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.

Unrelated tangent: saw HackerSmacker in your profile, plan to try it out, wish it supported iOS.

>> 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?

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.)

they may have trimmed some fat, which is normal and necessary, but it's disingenuous to say that "engineers were vilified"

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.

>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?

the space part gets the most attention

They specify early to mid career. Imo they're anticipating a ton of applications and bounding it makes reviewing them tractable.

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...

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...

It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.

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

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.

Intern project?

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.

Windows by any chance?

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.

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.

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

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?

...usually it's the other way around.

May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?

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.

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.

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 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.

There's some way this is enshittified.

So, yeah.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

From wikipedia. The white house is pushing for major cuts to Nasa

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 they could try a pilot program somewhere like LGA?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 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.