NASA Force

Posted by LorenDB 18 hours ago

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Comments

Comment by scrumper 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by sailfast 15 hours ago

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?

Comment by OhMeadhbh 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by DaiPlusPlus 14 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by jimmydddd 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by elictronic 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by bigyabai 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by stronglikedan 14 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by UqWBcuFx6NV4r 9 hours ago

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?

Comment by gbnwl 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by dboreham 13 hours ago

The entire DOGE program was an exercise in vilifiaction.

Comment by ahhhhnoooo 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by nebula8804 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by ImPostingOnHN 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by thegrim33 13 hours ago

>> 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?

Comment by aaronharnly 12 hours ago

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...

Comment by casefields 12 hours ago

Congress passes the budget since they have the power of the purse. Presidents have requested all sorts of nonsense to appease the base.

Comment by throwup238 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by jrussino 5 hours ago

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...

Comment by kevin_thibedeau 10 hours ago

This same president wanted a Mars landing by 2028.

Comment by WaltPurvis 10 hours ago

It has been 30 years since Congress last passed a budget.

Comment by SilentM68 11 hours ago

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 :|

Comment by zamadatix 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by SiempreViernes 13 hours ago

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?

Comment by elictronic 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by SiempreViernes 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by chaboud 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by hatsix 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by adalacelove 1 hour ago

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.

Comment by dkural 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by nine_k 12 hours ago

Are these numbers adjusted for inflation? $19.2B in 20216 dollars would be $26.4B in 2026 dollars.

Comment by VanTheBrand 11 hours ago

Accounting for inflation the 2026 budget is 2 Billion less than the 2016 budget.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by andrewstuart 13 hours ago

You’re kinda implying that there’s a few people standing around in a shed, and that really don’t cost too much.

Comment by chrisweekly 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by weare138 9 hours ago

Still no idea what 'NASA Force' is but they do have a slick looking website.

Comment by porridgeraisin 17 hours ago

Isn't most of the actual aerospace R&D work contracted out?

Comment by jvanderbot 16 hours ago

No

Comment by porridgeraisin 16 hours ago

What kind of research happens outside academia-attached labs like JPL and outside MIC firms like lockheed/boeing?

Comment by robotresearcher 10 hours ago

Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) had researchers at Ames and Langley Research Centers, for example. Super cool IMHO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)

Comment by OhMeadhbh 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by porridgeraisin 15 hours ago

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?

Comment by jvanderbot 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by porridgeraisin 2 hours ago

makes sense, thanks

Comment by 14 hours ago

Comment by krapp 13 hours ago

>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.)

Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 11 hours ago

> (oops I did a cynicism.)

That's not cynicism, that's... something else.

Comment by tjwebbnorfolk 16 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by digitaltrees 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by LorenDB 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by threetonesun 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by esseph 15 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by bakies 15 hours ago

is there?

Comment by esseph 11 hours ago

- 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"

Comment by ButlerianJihad 16 hours ago

Isaacman definitely did not pass up his golden opportunity on Pesach to light the most epic menorah the world has ever seen!

Comment by partiallypro 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by arikrahman 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by esseph 15 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by arikrahman 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by esseph 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by arikrahman 9 hours ago

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."

Comment by digitaltrees 3 hours ago

Some times facts have a political bias. Realty doesn’t care that you wish it was different to fit your political ideology.

Comment by lovich 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by arikrahman 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by tialaramex 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by singleshot_ 15 hours ago

Not true; I'm a huge fan of USAID

Comment by raw_anon_1111 16 hours ago

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?

Comment by russellbeattie 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by bigyabai 15 hours ago

You can certainly like it, it's just hard justifying your stance when things go sideways (eg. DOGE and the leaked Social Security data).

Comment by itsdesmond 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by arikrahman 15 hours ago

Well said, although there are legitimate critiques of the admin to be had even from the well-adjusted, especially recently.

Comment by leptons 15 hours ago

"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".

Comment by itsdesmond 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by arikrahman 13 hours ago

Hysterical nonsense like this just lends credence to TDS

Comment by sailfast 15 hours ago

"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...

Comment by rozab 14 hours ago

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?

Comment by nine_k 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by rdiddly 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by altmanaltman 3 hours ago

No, its literally written using ChatGPT

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by dartharva 6 hours ago

Are you serious? Those aren't even coherent sentences!?

Comment by archontes 10 hours ago

This has got Russell Vought's fingerprints on it, mark my words.

There's some way this is enshittified.

Comment by tkzed49 10 hours ago

Pixel 10 absolutely ate shit when I opened the page!

Comment by olyjohn 8 hours ago

Pixel 7a on Graphene using Vanadium browser worked just fine.

Comment by tiberone 17 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by dragonwriter 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by ambicapter 16 hours ago

You skipped a word.

"NASA Force: Technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery".

Comment by rrr_oh_man 14 hours ago

NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery?

Comment by blargey 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by kokanee 17 hours ago

This website is vibe coded

Comment by kevin_thibedeau 9 hours ago

No cross site scripts so they have that going for them. Better then 99% of the web already.

Comment by input_sh 16 hours ago

...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.

Comment by adonovan 12 hours ago

This administration does love "force".

Comment by steele 9 hours ago

When you're a celebrity, they just let you do it.

Comment by jakeydus 7 hours ago

The hard looped animations are so painful to look at

Comment by nipponese 16 hours ago

I am trying to understand, are you saying marketing always needs to be hand-rolled?

Comment by finghin 16 hours ago

Seemed to work okay back in the day.

Comment by MintyPyro 15 hours ago

Great, we should never change anything ever again then

Comment by lynndotpy 14 hours ago

When the change makes something worse all around, then that change should not be favored.

Comment by nipponese 13 hours ago

it didn't make the amount of tax payer money spent on the webpage worse.

Comment by arikrahman 15 hours ago

Nothing ever happens

Comment by gegtik 14 hours ago

whats next? luddites demanding that book contents be hand-rolled by meatbags?

Comment by pona-a 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by FarmerPotato 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by hermitcrab 16 hours ago

I don't think it actually a sentence.

Comment by olivierestsage 16 hours ago

It is not a sentence unless “to technologist” is a verb.

Comment by sph 16 hours ago

"Force" is the verb.

Comment by dnnddidiej 8 hours ago

r/titlegore

Comment by philipwhiuk 15 hours ago

There's a missing 'are' before 'inside'.

Comment by RIMR 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by Rooster61 17 hours ago

I can't. It is a subject without a predicate. It doesn't look like valid English to my eyes.

Comment by Thorrez 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by boogieknite 17 hours ago

or a headline about coercion. even that would be "forces"

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by hellojesus 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by jacobsenscott 16 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by chasd00 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by dublinstats 16 hours ago

Maybe a visiting scholar kind of thing.

Comment by unfunco 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by cheschire 14 hours ago

Why would the president that created space force want to screw with it? Was there some recent bad blood or something else I missed?

Comment by jjk166 14 hours ago

I doubt the president of the united states is personally reviewing the wording of low level job postings.

Comment by cheschire 14 hours ago

GP was discussing the overall name “nasa force”, not the wording of the job postings

Comment by jjk166 13 hours ago

The name of the job posting is part of the wording of the job posting, and very likely not reviewed by the president.

Comment by unfunco 4 hours ago

I'm saying people at NASA may want to skew the results for Space Force, not Trump.

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by antisthenes 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by jvanderbot 16 hours ago

You'll have better luck visiting the various center's websites.

Comment by kjkjadksj 16 hours ago

15 open roles for nasa is disturbing. I’m sure every post has 3000 applicants.

Comment by jjk166 14 hours ago

Open roles != open positions. NASA probably has use for more than one aerospace engineer.

Comment by willis936 8 hours ago

I'm sure they do, but do they have the budget for more than one aerospace engineer?

Comment by alephnerd 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by hellojesus 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by jmalicki 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by hellojesus 15 hours ago

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!

Comment by FarmerPotato 13 hours ago

Were you in an Econ program that required tons of Matlab, SAS, R?

Comment by hellojesus 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by alephnerd 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by hellojesus 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by jmalicki 12 hours ago

One way of viewing this is that to a moderate degree, NASA has largely been outsourced to SpaceX.

Comment by alephnerd 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by SauntSolaire 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by sobellian 5 hours ago

Back in my college days, embedded control was required for both ECSE and mech. E.

Comment by jjk166 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by sublinear 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by chasd00 15 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by jjk166 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by tencentshill 18 hours ago

Cool website, Big Balls. Where's our social security data?

Comment by Terr_ 12 hours ago

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...

Comment by sp4cec0wb0y 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by mmcconnell1618 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by thegrim33 13 hours ago

It is a word with multiple meanings. One such meaning is "a group of people brought together and organized for a particular activity."

Comment by radley 9 hours ago

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."

Comment by ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago

The midichlorians are numerous in this one

Comment by mjmsmith 7 hours ago

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this administration thinks it sounds more manly.

Comment by johnhess 18 hours ago

The first sentence isn't even a sentence.

Comment by Waterluvian 18 hours ago

Sure it is. You can fit a lot of technologists inside space flight and aeronautics systems if you push hard enough.

Comment by happyopossum 17 hours ago

"fit" - you added a verb. That makes it a sentence.

Comment by Waterluvian 16 hours ago

I was thinking we verb the second word:

NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.

Comment by bilekas 17 hours ago

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..

Comment by metalliqaz 17 hours ago

It reads like it received no proof-reading or editing, and it looks like it was vibe coded.

Intern project?

Comment by daviding 17 hours ago

My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..

Comment by Flere-Imsaho 16 hours ago

It's an OS thing. My Pixel 9 handled it just fine.

Windows by any chance?

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Comment by lucb1e 13 hours ago

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

Comment by Bender 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by joshuat 12 hours ago

My MBP M5 couldn't handle it with Firefox but it was fine on Safari, betting it's a WebGL issue or something

Comment by signorovitch 15 hours ago

Ran smooth on both my iPhone and my 13-year-old thinkpad x230.

Comment by Computer0 14 hours ago

what OS is on the thinkpad?

Comment by pugworthy 13 hours ago

My run of the mill notebook computer is showing the Jennifer Lawrence meme clip to you right now, and still performant.

Comment by ivanjermakov 14 hours ago

Probably WebGL is using integrated iGPU for whatever reason. Happened to me on Windows+Brave.

Comment by sirtimbly 16 hours ago

ohhh... right, clearly, they only expected Mac users to open the web page or to apply.

Comment by tristor 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by airza 16 hours ago

it chokes on my mac also

Comment by ISL 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by sublinear 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by robotresearcher 11 hours ago

"NASAFORCE technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery."

First hire should a verb.

Comment by hexo 22 minutes ago

What is it about? I can't get past this "scrolling" website formats. Makes my brain hurt.

Comment by cdrnsf 14 hours ago

10.5MB page weight for a landing page? This national design studio is...not great.

Comment by lucb1e 14 hours ago

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)

Comment by gbbloke 2 hours ago

I'm currently reading Liu Cixin's The Dark Forest and clickin on this website gave me the chills.

Comment by rafram 18 hours ago

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/

Comment by beej71 17 hours ago

It misbehaves on Android FF, as well.

Comment by rationalist 14 hours ago

It works on my Android FF.

Comment by jmye 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by redanddead 10 hours ago

Did anybody else peep this? https://ndstudio.gov/

Comment by burnt-resistor 7 hours ago

That's the AirBnB / DOGE guy's web design grift.

Comment by yalogin 11 hours ago

I am confused or misinformed. I thought the administration has severely gutted nasa, did it not? Yet they are doubling down on the brand?

Comment by consumer451 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by maciejzj 18 hours ago

Is this gig-workification of the space industry?

Comment by cshimmin 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by bilekas 17 hours ago

> But without having to waste your time getting a PhD

Ah yes, that 'waste of times' having to learn things in aeronautics and physics..

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Comment by GaryBluto 15 hours ago

Betteridge's law of Hacker News comments.

Comment by drstewart 17 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by EricRiese 14 hours ago

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).

Comment by spelunker 11 hours ago

They want my college transcript? From the early 00's? I would like to think I've grown a bit professionally since then.

Comment by EricRiese 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by EricRiese 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by dangoodmanUT 17 hours ago

you can tell this was generated with Gemini, the way it loves to do those "enter on scroll" sentences

Comment by brianjlogan 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by lucb1e 13 hours ago

Do you mean the "highlight more words as you scroll down the text" effect?

Comment by big_toast 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by soraki_soladead 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by big_toast 16 hours ago

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-...

Comment by kami23 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by jesse_dot_id 17 hours ago

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.

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Comment by nozzlegear 17 hours ago

Frankly, drug screenings for employees can only benefit NASA given the kind of work they do.

Comment by moomin 17 hours ago

As if the job of NASA wasn’t to get some select people as high as possible.

Comment by jjk166 13 hours ago

Who needs MDMA when you got UDMH?

Comment by reassess_blind 7 hours ago

The initial lightspeed animation lags on my beefy gaming desktop.

Comment by 1970-01-01 10 hours ago

NASA FORCE: When you want to figure out how your stargate works, but have a limited budget for the research.

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Comment by Avicebron 17 hours ago

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

Comment by tialaramex 16 hours ago

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...

Comment by mikeocool 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by piloto_ciego 17 hours ago

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...

Comment by 650REDHAIR 16 hours ago

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?

Comment by piloto_ciego 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by dragonwriter 16 hours ago

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.)

Comment by yieldcrv 17 hours ago

its an air administration

the space part gets the most attention

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Comment by Rebelgecko 16 hours ago

So is this collecting signups for new GS-12s? Or is this program able to offer more competitive compensation?

Comment by stickman393 16 hours ago

NASA should have co-opted "Space Force" from the get-go; funding might not have been such an issue

Comment by sph 16 hours ago

Comment by beej71 17 hours ago

Wonder what the job security is like.

Comment by ahhhhnoooo 11 hours ago

Negligible. You'd be a fool to apply. Let alone accept.

Comment by calmbonsai 7 hours ago

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.

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Comment by krunck 15 hours ago

Such urgency. They're definitely racing China to the moon.

Comment by blendo 13 hours ago

Searching for more DOGE-boy wrecking balls?

Comment by insane_dreamer 10 hours ago

Cheesy, with "join the Army" vibes, but maybe it'll appeal to some dude out there, I guess

Comment by boywitharupee 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by browningstreet 17 hours ago

I think the hint of violence was deliberate.

Comment by tills13 14 hours ago

So are they defunding NASA or not?

Comment by xpe 17 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by ghostpepper 18 hours ago

How do they have budget for this but not for decent production values on the Artemis 2 livestream?

Comment by Rebelgecko 16 hours ago

It looks like this come from the White House, not NASA's defunded communication budget

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Comment by paultopia 15 hours ago

Based on the name I’d thought it was going to be another militarization project, thank god it isn’t.

Comment by CoastalCoder 14 hours ago

I had the same thought.

But can we really rule out it being part of such a strategy?

Comment by johnnyApplePRNG 14 hours ago

Comment by jacobsenscott 16 hours ago

> ...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.

Comment by tonymet 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by epsteingpt 7 hours ago

Pretty cool. We're getting much better govt. websites now.

Comment by 15 hours ago

Comment by phendrenad2 15 hours ago

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).

Comment by xpe 18 hours ago

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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by sybercecurity 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by secretsatan 17 hours ago

I’m sure it’s based on merit

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Comment by gigatexal 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by pcj-github 17 hours ago

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

Comment by righthand 17 hours ago

It’s the brain dead rebranding of what Trump thought USDS was doing.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 13 hours ago

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

Comment by _joel 13 hours ago

Not a thirsty rocket

Comment by ahhhhnoooo 11 hours ago

Lol. Gross. Weird comment.

Comment by digitalShield 17 hours ago

I loved that rolling moon

Comment by doener 18 hours ago

As long as Trump is still President every sane human being should stay away from any federal agency.

Comment by EricRiese 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by seanalltogether 13 hours ago

> 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

Comment by wayeq 14 hours ago

... so that the only people left doing those jobs are sycophants?

Comment by Cycl0ps 13 hours ago

Incompetent sycophants

Comment by xpe 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by Rooster61 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by RIMR 17 hours ago

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?

Comment by hellojesus 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by drstewart 3 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by nozzlegear 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by LtWorf 17 hours ago

Good people need to make a living too!

Comment by erdaniels 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by gcanyon 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by erdaniels 9 hours ago

Yeah it was the same thing with tech force or whatever it was. It's on the last page of the application.

Comment by InvisibleUp 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by kevinten10 8 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by chimerasaurus 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by MAGAtssuck 15 hours ago

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Comment by pona-a 15 hours ago

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Comment by voodoo_child 14 hours ago

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?

Comment by pona-a 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by givinguflac 18 hours ago

This is so weird and vague; I am not interested for fear of all of it being for space defense. Nope for me.

Comment by dmazin 17 hours ago

Agreed.

That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.

Comment by 17 hours ago

Comment by kube-system 17 hours ago

Technology and defense technology have been inextricably linked since the wheel and fire were new technologies.

Comment by whatshisface 18 hours ago

"We fired all of our employees. Now we're hiring temporary consultants."

Comment by EricRiese 14 hours ago

It's the same hiring process for regular government jobs with references to standard pay scales. So I don't think so.

Comment by fhdkweig 17 hours ago

They used to be called scabs.

Comment by drstewart 17 hours ago

Can you point me to the ongoing strike by NASA employees?

Comment by drstewart 17 hours ago

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Comment by mg794613 15 hours ago

Let me get back to you if I find someone who wants to relocate to the USA.

Comment by OhMeadhbh 15 hours ago

Is this just USAJOBS way of getting more resumes so they can give them to xAI or OpenAI as a training set?