Discussion

BUILD THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY

johnhess: The first sentence isn't even a sentence.

daviding: My 5090 couldn't handle that starfield at the beginning. I got a 1202 alarm just scrolling down..

doener: As long as Trump is still President every sane human being should stay away from any federal agency.

xpe: [delayed]

rafram: 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/

beej71: It misbehaves on Android FF, as well.

givinguflac: This is so weird and vague; I am not interested for fear of all of it being for space defense. Nope for me.

dmazin: Agreed.That said if this bothers you I highly recommend not looking up how many Space Shuttle missions are classified.

scrumper: 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.

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

Bender: 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.

maciejzj: Is this gig-workification of the space industry?

cshimmin: 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.

whatshisface: "We fired all of our employees. Now we're hiring temporary consultants."

fhdkweig: They used to be called scabs.

drstewart: Can you point me to the ongoing strike by NASA employees?

kami23: 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: 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.

xpe: 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: 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.

pcj-github: 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 setupThe executive order established the NDS along with a new position: Chief Design Officer of the United StatesTrump appointed Joe Gebbia (Airbnb co-founder) as the first Chief Design OfficerGebbia previously worked at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) alongside Elon Musk on modernizing federal retirement paperworkThe 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: It’s the brain dead rebranding of what Trump thought USDS was doing.

dangoodmanUT: you can tell this was generated with Gemini, the way it loves to do those "enter on scroll" sentences

tiberone: > 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?

Avicebron: 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

yieldcrv: its an air administrationthe space part gets the most attention

bilekas: 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..

RIMR: 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: 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.

hellojesus: 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.

antisthenes: 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.

LtWorf: Good people need to make a living too!

Rooster61: 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.

nozzlegear: NASA has always been a nationalist organization, 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.

kokanee: This website is vibe coded

big_toast: 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: [delayed]

RIMR: 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: or a headline about coercion. even that would be "forces"

piloto_ciego: 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...

digitalShield: I loved that rolling moon

dragonwriter: 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.

alephnerd: > I'd love to work for Nasa, but I live in Portland, OR. Does this geo basically disqualify me from ever joining NasaYes. And it always did 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 degreesNot all industries need SWEs who are CRUD monkeys.

dragonwriter: 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.)

jvanderbot: No

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

stickman393: NASA should have co-opted "Space Force" from the get-go; funding might not have been such an issue

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

sph: "Force" is the verb.

jvanderbot: You'll have better luck visiting the various center's websites.

boywitharupee: 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.

olivierestsage: It is not a sentence unless “to technologist” is a verb.

olivierestsage: Looks like the UAC interface from Doom 3 to me. Make of that what you will

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

ramoz: What guarantees do we get in terms of not disappearing off the face of the earth?

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

happyopossum: "fit" - you added a verb. That makes it a sentence.

Waterluvian: I was thinking we verb the second word:NASA force technologists inside the systems that power American spaceflight, aeronautics, and scientific discovery.

hermitcrab: I don't think it actually a sentence.

tjwebbnorfolk: It's a rule on HN; nobody is allowed to like anything the government does while orange man in office.

digitaltrees: That’s not even remotely true and is a trite dismissal of legitimate criticism. Further, even though this might be an exciting concept, when put in the context of the massive budget cuts to nasa specifically it’s hard to fully celebrate what might be more a PR stunt than a meaningful commitment to science and exploration.