phishing emails got good.
Pretty cool. We're getting much better govt. websites now.
As long as Trump is still President every sane human being should stay away from any federal agency.
The entirety of the government doesn't turn over every 4 years, especially at a technical org like NASA. You're still going to be working at NASA with a team of NASA people. Plus if they're hiring you know your team in particular won't be a target of layoffs.
> The appropriated FY2026 budget has the largest discrepancy from the White House Request since 1987 at nearly 30%.[3] The request, submitted in May 2025, proposed a 24% cut to NASA's overall budget.[4] In January 2026, Congress passed the final budget, rejecting nearly all of the proposed cuts.
From wikipedia. The white house is pushing for major cuts to Nasa
... so that the only people left doing those jobs are sycophants?
Incompetent sycophants
I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it), but we want the opposite to be true. Let's find ways to support good people who step up.
Edits (in case my meaning above is not clear):
1. When I write "but we want the opposite to be true" I mean this: if only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. When I write "I understand the spirit of this comment (and I get it)" I mean: from an individual point of view, I fully grant that many people would be better off seeking work elsewhere.
3. My experience and scientific research shows that people are not merely selfish actors. While individual incentives matter a lot, perhaps even predominantly, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior with exclusively narrow individualist framings.
4. Many of us act selfishly much of the time, and this is indeed reasonable and even beneficial at times. But taken to an extreme it can be worse overall, even for those individuals. See: game theory, social connections, morality, and so on.
5. When I write "Let's find ways to support good people who step up" I do mean concrete things such as "let's crowdfund ethical people's legal fees" to survive the Trump administration.
Given what we're facing, I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time. There's a lot of nationalist language on this site. Even if your motivations are for science, do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
> I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time.
I'm sure this wounds them deeply.
Given what we're facing worldwide, I'd say more people are skeptical of anyone that works in tech at this moment in time.
>There's a lot of nationalist language on this site.
Incredibly the US government isn't anti-US. This may come as a surprise to some in certain online bubbles.
>do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
The goals of going to the moon? You're right, it's a giant waste of money when there are problems to be solved on earth. Something many people have been saying for a long time. Glad you're coming around.
I think it's a bit of, "Be the change you want to see". It may not be a bad thing to get tech folk with sense into these roles. They probably tend to have enough of a cushion to be able to refuse unethical work without worrying about the immediate consequences.
NASA had a nationalist origin and has always kept those undertones even in the modern day, but I don't think anyone's ever accused it of being partisan. I don't believe many Americans associate NASA with any particular president, except maybe JFK, and I don't believe they'd conflate working for NASA with working for Trump.
I think part of the point of OP was that this isn't a good way to support people to step up. It's frankly bizarre and has dubious future prospects like any other federal program under the current administration.
Good people need to make a living too!
This is so cringe. Who are the people behind this god awful "national design studio", and how are they related to MAGA / Trump? Assuredly yet another insider cronyism deal that degrades trust in the US government.
Claude:
The National Design Studio (NDS) is a new White House agency that Trump created by executive order on August 21, 2025, as part of an initiative called "America by Design." It lives inside the White House Office of the Executive Office of the President.
The setup
The executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United States
Trump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design Officer
Gebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperwork
The stated goal: overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites and physical government interfaces to be "both usable and beautiful" — Gebbia has compared the target experience to "the Apple Store"
Initial results are required by July 4, 2026 (the US 250th anniversary), and the temporary organization within NDS is scheduled to sunset after three years
It’s the brain dead rebranding of what Trump thought USDS was doing.
Yet another US Job application where you need to answer "How would you help advance the President's Executive Orders and policy priorities in this role?". Instant pass.
Wait, really? I’m not doubting you, I just didn’t go far enough into the application process to validate one way or the other.
Yeah it was the same thing with tech force or whatever it was. It's on the last page of the application.
eww
Isn’t the Office of Personnel Management still under the control of DOGE? I’m wondering if this is an actual internship program or a way to sneak Elon Musk’s SpaceX buddies into NASA.
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> You will join a collaborative, mission-driven team where ideas are valued, contributions are recognized, and innovation is part of everyday work.
Wow, gee wiz. I can’t wait to synergize in real time for action oriented solutions.
/s
This website feels like an HR person asked Claude to make a website. If you’re swayed by a simple website, you’re not high caliber talent.
Hey, wanna potential future at something amazong while you work for free (basically)? /s
I love that NASA is hiring, I worry this is because NASA doesn't have funding.
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If I’m not misunderstanding; Its not a complex project, and allows them bootstrap a recruitment campaign fast to take advantage of Artemis hype. I don’t understand why being vibe coded or reusing/recycling other designs matters?
I partially agree, but my problem is it's visibly vacuous. It's not hard to design a web page like this, and with a proper workflow, design system/components, and staff it's trivial for an organization to assemble as is without resorting to AI slop.
That just feels disrespectful to the reader when what you expect me to read may or may not have been a single prompt.
This is so weird and vague; I am not interested for fear of all of it being for space defense. Nope for me.
Agreed.
That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.
Technology and defense technology have been inextricably linked since the wheel and fire were new technologies.
So what? Doesn’t mean I have to be a part of it or support it.
Of course you don't have to, it just seems a bit hypocritical to complain about it over DoD's TCP/IP.
"We fired all of our employees. Now we're hiring temporary consultants."
It's the same hiring process for regular government jobs with references to standard pay scales. So I don't think so.
They used to be called scabs.
Can you point me to the ongoing strike by NASA employees?
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Let me get back to you if I find someone who wants to relocate to the USA.
Is this just USAJOBS way of getting more resumes so they can give them to xAI or OpenAI as a training set?