4000 gone: Inside NASA's brain drain | Hacker News Reader

4000 gone: Inside NASA's brain drain

planetary.org

85 pointsawnird18 comments

What kills me is that it's not even saving that much money.

The average salary for a government employee is $67k. Round it up to $100k, and multiply by 2 for the usual overhead. That means that removing 4,000 salaries saves us $800,000,000 a year. Or about .046% of the deficit.

(That's the amount of the shortfall. It's .012% of the budget.)

Employees aren't the driving factor in the cost of the government. A lot of the money goes out the door, in the form of entitlement payments, grants to states, and contracts. If you want to cut the budget seriously, you have to cancel programs, not just the individuals who manage them.

The article says that these 4,000 employees are 20% of the agency. Applying that to my estimate, that means you could fire everybody, and save $4 billion per year. That would still leave $21 billion in NASA's budget.

Canceling that, too, would not even be a rounding error in our $6.66 trillion budget and $1.27 trillion deficit.

It attracts a lot of attention, and removes the much-reviled government employees that they've spent decades demonizing. But it doesn't solve any of the budget problems, and doesn't even pretend to. So we're losing a key element of American prestige, and getting basically nothing in return.

“Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing" - Oscar Wilde

That's a great quote!

Your math makes sense, but it was never about the money.

There's a thriving community of aerospace startups in the US right now that are eager to snatch these NASA folks up. It won't be the right move for all of them, and it's unfortunate to get displaced from a comfortable, prestigious job like that, but I strongly believe a lot of these people will go on to do great things in industry, and potentially have a far greater impact on aerospace than they ever could at NASA.

Not saying I agree with the cuts, just pointing out there may be a silver lining.

Generally agree with the sentiment, just they're probably worried about the 2026 proposal, that talked about $18.8 billion for FY 2026. Both the Senate the House did not agree with the White House proposal, yet the threat that $6 billion was going to vanish causes a lot of issues. Now they're in limbo with shutdown. And FY 2025 was a full-year CR. So not a lot of belief in a functioning House / Senate.

Difficult to plan the usual when the White House is proposing -$6B and the House / Senate are not functioning. And they all got emails paraphrased as "get out while you can."

Minor nitpick, the budget amount really seems to depend where you look. Per USASpending.gov, supposedly "the official open data source of federal spending information", FY 2025 Obligated is $9.4 trillion as of August 30th. FY 2024 was $9.7 trillion. FY 2019 was when it was $6.6B. [1]

However, your numbers are closer to the numbers from the Treasury that say $7 trillion was spent so far this year. [2] Treasury actually mentions USASpending by name and notes "Values displayed are outlays, which is money that is actually paid out by the government. Other sources, such as USAspending, may display spending as obligations, which is money that is promised to be paid, but may not yet be delivered."

Differences between them:

  Social Security                    23%        16.30%
  Medicare                           14%        18.30%
  Health                             14%        11.60%
  Net Interest                       14%        12.30%
  National Defense                   13%        15.90%
  Income Security                    10%        6.70%
  Veterans Benefits and Services      5%        4%
  Transportation                      2%        1.70%
  Natural Resources and Environment   1%        1.20%
  Administration of Justice           1%        1%
  General Government                            4.2%
  Education, Employment, Training               1.9%
    and Social Services
  Other                               2%        4.90%
    SUM                              99%        100.00%

Social Security looks like way larger percent paid than percent promised. Total dollars on Treasury is $100 billion higher than USAspending. Medicare looks like a lot has been promised, yet to be delivered. National Defense looks quite a bit more promised than delivered. Income Security is also more paid than promised (~another $100 billion) General Government and EETSS was not included in Treasury (?). They're at 99%, no room for another 6%.

[1] https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

FTA, Michael Garcia, ex Hubble Project Scientist:

>> What surprised me was that initial budget request, which basically said, we, America, are never going to launch another space telescope. We're going to turn off 95% of the ones we have in orbit. We are getting out of that business, we don't want to ask those questions anymore.

So this hits on a few key points. It’s not just that this budget request is tossing out perfectly good technology maturation plans for getting the next large space telescope built (https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/habitable-wor...), among other goals.

It’s also (see the second sentence) that the budget request will result in de-orbiting perfectly-functioning operational missions like OCO-2 (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov/), and deactivating perfectly functional instruments onboard ISS that are returning data continuously right now. It’s a multi-billion dollar self-own. There’s no sense in it. (https://www.planetary.org/charts/fy-2026-active-mission-canc...).

For many of these missions, having a long-term continuous dataset is super-valuable —- obviously so for a CO2 monitoring mission, or missions monitoring land surface temperature, vegetation/forests, etc. They are built, launched, and returning data. It’s all gravy at this point.

As nearby commenters note, this has nothing to do with cost savings. It’s more like a mix of pure spite, owning some libs in Maryland and California, and an object lesson in who the boss is.

A sort of naïve dream... NASA is not the budge, but the brains and lives put on it. It is not American. If you all can have the budget to survive with a check payment work, invest you dream and life on open sourcing the knowledge. Dont let it be an Alexandria Library, certainly ESA, Roscosmos and other future players can inherit your life efforts now or in coming centuries.

> Roscosmos and other future players can inherit your life efforts now or in coming centuries.

Roscosmos? Good joke sir. It's on brink of collapse due to sanctions, management and kremlin's priorities. A ghost from the past.

gone yes, but where?, space x, china?

Anecdotally, I work with a JPL alumni (not current layoff batch) in the autonomous driving industry

I thought the aerospace industry in particular are careful about who they employ, some of it mandated by law that they won't give trade secrets away to other countries.

I've hired a lot of them into medtech, surgical robotics, etc.

> I've hired a lot of them into medtech

Somehow, my brain read that as `nerdtech`

The shoe fits, my company name is Nerdian

Heavy disagree with the point of this article. Their concern is that departures result in institutional memory loss. I think that rapid iteration >> institutional knowledge. Unfortunately NASA is at a point where private companies have to develop hardware independent of NASA and then sell it to NASA because their requirements are too dumb. I wanted to work at NASA/JPL for years but all the people I’ve met there have become paper subject matter experts by making 10 satellites and rovers while people at Nvidia, Apple and SpaceX ship millions of products and get to see hardware fail at scale. From what I have heard, NASA and legacy milaero contractors are where you go to get your new ideas crushed by incumbents. I think science is ripe for disruption where we privatize the process of doing science and publish the process and results publicly. NASA keeps much of their institutional knowledge to themselves from what I have experienced, I work in aerospace, and none of their data is readily available to me. Also, years ago JPL was criticized for significant delays in programs due to their policies. https://spacenews.com/psyche-review-finds-institutional-prob...

Do you really think these cuts are done with the intent of positive effects on the space and earth science enterprise?

The model was that NASA did stuff that was pathfinding, typically in response to science objectives, and that commercial applications would follow. By design, it’s not mass production.

This works for Earth science stuff like land surface monitoring, methane monitoring, land subsidence, groundwater monitoring, sea level rise, etc. NASA developed these remote sensing technologies that have made it into commercial applications.

So there is a synergy between NASA science and commercial space. It does not have to be either/or.

I genuinely believe NASA funding should be reduced to 0% then ramped back up to eliminate the old blood and introduce people with new ideas and ways of thinking. NASA is also incredibly inefficient with their quantity of centers and conflicting specifications. People forget that NASA has been so mismanaged since Apollo that they designed the deadliest spacecraft ever - the Space Shuttle. If there’s a synergy between NASA and industry I don’t know about it and I don’t benefit from it! All the models and theories I use in my daily life were pioneered by IBM, DoW/AF and universities. I can’t actually think of a single model I use that came from NASA. Near-future I see Lunar Gateway as a debacle, distraction and money pit, likewise with SLS. In recent memory incumbent milaero companies flubbed Orion heat shield tiles (NASA could have prevented this if they actually had institutional know of this old technology), Starliner thrusters and SLS solid rocket boosters. They also binned nuclear thermal propulsion.

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