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?
There are all these 30-60 year old engineers who look like they should be good hires on paper, but the tech economy has been pooping out bullshit products (and jobs) for the last 20 years. The last "real" job I had... my official role was to sit at a desk and "coordinate" development. While no one was looking, I wrote code and passed it off to a dev in India to check in (US engineers weren't allowed to check in code.) My job at Amazon was similar... the higher up the food chain you went, the less management understood what engineers did (modulo a few notable exceptions -- the guy who ran Route 53 when it launched was amazingly tech saavy for a VP level manager.)
There's only so much idiocy you can expect the tech industry to digest. It's time to send engineers to the government so they can write documents about how we should evaluate the requirements for evaluation criteria.
...usually it's the other way around.
May I ask what the situation was? Reverse-outsourcing by the Indian central government?
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.
Panic-firing and panic-reemploying your workforce every <4 years is not a sustainable rate of attrition for professional, research-oriented culture.
It's not a meritocracy right now. Good people were fired based on their identity alone.
You can always tell when someone is embarrassed to defend something (especially hurting people), when they have to mask it in ambiguous, impassive terms and stale euphemisms.
He didn't fire thousands of good people, human beings who have to worry about putting food on the table now, for purely ideological reasons, while vilifying them as "woke", unqualified, doing work not worth doing (only to open the same positions back up now, because it turns out it was). No, he just "trimmed the fat".
Oh, did people get hurt? Did we waste money and lose expertise for nothing? No, we just "trimmed the fat". Gotta "trim the fat", right? "Trimming the fat" is normal and necessary, and if I say something is just "trimming the fat", that's all it is.
>> will still be around after this congress and the agency can stabilize once again
2026 budget - 24.4 billion
2025 budget - 24.8 billion
2024 budget - 25.3 billion
2023 budget - 25.3 billion
2022 budget - 24.0 billion
2021 budget - 23.2 billion
2020 budget - 22.6 billion
2019 budget - 21.5 billion
2018 budget - 20.7 billion
2017 budget - 19.6 billion
2016 budget - 19.2 billion
What part of these numbers are you interpreting as some sort of insane budget restriction?
2026 White House proposed budget[2]: $18.8 billion
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/budget...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal...
[2] is represented as deltas, explainer here https://spacenews.com/white-house-budget-proposal-would-phas...
So, probably that squeeze?
Unrelated tangent: saw HackerSmacker in your profile, plan to try it out, wish it supported iOS.
There's a joke in the aero world that F-16s are designed by people Ph.D.'s, manufactured by people with Masters degrees, flown by people with a Batchelor's degree in History and maintained by people with a High School Diploma.
It turns out you have to make jobs for people at all levels of education and experience.
But in reality they do significant amounts of directed research using "burden" funded research for their on internal needs, and grant work for NASA and other agencies (like DOE).
I worked at JPL, and worked with folks at Ames for various reasons. Both centers try to carve out enough internal time to research new mission concepts, new ways of accomplishing existing mission concepts, or new basic technologies that have dual use for missions/commercial appliations. All of this would qualify as basic research similar to what would happen at Caltech or Stanford, the nearby official/unofficial partners.
I attended all kinds of conferences and agency-level meetings with researchers from many other agencies / nasa centers as well, all mostly aimed at finding out how to better explore space (new missions), or improve our existing exploration capabilities, either with new or by adapting existing tech.
NASA has an entire reporting pipeline called "New Technology Reports" that makes all of this research immediately public, and a deep tradition of spinning off commercial businesses to carry it forward if it turns out to be a good idea.
While I can't comment on the cost per say, there are both military and capitalistic reasons for the race to the moon.
- Logistics Hub
- "Get there quickly and set legal precedent"
- Resource extraction (helium-3, gold, platinum, etc)
- If moon dust can be converted to oxygen reliably, the first company or country to set up shop on the moon can sell that service to countries and commercial entities.
- Unique manufacturing and science activities because of the low gravity
- "Space Tourism"
They all deserve criticism, but when that's all a thread turns into when these items come up, well the discussion becomes very hollow and partisan really quickly.
So, humans that are extremely upset with the current state of things.
> and do it to farm points
I'm sure some do, but have you seen how many people across the US have been having protests? People are pissed.
I'm pretty sure your analysis of the motivations would not at all be accurate with such a blanket statement.
If it's a human getting up and rushing to to write about promoted ragebait content devolving a forum into an echo chamber, of course someone takes the bait and lists grievances in hysterical language unsolicited. Such emotionality is totally uncalled for on a tech forum, and proves my point.
Only when the robots fully take over. It's one of many things that separate us from the machines. Dismissing emotions is dismissing humanity.
However "Finally deleting the worthless penny" is not a big achievement and so it's understandable that you mistook "Trump constantly does incredibly bad things nobody likes" for them disapproving universally of all US Federal government activity.
I don’t know enough about the current NASA administration so it isn’t a criticism toward them. But it roles up to the top.
Just like if I were in the medical field - why would I work for the CDC now?
It's always hard to get tell with you people whether your attempt at trolling is based on willful ignorance, maliciousness or immaturity. Probably all three.
Pre-sorting all criticism as reflexive and not necessarily justified is a rationalization for you not trying to understand other perspectives.
Edit: it seems like my message was ambiguous. Fuck Donald Trump, I’ve got a bottle to pop when he dies and I’ll never let you fuckers live down what you’ve done.
Why bother? Americans clearly don't believe in science anymore, and the American government can't be trusted to fund it properly, or to not rewrite or defund research because of wrongthink or "DEI."
If I were working for NASA, or even a possible candidate for working for NASA, I'd get my passport in order and look for greener pastures. Sure, the pay may not be the best but at least you aren't working for Nazis and pedophiles who believe in space demons and miasma theory.
(oops I did a cynicism.)
That's not cynicism, that's... something else.