Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

kcrw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 774 posts

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#371

Post by OrvalWintermute »

WalterBright wrote: post #346
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James webb is the perfect example of why we absolutely need NASA and what they do. Did the budget balloon and delays rack up? Yup, and if you read about why you will see that it was basically unavoidable. A private business would have canceled it at the first roadblock (depriving us of an INCREDIBLE scientific tool). And for the actual launch and deployment, the cost of the instrument meant that a very high success r…

JWST is a great achievement. No question about that. But we could have easily made good use of a dozen of them. NASA could have built a dozen with only a small incremental cost, because once you have a design and tooling and test rigs and test plans and machine shop setups, the incremental cost is pretty small. For example, when I worked at Boeing, sinking a die for a forging cost $250,000. Stamping out a forging cos…

What you said is very correct.

there are a huge amount of one time costs associated with the design and engineering of a spacecraft or a satellite that could enable fairly cheap constellations compared to singular satellites, and the testing regimen becomes much more cheap when it’s done as part of a campaign.

I’m a proponent for the disaggregation of satellites from sensors using specified interfaces. Industry is definitely moving in this direction with their satellite buses you can buy fairly cheaply.

Will we want to stick a $3 billion sensor onto a $15 million satellite? I can’t answer that question

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#373

Post by krainboltgreene »

exe34 wrote: post #274
krainboltgreene wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These two sentences paired together is so fantastically american.

I'm British, but sadly we're heading the same way.

Just to be clear I think what you said is extremely shortsighted and self-defeating.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#374

Post by unnamed76ri »

noobermin wrote: post #302
samrus wrote: post #153

I understand wanting to make the organization more efficient, but i don't think this is what's happening here. I think this is the classic republican strat of gutting federal agencies, pointing to the inefficiencies caused by the loss of institutional knowledge, and using that as an excuse to privatize to their friends. The fact that Elon's DOGE suggested these cuts lines up

It's not worth making this point anymore. Bannon et al have been explicit for decades now they want to destroy the federal government. It's ideological, that's it quite simply. All these discussions about efficiency, even more so the debt given they just blew up the debt to never before seen levels just shows that sincerity is not deserved when talking to Rs.

Every day the debt rises to never before seen levels. That’s not new or something exclusive to one party or the other.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#375

Post by jart »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #195
jart wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA ended their space shuttle program in 2011 and hasn't been able to send things into space since. For the rest of that decade, the only way Americans could access ISS was by purchasing tickets on Russian spacecraft. NASA pivoted to partnering with private government contractors like ULA, which did 4 launches in 2024, probably spy satellites for the military, but their Atlas V rocket only has 14 launches remaining…

Hey everyone, consider looking at the Wikipedia page for an agency before posting piss-takes on social media regarding that agency. Sending things to space is a small part of what NASA does. "Aeronautics" is not "space rocketry", and all federal agencies do more than what their name indicates.

And what is that?

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#376

Post by unnamed76ri »

ceejayoz wrote: post #335
DSingularity wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I won’t cry if it is dismantled. You will if the private replacement is much worse.

The federal government is 36 trillion in debt. How do you run things worse than that? No private company or citizen would survive blowing up their finances as bad as what the federal government has been doing for decades.

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#377

Post by giantg2 »

nothercastle wrote: post #348
nine_zeros wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, and they can't even fill the positions they have under that cap. Yes, they can't even fill positions - that is how incompetent Republicans are.

If it cap salary at 2000 levels then that you won’t be able to fill. That’s happening all over the federal government. The pay is so low the only way the compensation works is if employees do the bare minimum

Government employees have been getting COLAs. It just appears that the private sector has been giving larger increases and is subject to more competition. For example, as a developer you can job hop or negotiate raises in the private sector, but that doesn’t work in the public sector. I think inflation and wage growth in the covid era hit this especially hard. Why would I want to deal with DMV customers all day for $45k when I could work at an Amazon warehouse for $70k or even Walmart/McDonald's/etc for $50k?

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#378

Post by scarface_74 »

unnamed76ri wrote: post #374
noobermin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not worth making this point anymore. Bannon et al have been explicit for decades now they want to destroy the federal government. It's ideological, that's it quite simply. All these discussions about efficiency, even more so the debt given they just blew up the debt to never before seen levels just shows that sincerity is not deserved when talking to Rs.

Every day the debt rises to never before seen levels. That’s not new or something exclusive to one party or the other.

It absolutely is worse for one party more than the other. Clinton was the last President to balance the budget. Bush II and Trump made it far worse than any Democrat

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#379

Post by OrvalWintermute »

declan_roberts wrote: post #296
tonyhart7 wrote: post #66

I hope spacex,blue origin etc can pick up these people hope the best for them

I don't think long termers at NASA are the kinds of people that survive at spacex, blue origin, etc. unfortunately

My engineering colleagues could jump to SpaceX / Blue Origin / Newspace in a second, and they work insane amounts. Much Newspace pays NASA to borrow talent to help stand up their space programs.

However, they want to do NASA work which is very R&D focused and has great opportunities for innovation, plenty of low TRL work, and a bro ad variety of missions.

Industry isn’t doing that much low TRL work

Re: 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

#380

Post by unnamed76ri »

maxlybbert wrote: post #301
nine_zeros wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost of FedEx from NYC to LA: Cheapest price for 1 lb letter is $60.37 before taxes https://www.fedex.com/en-us/online/rating.html Cheapest price on USPS for 1 lb letter is $9.70 after taxes. https://postcalc.usps.com/Calculator/MailServices?country=0&... That is 7x for a standard 1 lb envelope. The claims are not as egregious as you think. You are not the only one shipping goods around. There is a market that USPS s…

There is actually a law that requires FedEx and UPS to charge more for some parcels ( https://pe.usps.com/text/qsg300/Q608.htm ). It was created after Lysander Spooner created the American Letter Mail Company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company ) and delivered mail between large cities for 10% of the cost of the US post office. The argument is always that a private mail company would deliver…

I hadn’t heard Lysander Spooner’s name for a long time. He was a well known Abolitionist. Something else the federal government was bad at…
Post reply on HN