It is a very established multi-national company that makes -among many other things- laser communications space terminals. It will be a bump-up in salary.

It is a relief that the uncertainty is over. I will also- if the government honors the agreement of the deferred resignation program- be paid my salary from NASA until January 9th. Of course I am not being paid now due to the shutdown. The good news is my former team was exempt from the shutdown, so they are still working and getting paid…

The shutdown is causing serious hardship- there are news stories of long lines at food banks… Trump’s threat to not give them back pay after the shutdown- in violation of the law would destroy a lot of families.

I am looking at ways to help…our neighbors across the street have kids, and both parents were in the NIH, and were cut…

This is destroying a lot of good and dedicated people.

As the old saying goes: “It ain’t over til the HR lady sings” so I won’t breathe a sigh of relief until all the paperwork is signed…

I would be working from home mostly, something no longer allowed for NASA employees for any period of time since DOGE changedthe rules in February, but I may be asked to travel as much as 25% of the time to their various subdivisions.

I will mostly be advising on space terminals instead of the ground terminal work I have been doing the past 6 years, but I have had space terminal experience at NASA.

So, fingers crossed, I have employment lined up and starting shortly.

I am in close contact with my colleagues that have remained at NASA, and the conditions continue to deteriorate, with insults piling on day after day… most my former team is exempt from the shutdown since they are involved with the upcoming Artemis II mission… and on my way out I was able to preserve the jobs of a couple of our contractors that were on the chopping block… Nearly all contractors are being fired)….I am staying in contact with the team and offering advice when I can… but as part of the deferred resignation I no longer have access to NASA EMAIL or facilities.

It has been painful to leave NASA, and it was more emotionally painful than I anticipated, but staying there watching the destruction from inside was taking a toll on my health, and it was just a matter of time before my anger would lead me to run afoul of the Hatch Act…

I will be getting an increase in salary, but would trade it in a second to be able to go back to having the freedom to research new technologies… instead of applying existing technology to new products….

This is the end of the US as a world leader in innovation, and I have talked to professionals around the world who are all horrified by what they see happening here. The EU,UK, and Australia all do innovative work, but they all viewed the USA as a truely massive Force in advancing technologies… some of the EU folks I interviewed with seemed to be in genuine shock at how quickly we self destructed…

I worry that I am staying in the US, I hope that doesn’t turn out to be a tragic mistake.

I do know that things here are probably going to get much worse…

I wish us all luck in the years to come.

Stay true to your principles, and decide NOW what lines you will not allow yourself to be forced to cross. If you wait to make those choices until you are under the boot-heel of the fascists, you will end up regretting your choices for the rest of your life.

I missed that, but it would definitely identify me…

I have been preaching the importance of NASA building a ground terminal network for ages…

The response from HQ is typically “We see no reason to build a ground terminal network because no missions have been proposed that need a ground terminal network to support optical communications…’

Of course NO MISSION that requires an optical ground terminal network would make it past the first round of reviews, let alone get to the HQ level because their entire budget would be blown away if they have to build a spacecraft AND a ground terminal network… so HQ will NEVER see such mission proposals.

That is the level of reasoning I have been fighting against… Just as NASA built a Radio dish network to enable communications support of missions, it MUST build an optical ground network if missions are to take advantage of the several orders of magnitude higher data rates enabled by optical com…

Until such a network is at least started, NO mission that requires those high data rates can possibly make it through the first round of reviews…

I consulted on the Black Hole Explorer mission- they need 200+Gigabit per second data rates from a distance of 10′s of thousands of kilometers- it is simply physically impossible for that data rate to be achieved by anything other than optical com… even then it was way beyond what has been demonstrated, but it was do-able…. but it needed optical ground terminals that haven’t been built yet.

They baselined my team’s ground terminal(LCOT) as the optimal solution in their engineering feasibility study.

sigh… I just typed a few pages extending on this and lost it….

This is just part of what he had to say:
…………………….

“It is really hard to grasp the extent of damage this administration has done to American science- if we were to now start an all-out program to undo the damage, it would take decades to recover.

The official launch date of ARTEMIS II was moved earlier, to the first quarter of 2026… at the same time NASA is randomly losing its most qualified people. We were told that if we didn’t quit we could be expected to be forced out (with NO possibility of getting the severance payment we are owed) or forced to work in areas we have no experience in, in order to fill the critical gaps left by the mass resignations.

There was no planning in the staff reduction, Goddard Space Flight Center was told to cut its people by 50%… they offered a deferred resignation program… “Agree to retire, and we will pay you through January 2026… otherwise risk being FORCED out with no severance and/or face more and more intolerable working conditions ”

Now, imagine you are an astronaut assigned to the ARTEMIS II mission, you know that it’s now scheduled to launch months sooner than was previously determined to be practical, and additionally the organization responsible for your success and safety is in complete chaos, with devastated morale and the loss of its most experienced people…How safe would YOU feel?

The scale of activities on the moon, be it human bases, or mining operations will be constrained by the communication data rates. China recognizes this, meanwhile NASA refuses to build the ground infrastructure to support high data rates from the moon. (We) have been stymied by bureaucracy unwilling to make the modest investment to revolutionize our communication technology. China has, in contrast, been investing heavily in this area. Unless we seriously invest in this communication technology, we are effectively handing over the moon and its resources to China. People working in optical (communications) engineering could be forced to work in thermal analysis, because this administration thinks it’s a simple matter to take a scientist or engineer that has decades of experience in one area and suddenly have them work in a totally unrelated field.

The result of this ultimatum is the most experienced people took the resignation, the ones that have reputations that make it easy to find new jobs despite the glut of engineers and scientists suddenly on the market.

The people left at NASA are all good at what they do, and I am in no way denigrating their abilities… but the people that have had time to make a name for themselves are the ones most likely to take the deferred resignation.

This is a disaster waiting to happen. I fervently hope we don’t lose any astronauts as a result.

I am fortunate to have many options… but the people who are just starting out, extremely talented people who simply haven’t had the time to get a reputation, they are in a desperate position. They either have to hope they are allowed to continue at NASA, or they have to face an extremely difficult job market…

So now NASA will be staffed by scared, demoralized, less experienced people that have to live in fear of being arbitrarily forced out, or being fired for not playing along with the politics/

I had planned to work at NASA as long as I was able, well past retirement age if I was up to it… now, my goal is to get the savings I need to retire comfortably and hopefully retire outside the US.

NASA scientists and engineers are being treated like lazy parasites, yet I and pretty much everyone I worked with put in countless hours of unpaid overtime because we believed in the importance of what we were doing. That will no longer be the case in a workforce that is demoralized and subjected to daily insults.

ARTEMIS II will almost certainly not launch by the new earlier date, and the safety of the crew is at risk.”

I’ve followed all of your instructions to a T.

Edit: I also left out this part because it could help to identify you-

“For the past 10 years I have been working to create an economically practical way to build a ground network to support massive data links to the moon…”

They have continued to do the work and, honestly, have managed to prove our design worked even better than I had anticipated…

Depending on who you wish to share it with, I am willing to rewrite… but the issues of my mother’s health are not pertinent to the impact. It simply was a personal aspect that I felt I owed my team to make it clear my decision was not in any way a reflection on their abilities to finish what we started.

Let me know the intended audience, and I can edit… but the personal family details won’t matter to random people… what SHOULD matter is the fact that the upcoming generation of scientists and engineers are being hurt, eliminated, ad demoralized… and that we are going to fall behind as a result.

One of my very last acts as a government employee was to write up a detailed analysis of China’s efforts in laser communications, and their emphasis on demonstrating Gbps data rates from the moon. The scale of activities on the moon, be it human bases, or mining operations will be constrained by the communication data rates. China recognizes this, meanwhile NASA refuses to build the ground infrastructure to support high data rates from the moon.

For the past 10 years I have been working to create an economically practical way to build a ground network to support massive data links to the moon, and have been stymied by bureaucracy unwilling to make the modest investment to revolutionize our communication technology. China has, in contrast, been investing heavily in this area. Unless we seriously invest in this communication technology, we are effectively handing over the moon and its resources to China.

I wrote a long report, on my own time, trying to alert anyone that would listen to this fact. I used openly available data, reports, and satellite imagery to show the extent of China’s optical ground terminal network… It was taken seriously by other governmental agencies, but not by NASA HQ…

We are losing the moon, and we have MAYBE a few years to pull back ahead… unfortunately we are gutting NASA and forcing the people that could help us compete to find work overseas…

Many expletives deleted from this post.