The federal agency brain drain will have dire effects
y Gautam Mukunda / Bloomberg Opinion
In November 2023 and more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, started sending gibberish back to mission control. The signals received from Voyager are only one ten-quadrillionth of a watt strong, or about one twenty-billionth of the power of a digital watch. But those infinitesimal signals still transmit valuable scientific data. So the Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to debug 40-year-old code running on hardware designed before anyone on the current team was born, working across a distance so vast that each command takes 22.5 hours for a round trip, and do it all with systems that have just under 70 kilobytes of memory.
They pulled it off! Engineers sent a command that returned a full memory dump of the flight data system. They identified a single corrupted chip, realized no single location in the tiny memory could accommodate relocating the affected code, and devised a workaround that split the code into pieces and distributed it across functioning memory. It was a technical feat performed by peerless scientists and engineers, requiring both brilliance and institutional memory built over decades.
Here’s the problem: A new report shows more than 10,000 workers with doctorates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, have left federal service since 2017. The workforce of people who do this kind of work is rapidly dwindling. And the problems that will cause stretch far beyond a space probe at the very edge of the solar system.
When it comes to technical capacity, the government does two things the private sector can’t and won’t. First, it funds research that pays off 20 to 30 years in the future. The Defense Advanced Research projects Agency (DARPA) created the internet. National Institutes of Health (NIH) basic research enabled modern cancer treatments. NASA’s deep space missions answer questions that have no immediate commercial application. But the returns can be huge. Every one of the 12 key technologies underlying the iPhone component tracks back to government-funded research.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-the-federal-agency-brain-drain-will-have-dire-effects/
Who needs any of those fancy pants smart people when you got real 'Mericans?
