- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
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.
I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.
i doubt it's that great, NASA is a huge government organization. There may be a handful of people/teams doing cool things but I suspect much of it is infuriating slow and bureaucratic. However, it's probably a good place to retire from if you're willing to put in the 30-40 years.
> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.
> I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining Nasa
Yes. And it always did since the 1950s unless you were interested in relocating.
Ffs aerospace engineering cannot be done remotely, and that too in a city with a nonexistent aerospace industry.
> Does that mean there are legitimately no other jobs open for tech-related folks? What is the point of the fancy landing page (that provides zero actual info) if that's the case? No Data Science or developer openings for tech folk that don't have Abet certified engineering degrees
Not all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys. And your assumption deeply underestimates how most Aerospace and Mechanical Engineers know how to develop at a CS level now as well - most MechE and Aerospace undergrad programs now see their students double major or minor in CompE or CS.
Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.
Fair. I think this is about the extent of my training, which was as an Applied Mathematics and Econ undergrad about 15 years ago: Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss
> https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/1093497/TOC
Maybe my idea of NASA was too encompassing. I figured that, apart from the engineering work, general sim would require optimizations and productionalization similar to how we have AI Engineers focused on the practical implementation of ML systems apart from the core model R&D.
I got a bit hooked on Econ for awhile which held my attention through an MS, which is when I learned about computers and then applied that into DS and development.
Most of my simulation experience is in stochastic systems and modern digital twins where agents sometimes have asymmetric information. I can see how I'm of no practical use to NASA now, but it still stings. What a bummer existing and not doing anything cool with life. A warning to youth!
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.
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.
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.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
I got the impression that despite using terms like "mission critical", this isn't about the hardcore technical wizardry behind propulsion and safety.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
It kinda sounds like a post-doc, in that it provides an on-ramp to working in the industry/institution. But without having to waste your time getting a PhD.
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
Ya, I don't understand the calculus. If it's important enough for a big website, why not promote the site for a week first. Too many applications seems more desirable than missing the right people who are 'heads down building' or just not terminally online.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
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).
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.
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
I initially thought this was a call for technologists to commit to volunteering on a deep technical project for four days. That’s not enough time to design a component. But it might e.g. let some minor work on a protocol advance.
That has been the assumption in most of these cases. The agency must already have a list of people they want, so a short window keeps the risk of someone else jumping to the front of the queue.
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.
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
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.
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.
Given what we're facing, I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time. There's a lot of nationalist language on this site. Even if your motivations are for science, do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
I think it's a bit of, "Be the change you want to see". It may not be a bad thing to get tech folk with sense into these roles. They probably tend to have enough of a cushion to be able to refuse unethical work without worrying about the immediate consequences.
NASA had a nationalist origin and has always kept those undertones even in the modern day, but I don't think anyone's ever accused it of being partisan. I don't believe many Americans associate NASA with any particular president, except maybe JFK, and I don't believe they'd conflate working for NASA with working for Trump.
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
Normally I would agree but I get it with regards to NASA. They do life and death stuff that has like zero margin of error. They probably shouldn't be in the business of hiring people who's edible might be lasting longer than they expected.
Two things:
- I like the rolling Moon animation very much.
- This seems like a clever way of getting talent involved during a budget squeeze, presumably with the hope that some of those they attract will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again. I guess it's also a neat kind of try-before-you-buy for both sides. NASA is prestigious and one of the very few places one could do purely science-focused aerospace engineering, but it's still a government job under all the gold leaf and atomic robots.
EDIT: Good Lord, I get the cynicism but at least someone at NASA HR is trying new things to keep the lights on.
They had these kinds of programs for a long time, but many of the engineers were vilified and the programs disbanded as soon as this administration took office. I'm not sure why someone would sign up to work for a government that has no respect for its employees (or a company for that matter) if they already have gainful employment.
In fact, a bunch of NASA labs were recently closed where folks with this exact skillset could do these exact jobs. Why re-post under a different skin and expect a different result?
Well... the TSA was a jobs program for people who couldn't or didn't want to get jobs as cops. Stennis (Space Flight Center) is a jobs program for Aero Engineering grads to keep them from going to work in Europe or India. Who knows... we might need them to design newer expensive missile systems sometime.
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
Isn't most of the actual aerospace R&D work contracted out?
No
What kind of research happens outside academia-attached labs like JPL and outside MIC firms like lockheed/boeing?
There are a fair number of engineers at centers (Stennis, Ames, Kennedy, etc.) that are government employees. When I was NASA-adjacent, it seemed they wrote the specs and testing regimes. I think the government even did some of the testing with government-employed test engineers and technicians. But yeah, a lot of the manufacturing is done by contractors.
There's a joke in the aero world that F-16s are designed by people Ph.D.'s, manufactured by people with Masters degrees, flown by people with a Batchelor's degree in History and maintained by people with a High School Diploma.
It turns out you have to make jobs for people at all levels of education and experience.
Makes sense. What about on the basic research side? Is that done mostly through academia grants or are there in-house folks in the centers?
"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...
> NASA Force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
It is a definition; the transition between the logotype and normal text has an implicit [:}, NASAFORCE: technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
Though its an odd choice that they run it in with the paragraph of normal text rather than making that a heading. Of course, with a four day hiring window its a website that exists as pro forma evidence that there was a public website about the hiring effort, the people actually intended to be hired were almost certainly notified in advance out of band, so there probably wasn't a whole lot of effort put into this.
You skipped a word.
"NASA Force: Technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery".
This website is vibe coded
...and equally substanceless as anything coming out of National Design Studio.
Here's an almost identical one (design-wise): https://genesis.energy.gov/
And another one: https://techforce.gov/
And another one: https://safedc.gov/
All basically the same one-pager with different vibe-coded graphics and like 500 words of text.
I am trying to understand, are you saying marketing always needs to be hand-rolled?
Seemed to work okay back in the day.
Great, we should never change anything ever again then
Nothing ever happens
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.
"Force" is the verb.
It is not a sentence unless “to technologist” is a 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 can't. It is a subject without a predicate. It doesn't look like valid English to my eyes.
or a headline about coercion. even that would be "forces"
[delayed]
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.
I think it's called NASA Force to screw with the search results for Space Force, similar to Boris Johnson saying his hobby was building toy buses, in order to try and reduce the relevancy of the Brexit bus.
> I'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.
> Highly skilled early- to mid- career engineers, technologists, and innovators join NASA for focused term appointments, typically 1–2 years with the possibility of extension, to solve complex...
is somewhere in that word salad. I think it's an internship?
I guess what they want is a short term resource which would typically be a contractor or consultant but maybe they have to hire an FTE. So they're saying it's going to get real boring after year 2 so we expect you to leave. Sounds like a good deal for a new grad, bottom bullet on the resume would be a year or two at NASA.
Maybe a visiting scholar kind of thing.
Yeah, there definitely needs to be more transparency about the whole initiative.
Either it's "We're hiring ~1000 IT/Engineering specialists across multiple domains" or it's "Hey, just apply on USAJobs for the open positions".
Otherwise it just feels like throwing an application into the black hole of some kafkaesque talent management system.
You'll have better luck visiting the various center's websites.
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.
Thanks. I was dual questioning people that likely knew the answer and lamenting my life's decisions.
I have no doubt that modern engineering students have CS know-how. It's almost a requirement for the modern world. But I was curious if there were roles for things like simulation, embedded software, etc. or even general scientists that may not fall under traditional engineering. This was mainly conditional on the website's approach to vaguity.
Simulation is largely what traditional engineers do - I mean how many classes have you taken on finite element methods, discretizing PDEs, etc.? It's not web dev.
Fair. I think this is about the extent of my training, which was as an Applied Mathematics and Econ undergrad about 15 years ago: Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss > https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/1093497/TOC
Maybe my idea of NASA was too encompassing. I figured that, apart from the engineering work, general sim would require optimizations and productionalization similar to how we have AI Engineers focused on the practical implementation of ML systems apart from the core model R&D.
I got a bit hooked on Econ for awhile which held my attention through an MS, which is when I learned about computers and then applied that into DS and development.
Most of my simulation experience is in stochastic systems and modern digital twins where agents sometimes have asymmetric information. I can see how I'm of no practical use to NASA now, but it still stings. What a bummer existing and not doing anything cool with life. A warning to youth!
> 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.
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.
Cool website, Big Balls. Where's our social security data?
The first sentence isn't even a sentence.
Sure it is. You can fit a lot of technologists inside space flight and aeronautics systems if you push hard enough.
"fit" - you added a verb. That makes it a sentence.
I was thinking we verb the second word:
NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.
My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..
It's an OS thing. My Pixel 9 handled it just fine.
Windows by any chance?
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 chokes on my mac also
Spaceflight requires relentless deliberate progress.
An exploding job-recruitment offer might not attract the kind of folks we want designing a system that absolutely must work after a decade in space.
I've worked with NASA and ESA employees/contractors who've made technical miracles happen in space. I don't think any of them would be drawn to this style of recruitment.
I got the impression that despite using terms like "mission critical", this isn't about the hardcore technical wizardry behind propulsion and safety.
This is a call for developers of the very long tail of logistics related stuff. I'd imagine a moon base would need someone to write the software for schedulers, dashboards, etc. and engineer the parts that interface with and provide non-critical telemetry to those systems. I'm not saying that stuff isn't hard, but it's not anything life or death.
Some of those roles might not even be technical at all and be more about coordinating the human side of those efforts.
This really screams and reads like a crypto scam or something, also why would they not use the official NASA logo ?
This is so strange.. I'm still not even clear on what it's for..
It reads like it received no proof-reading or editing, and it looks like it was vibe coded.
Intern project?
Based on the name I’d thought it was going to be another militarization project, thank god it isn’t.
Another barely usable website from the "National Design Studio." I wish they'd take a cue from gov.uk (or even the US Digital Service and 18F, which they gutted) and build clean, functional, and accessible sites... but the crew of web developers who are willing to work for this administration seem way too obsessed with this defense-tech startup landing page aesthetic to care about usability.
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
[1]: https://www.lenis.dev/
Truly the "maximum lethality" of web design. And that's ignoring how terrible "NASA Force" is as a name. It's like it's all out of a bad 80s cartoon.
It misbehaves on Android FF, as well.
Is this gig-workification of the space industry?
It kinda sounds like a post-doc, in that it provides an on-ramp to working in the industry/institution. But without having to waste your time getting a PhD.
> But without having to waste your time getting a PhD
Ah yes, that 'waste of times' having to learn things in aeronautics and physics..
Betteridge's law of Hacker News comments.
Why does the application window last four days?
Charitably they're moving fast, but without already having people in mind for the roles or having created the hiring pipeline, how do you reach a sufficiently large audience. Is there an explanation I'm missing? Was this announced a while ago?
Makes it feel like they already know who they want for the roles/preferential selection. On a longer or recurring timescale, seems like a cool way to reach out to potential hires.
I'm not saying you're wrong but then why do a big website and branding push. If they had someone in mind they'd bury it on a regular job posting.
They specify early to mid career. Imo they're anticipating a ton of applications and bounding it makes reviewing them tractable.
Ya, I don't understand the calculus. If it's important enough for a big website, why not promote the site for a week first. Too many applications seems more desirable than missing the right people who are 'heads down building' or just not terminally online.
That on top of Direct Hire Authority.
I can see NASA Force[1] is part of the US Tech Force[2] push and has been talked about for the last several months.
[1]:https://www.meritalk.com/articles/nasa-opm-kick-off-drive-fo...
[2]:https://meritalk.com/articles/opm-launches-us-tech-force-to-...
Such urgency. They're definitely racing China to the moon.
you can tell this was generated with Gemini, the way it loves to do those "enter on scroll" sentences
Is this just USAJOBS way of getting more resumes so they can give them to xAI or OpenAI as a training set?
NASA should have co-opted "Space Force" from the get-go; funding might not have been such an issue
It's already a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
So is this collecting signups for new GS-12s? Or is this program able to offer more competitive compensation?
Did anyone scroll down far enough to see the "automate air traffic controllers"? I guess technically it's aeronautics but I didn't know that was part of NASA
One of the most important things NASA does, ignoring for a moment the unknowable value of say, discovering that Mars once had microbial life, is ASRS https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
You know how (scheduled, ie you buy tickets to SF, no prior relation to the crew, money for a service) aviation is incredibly safe? Well, one way you can continue increasing safety when you've already fixed all the things which keep going wrong enough that they happened and you corrected for them, is collect incidents where things didn't go wrong.
But obviously no pilot is going to just say "I nearly killed everybody" in public 'cos that's career ending, so ASRS collects these reports anonymously and in fact promises you immunity for certain things if you reported them first. So they can see e.g. sure nobody ever died on a plane because a pilot pushed the "kill everybody" button on the new Boeing cost-optimised "It's probably fine" B123-Extra but here are six reports from pilots who pushed "kill everybody" but were able to push "Whoops, no don't do that" in the six seconds left to prevent it. So this means no the FAA should not approve Boeing's request to remove the "unnecessary" Whoops button from future models and actually maybe the FAA OK for the "kill everybody" button should be revisited 'cos it doesn't say anything about pilots pressing it easily by accident in Boeing's request...
I saw that, I was a pilot for many years, and this would actually be kind of cool technology if it could be done right. I'm half tempted to apply.
One of my customers right now is frustrated because they have the tower closed at weird hours at their principle base of operations and they can't depart flights conveniently because of staffing shortages. Clearances are a bitch too... the whole thing is kind of wild and it's kind of a safety hazard when this airport goes uncontrolled. Anything that would help out - even cameras that would let the tower controllers at the primary airport see WTF is happening at the satellite field would be helpful...
Yes, our stretched thin controllers watching the feed from a satellite field makes total sense.
Maybe they could try a pilot program somewhere like LGA?
Situational awareness is situational awareness. We still do in AK, but we used to have good Flight Service Stations that could provide advisory workload permitting.
AI tooling to provide traffic advisories when there are critical staffing shortages would be a godsend in some parts, and they don't necessarily need to even remotely be close to provide some help.
Obviously, that's not going to work at Teterhole or LGA, but the air traffic system is more than just the east coast. There's tons of staffing shortages across the whole country.
My first thought is, "we should hire more controllers and pay them better" - but if we're not going to do that or if we can't recruit and train fast enough (we can't really), some automation would be good.
NASA has always had significant role in forward looking research in the area of civilian aviation (which it assumed from the agency it replaced, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.)
its an air administration
the space part gets the most attention
Let me get back to you if I find someone who wants to relocate to the USA.
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.
Wonder what the job security is like.
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).
> 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.
How do they have budget for this but not for decent production values on the Artemis 2 livestream?
It looks like this come from the White House, not NASA's defunded communication budget
I think the hint of violence was deliberate.
I loved that rolling moon
These job postings opened today on April 17 and close in four days (on April 21). This is highly compressed and highly unusual.
Being no fan of the current administration and its hangers-on, my brain quickly jumps to less flattering reasons for these short time windows. A four day application window favors people they want to select. They may well have told certain people in advance to be ready. I don't have direct "proof" of this, and I'm open to learning more, but the current administration has beyond exhausted any presumption of fair dealing.
I encourage anyone and everyone interested to apply and report back. NASA has a good mission and its needs people with a moral backbone and intrinsic pro-science drive.
I initially thought this was a call for technologists to commit to volunteering on a deep technical project for four days. That’s not enough time to design a component. But it might e.g. let some minor work on a protocol advance.
That has been the assumption in most of these cases. The agency must already have a list of people they want, so a short window keeps the risk of someone else jumping to the front of the queue.
I’m sure it’s based on merit
Every single thing dumb fuck loser Donald pedophile felon Trump does, WILL be undone the moment he is gone!
> ...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.
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.
This is so weird and vague; I am not interested for fear of all of it being for space defense. Nope for me.
Agreed.
That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.
Technology and defense technology have been inextricably linked since the wheel and fire were new technologies.
This is so cringe. Who are the people behind this god awful "national design studio", and how are they related to MAGA / Trump? Assuredly yet another insider cronyism deal that degrades trust in the US government.
Claude:
The National Design Studio (NDS) is a new White House agency that Trump created by executive order on August 21, 2025, as part of an initiative called "America by Design." It lives inside the White House Office of the Executive Office of the President.
The setup
The executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United States
Trump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design Officer
Gebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperwork
The stated goal: overhaul roughly 26,000 federal websites and physical government interfaces to be "both usable and beautiful" — Gebbia has compared the target experience to "the Apple Store"
Initial results are required by July 4, 2026 (the US 250th anniversary), and the temporary organization within NDS is scheduled to sunset after three years
It’s the brain dead rebranding of what Trump thought USDS was doing.
As long as Trump is still President every sane human being should stay away from any federal agency.
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.
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.
Given what we're facing, I am actually skeptical of people who step up to work for the government at this moment in time. There's a lot of nationalist language on this site. Even if your motivations are for science, do we really want to give any assistance to the goals of this administration?
I think it's a bit of, "Be the change you want to see". It may not be a bad thing to get tech folk with sense into these roles. They probably tend to have enough of a cushion to be able to refuse unethical work without worrying about the immediate consequences.
NASA had a nationalist origin and has always kept those undertones even in the modern day, but I don't think anyone's ever accused it of being partisan. I don't believe many Americans associate NASA with any particular president, except maybe JFK, and I don't believe they'd conflate working for NASA with working for Trump.
Good people need to make a living too!
"We fired all of our employees. Now we're hiring temporary consultants."
They used to be called scabs.
I would love to work for NASA so much even at a significant pay cut, but almost everything I've read in the past was they still do drug screenings for a lot of positions I was interested in. Maybe someday they will pull their heads out of the dark ages.
Normally I would agree but I get it with regards to NASA. They do life and death stuff that has like zero margin of error. They probably shouldn't be in the business of hiring people who's edible might be lasting longer than they expected.
Frankly, drug screenings for employees can only benefit NASA given the kind of work they do.
As if the job of NASA wasn’t to get some select people as high as possible.