Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

NASA has 18k permanent employees which I thought was surprisingly low. https://www.nasa.gov/about/index.html


Government typically has a whole ton of contractors, sometimes twice the number of FTEs, but a cursory Google indicates NASA has only about 1000 contractors. Interesting, but the contract money probably goes to acquisition and commercial partnerships (https://www.osbp.nasa.gov/docs/top20_2020_contractors-TAGGED...).

That said, their FY22 budget is “only” $30B, which is less than Elon just paid for all of Twitter. This number usually surprises people but a lot of other space-related work is within the USAF and NRO budgets.


About a decade ago I was working on websites for NASA and just the contractor I worked for had over a thousand contractors. They were far from the largest, too.


That’s because recent focus on the space program is nonexistent. It’s been getting on life support since the moon walk.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: