- 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.
porridgeraisin 52 minutes ago [-]
Isn't most of the actual aerospace R&D work contracted out?
jvanderbot 3 minutes ago [-]
No
tiberone 42 minutes 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?
dragonwriter 16 minutes ago [-]
It is a definition; the transition between the logotype and normal text has an implicit [:}, NASAFORCE: 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.
kokanee 23 minutes ago [-]
This website is vibe coded
input_sh 6 minutes ago [-]
...and equally substanceless as anything coming out of National Design Studio.
All basically the same one-pager with different vibe-coded graphics and like 500 words of text.
RIMR 39 minutes 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.
boogieknite 10 minutes ago [-]
or a headline about coercion. even that would be "forces"
Rooster61 27 minutes ago [-]
I can't. It is a subject without a predicate. It doesn't look like valid English to my eyes.
34 minutes ago [-]
tencentshill 1 hours ago [-]
Cool website, Big Balls. Where's our social security data?
sp4cec0wb0y 57 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
hellojesus 48 minutes 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.
alephnerd 32 seconds 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.
antisthenes 34 minutes 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.
johnhess 1 hours ago [-]
The first sentence isn't even a sentence.
Waterluvian 1 hours ago [-]
Sure it is. You can fit a lot of technologists inside space flight and aeronautics systems if you push hard enough.
happyopossum 18 minutes ago [-]
"fit" - you added a verb. That makes it a sentence.
daviding 59 minutes ago [-]
My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..
Bender 54 minutes 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.
bilekas 44 minutes 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..
metalliqaz 28 minutes ago [-]
It reads like it received no proof-reading or editing, and it looks like it was vibe coded.
Intern project?
12 minutes ago [-]
big_toast 27 minutes 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.
soraki_soladead 23 minutes 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.
kami23 42 minutes 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.
jesse_dot_id 40 minutes 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.
nozzlegear 28 minutes ago [-]
Frankly, drug screenings for employees can only benefit NASA given the kind of work they do.
moomin 9 minutes ago [-]
As if the job of NASA wasn’t to get some select people as high as possible.
maciejzj 1 hours ago [-]
Is this gig-workification of the space industry?
cshimmin 55 minutes 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.
bilekas 39 minutes 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..
18 minutes ago [-]
drstewart 57 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
rafram 1 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.
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
dragonwriter 3 minutes 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.)
piloto_ciego 11 minutes 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...
yieldcrv 42 minutes ago [-]
its an air administration
the space part gets the most attention
browningstreet 26 minutes ago [-]
I think the hint of violence was deliberate.
beej71 1 hours ago [-]
Wonder what the job security is like.
digitalShield 13 minutes ago [-]
I loved that rolling moon
dangoodmanUT 41 minutes ago [-]
you can tell this was generated with Gemini, the way it loves to do those "enter on scroll" sentences
xpe 1 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.
JumpCrisscross 40 minutes 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.
21 minutes ago [-]
sybercecurity 49 minutes 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.
secretsatan 46 minutes ago [-]
I’m sure it’s based on merit
ghostpepper 1 hours ago [-]
How do they have budget for this but not for decent production values on the Artemis 2 livestream?
doener 1 hours ago [-]
As long as Trump is still President every sane human being should stay away from any federal agency.
xpe 1 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. If only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. 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, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior according to narrow individual frames.
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.
Rooster61 22 minutes 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.
RIMR 36 minutes 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?
hellojesus 30 minutes 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.
nozzlegear 22 minutes 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.
LtWorf 19 minutes ago [-]
Good people need to make a living too!
xpe 48 minutes 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.
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.
whatshisface 1 hours ago [-]
"We fired all of our employees. Now we're hiring temporary consultants."
fhdkweig 57 minutes ago [-]
They used to be called scabs.
drstewart 55 minutes ago [-]
Can you point me to the ongoing strike by NASA employees?
drstewart 58 minutes ago [-]
Where did you see these were consultants?
The positions look term limited, just like 18F was under Obama
pcj-github 47 minutes 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
righthand 41 minutes ago [-]
It’s the brain dead rebranding of what Trump thought USDS was doing.
InvisibleUp 38 minutes 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.
givinguflac 1 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.
dmazin 1 hours ago [-]
Agreed.
That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.
55 minutes ago [-]
kube-system 39 minutes ago [-]
Technology and defense technology have been inextricably linked since the wheel and fire were new technologies.
Rendered at 17:44:37 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
- 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.
Am I an idiot or does their leading sentence make absolutely no sense?
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.
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.
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.
Yes. And it always did.
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.
This is so strange.. I'm still not even clear on what it's for..
Intern project?
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.
They specify early to mid career. Imo they're anticipating a ton of applications and bounding it makes reviewing them tractable.
Ah yes, that 'waste of times' having to learn things in aeronautics and physics..
The developer of this scroll-smoothing JS library [1] has a lot to answer for.
[1]: https://www.lenis.dev/
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...
the space part gets the most attention
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.
Edits (in case my meaning above is not clear):
1. If only Trump-aligned or Trump-tolerant people sign up for these roles, I do not think this is desirable for NASA.
2. 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, it isn't accurate to claim that we can fully explain human behavior according to narrow individual frames.
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.
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.
The positions look term limited, just like 18F was under Obama
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
That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.