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?

>> 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?

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.

>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.)

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

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?

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.

This website is vibe coded

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.

"Force" is the verb.

I don't think it actually a sentence.

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 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.

> 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'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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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

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

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

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

Windows by any chance?

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

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.

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

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

Intern project?

Not a thirsty rocket

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.

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)

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.

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 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.

Betteridge's law of Hacker News comments.

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

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.

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...

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...

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

It's already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force

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.

I had the same thought.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.