The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut at least 2,145 high-ranking Nasa employees with specialized skills or management responsibilities.
According to documents obtained by Politico, most employees leaving are in senior-level government ranks, depriving the agency of decades of experience as part of a push to slash the size of the federal government through early retirement, buyouts and deferred resignations.
The documents indicate that 1,818 of the staff currently serve in core mission areas, like science or human space flight, while the others work in mission support roles including information technology, or IT.
So, america… Ready to do anything yet?
Here’s the thing… if America really cared about NASA… I mean REALLY CARED… we would have been up in arms when they abdicated the shuttle program 14 years ago. That was, what, under Obama’s first term? 2011.
I was super interested in the shuttle stuff when I was a kid, from Enterprise forward, and was pretty disappointed with what they were doing with it.
“Oh, look, they’re sending up mice again… shouldn’t we be PAST that by now? We landed on the fricking MOON already, why are we sending up mice… AGAIN?”
Dude. The Space Shuttle program was initially meant to run for 10 years and 100 missions. It ultimately ran for 30 years and 135 missions,far surpassing every design goal. The tragedy is not that it was shut down, but that there was nothing to replace it when we did.
Yup. It just felt like we peaked with the Moon missions and have been steadily moving backwards ever since.
Same. I’m not even American and I was inspired by the goings on over the pond. Now, not so much.
Best I can do is a dictatorship.