NASA juggles work force as it shifts focus to Mars
Some employees will lose jobs, some will be reassigned

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

As much as I hate seeing people lose jobs, its actually a positive thing that they're actively moving to realign themselves as such. Bureaucratic inertia is the cause of insane levels of wasted labor in other departments of government.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

Could well be. But, NASA's brain drain will cost them more than they bargained for in terms of experience and judgment. We saw the same thing at the stand-down of the moon missions.

True enough, but with money getting tight and even cost minimal projects like Voyager being threatened, you have to make sacrifices. President Bush seems determined to turn NASA into an orbital version of the Department of Transportation, so NASA's focus may well take that course with experts in other disciplines going private or to universities. Plus it remains to be seen where the cuts/transfers are made, so we don't know from which talent pools the worst losses will be taken.

If anything, this drain of talent from NASA may be an indicator of just how important private spaceflight needs to become. I said in the Privatization of Space thread on ATM, that pure science missions would probably be better served and financed at the university level than federal. Probably cheaper to boot.

The difference between post-Apollo and post-ISS/STS is that these people being decanted from the agency have options in the space sciences field to explore. Depending on where the cuts get made, this is the time for some of these upstarts to do a little recruiting. It may be a step down from what some are used to, but it doesn't have to be a total wash.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I don't see much good coming from this--with any amount of spin. Te Pres promised to boost space spending--and now we see cuts while this obscene war continues.

My "gut feeling" is that when it's all done, NASA will be even more top-heavy than before. Cuts to the people actually doing the work - no cuts to "management". resulting in an even more bloated beauracracy, doing even less "real science"!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I'm hoping they'll be picked up by the likes of Burt Rutan. Maybe it'll help speed up the era of private spaceflight when NASA personnel hit the "free market".

Hey look! A flying, omnivorous, even-toed ungulate member of the family Suidae.

Shuttle Grounding May Cause Layoffs

The grounding of the space shuttle program following NASA's problems with insulating foam raised fears of layoffs at the Louisiana plant where the foam is applied. The plant supplies about 2,000 jobs, many of them high-paying, to the economically depressed city of Michoud, on the edge of New Orleans. "It's very depressing. We're concerned about our jobs, our livelihoods," said Mike Berger, an inspector for the foam application process

What I'm seeing from the peanut gallery is the systematic dismantling of NASA. This is depressing.

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. o O ( "Quote that 'Blazing Saddles' scene at Mike, and the BAUTer gets it! " )

Venus will freeze over by the time that happens. Rutan's toys are worse than worthless--they are distractions from REAL spacecraft.

As much as I get a little aggravated at publiusr's oft-times monotonous sounding "HLLV" rants, I agree with him here. I think that when the Rutans and Bransons of the world start scaling up SSO and trying to build orbital spacecraft, they are going to find out it's ORDERS and ORDERS of magnitude more complicated and expensive than they think. They still may be able to pull it off cheaper than NASA, but it will come with a formidable learning curve, in my opinion.

CJSF

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Two years ago moved from my town
I was looking up past the city lights
But the city lights got in my way

See the constellation ride across the sky
No cigar, no lady on his arm
Just a guy made of dots and lines

-from "See The Constellation"
by They Might Be Giants

Everyone's on tenterhooks at Goddard. No one wants to commit to anything until the new budget comes out and trickles down to our level.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Mission unthinkable: Disbanding NASA
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...25245.900.html
Take Operation Offset, a proposal devised by a group of Republican legislators to cut government programmes and free up funds to pay for damage done by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Conspicuous on the chopping block is NASA's moon and Mars initiative.

Rash promises meet harsh budget realities
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/news/...n/12955107.htm
federal deficit, headed downward before Katrina struck, is about to soar. What can Washington do?
The likelihood of "stealth tax increases" was discussed...

there won't be any "tax increases".
there will, however, be a bunch of new "fees" imposed on the public.

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Where is Punching Aldrin when you need him. The folks on capitol hill need to be laid out cold.

Right here.

NASA has never had a strong focus on science, and has always been an organization with a focus on spacecraft engineering, mission design, and of course manned (or "peopled" to remain politically correct) spaceflight. I know that at JPL we had data from the Pioneer spacecraft that reamined unseen by anyone, right up to the time they tried to rescue the data from aging magnetic tapes. That was about 10 years or so ago, when the tapes had already deteriorated to the point that many lost their oxide as the tape passed over the read head.

Mission budgets always include some money for science data analysis, but it is not unusual for the science budget to be raided to make the mission fly (flying the mission is always the #1 focus of NASA, from my experience). So it often happens that the data are gathered, and then stored somewhere until some grad student shows up with money to look at it.


Not hardly. This kind of re-alignment happens all the time, I've seen them come & go, and am not a bit bothered. I started out in the JPL Radio Astronomy Group in 1981. As long as a Republican was in the White House, I was an astronomer. When Clinton got in, I switched to EOS and the Earth Sciences. After Bush got elected in 2000, the NASA money for Earth went south, and I'm back in the astronomy business. If a Democrat gets in next time around, maybe I'll go back to Earth Science. Every President re-aligns NASA in his own image. Bush is on a Mars kick, so NASA is too. Whoever replaces Bush will do the same thing, and once again, NASA will take a new direction.

The real budget pressure comes from a mix of the war in Iraq, and the unprecedented cost of recovering from hurrican damage, mostly from Katrina. At JPL it will cost ~300 jobs all tolled, mostly from the engineering side (scientists with outside funding are not affected). It's a temporary deal, once this dip is handled in a few years, things will look up again, until they look down again, and so on ad-infinitum.

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Don't try this at home - We're what you call "professionals" - MythBusters.

I think this is a good thing.... think about it, people want to keep their jobs right? So they going to work harder... In this next year we may see more of a development in space flight then ever before....I don't think that this will lessen the progress at all, but boost it greatly.

I can follow your thinking, but in my profession, what I see is the marketable people start sharpening thier skills for the next job. The only ones that start scrambling are the ones that you would want to let go anyway.

All this makes me feel better about not getting that job at Glenn back in the 80s.

The aerospace industry in general is pretty volatile. Anybody working in it is used to bouncing around from company to company, from project to project. In the case of working for NASA (or for NASA money), remember that congress controls the budget, and they also micromanage the budget, choosing which projects NASA will work on, and limiting (or expanding) NASA's capabilities with those projects. So, quite literally, you really never know if you will have a job next year. One of the reason's I have managed to stay at JPL for 25 years is that I've learned to be versatile, so I can work on almost any project. I know a lot of people, and I keep up with where the money goes, so I can follow it. That's a lot more "work" than a "regular job", but it's worth it, because it's a lot of fun to work here!

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Don't try this at home - We're what you call "professionals" - MythBusters.