What do you do? You don’t have to tell me your job title, but what’s your job?
I write flight software for NASA. Flight software is basically any software that runs onboard a spacecraft, so it includes things like direct interfaces with motors and sensors, coordinating communications with ground stations, managing spacecraft operations, keeping an eye out for fault conditions, and a lot more. Flight software is used on everything from satellites the size of a Rubix cube to the tennis court-sized James Webb Space Telescope, so it tends to be fairly custom for each mission depending on their unique needs. It’s fairly different from typical Earth-based software because of the very different space environment it’s run in. Once you leave the protection of Earth’s magnetic field, there’s tons and tons of radiation that screws with electronics, so the radiation-hardened hardware we run flight software on is pretty specialized and much more limited than your typical laptop hardware, while also having much higher stakes!
It’s not like you can send tech support to a satellite if you accidentally brick it. So, a lot of my time is spent trying to come up with software solutions that are light, flexible, and as error-resistant as possible.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
I always liked space as a kid, but in the same way that lots of kids find space fascinating, there’s such a wide universe out there that we only know a very tiny fraction about! I didn’t really intend to go into the space field though, I studied computer science in college with no clear idea of where to go beyond that, but when I was looking for summer internships, someone forwarded me a link to apply for a NASA internship and I was just lucky enough to get hired and lucky enough that my manager at the time was an absolutely lovely person to work with.
The internship program I did was designed as a feeder program into the civil service; you do it in parallel with your degree and once you graduate, conversion was more or less guaranteed provided you met certain requirements. Sadly, due to the hiring freeze and preexisting issues with hiring caps, it’s now much, much harder for current interns to get full time jobs at the agency after graduating. This is a shame, since it’s hard enough to recruit talented software engineers who are willing to effectively halve their pay compared to what they could get in private industry.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
To me, NASA is the epitome of what the US, with all its power and wealth, can achieve in service to humanity and to our collective knowledge. The origin of life on this planet is one of the great questions to investigate, and in learning more about our universe, we can get closer to approximating a complete answer.
But in more practical terms, there’s so much that NASA does that’s deeply relevant to our lives now. There’s a ton of satellites that collect data on various aspects of weather (both Earth weather and space weather!), climate, land use, ocean health, and a ton of other metrics that help us understand both the human impact on the planet as well as the planet’s impacts on humans.
Although there’s certainly a large and active private space industry, these are the sorts of missions that industry doesn’t tend to do without federal funding incentivizing them, there’s just not a lot of money to be made here. Monitoring solar weather to see when coronal mass ejections from the sun might impact Earth is super important to keep our electrical grid from getting damaged, but no company is willing to front the millions of dollars that doing that would require.
I feel like this is the purpose of NASA and the government — to invest money in the public good rather than in simply generating profits. I’m just one person within the massive teams it takes to make space missions a success, but being able to contribute even a few lines of code to this work is an incredible feeling.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
As politicized as it might be, climate change is very, very real, and NASA satellites are necessary for collecting data on how this planet is changing and how it will impact all of us. We work closely with NOAA to get weather data available to the public (for free!), so that we know when and where a hurricane will hit, or a blizzard, or a wildfire, or any of a number of extreme weather events that, without proper preparation and advance notice, could kill countless numbers of people.
NASA also monitors asteroids and recently demonstrated the capability to push an asteroid off its course, which could potentially prevent an impact like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. The solar system is a very hostile environment and we are, in many senses, ants clinging to a tiny rock hurtling through the universe. The Earth protects us in so many ways, but it’s a fragile balance that we’ve disrupted, and there’s a lot we need to know about both our planet and about the universe at large, if we want to continue to thrive on this blue and green marble.
Even if some of the astrophysics missions we do have less of an obvious benefit for the public, I think they provide a multitude of indirect benefits in cultivating American engineering and scientific talent, inspiring young people with the vastness of outer space, and in simply learning more about the universe and our place in it.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
At the most basic level, all the chaos and uncertainty is just completely destroying morale, which doesn’t lead to a particularly efficient workforce. People work at NASA mostly out of a deep appreciation and love for the work, most of us could get paid so much more in private industry. But low morale tends to kill the passion, and it’s going to scare off the next generation of engineers and scientists from considering NASA as a place to work.
I’m worried about NASA’s long-term success if it can’t manage to retain or attract employees, and given the conflicts of interest with DOGE and SpaceX, that does almost seem to be the point. There’s clearly an interest in furthering the exploration missions, like Artemis, thanks to their high political profile, but I’m worried that with shrinking budgets, that will come at a cost to all the other missions, especially ones focused on climate and Earth science. NASA has had funding problems for years at this point; I’ve worked on countless projects that have gotten major budget cuts or full on canceled, and I don’t know how we’re going to survive as a leader in space science if this trend only gets worse. People seem to have some hope that due to Musk’s personal interest in space we might be able to escape the worst of this administration’s cuts, but I’m somewhat skeptical.
I think we’re in serious danger of worsening the long trend of privatizing the American space program and simply selling off NASA for parts. The US could lose all the best parts of our space research in favor of giving billionaires joy rides to space, and the decades of NASA’s dominance and prestige could be completely lost. I’m definitely more cynical than a lot of my coworkers, but I just don’t see how we come out of this without major institutional damage.
NASA’s had problems that way precede this administration (the 2024 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has a lot to say about the future of the agency), it turns out there’s only so much you can do with a budget that’s less than a single percent of the total national budget. Yet, despite serious problems, we’ve had some major successes too, with the James Webb Space Telescope, the return of samples from the asteroid Bennu, the first Artemis test flight, and more. Lone geniuses didn’t get us these successes, the hard work of many, many teams of people did, and if we give these people the funding and support needed to do their jobs, there’s so much more we could do.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 