- 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.
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?
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.
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.
...usually it's the other way around.
May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?
they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"
It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.
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.
>> 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?
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...
So, probably that squeeze?
Unrelated tangent: saw HackerSmacker in your profile, plan to try it out, wish it supported iOS.
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.
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.
While I can't comment on the cost per say, there are both military and capitalistic reasons for the race to the moon.
- 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"
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.
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.
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.
Only when the robots fully take over. It's one of many things that separate us from the machines. Dismissing emotions is dismissing humanity.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
That's not cynicism, that's... something else.
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...
>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?
There's some way this is enshittified.
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
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.
"NASA Force: Technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery".
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.
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.
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 proposed inefficiency.
First hire should a verb.
NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.