NASAWatch Is 28 Today

Keith’s note: NASAWatch turns 28 on 1 Apr 2024 (not a joke). It started as “NASA RIFWatch” on 1 Apr 1996 with this post “RIF at NASA In Summer 1997?”. The website was first hosted on a Mac Classic II on a 128 kbps ISDN line in a little condo in Reston, Virginia (see 20 Years Ago Today: The Seeds of NASAWatch). I sincerely doubt there will be many future birthdays for this website. Besides, Dan Goldin and I have a mutual admiration society thing going over on LinkedIn 😲. Meanwhile, here are a few things from those early days that are still online:

• Rogue Webmasters, Government Executive, 1 Oct 1996
• NASA’s Most Important Asset, Gerry Griffin, 31 December 1996
• Changes in Thinking At NASA November 29, 1996, PBS News Hour

Keith Cowing

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

One response to “NASAWatch Is 28 Today”

1. Alex Pline says:

   April 2, 2024 at 4:01 pm

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   Well about 30 years late, the reduction in force is happening naturally. I’ve called it the “silver wave”. I started in August 1988 the right side of the bimodal hump (with the left side being the Apollo era folks) and now they are all retiring. I looked at some HR stats before I retired 3 years ago and my assessment was that about half of the civil service workforce would retire by 2030. Since I am not on the inside anymore I have no idea how many are being hired, but my total wag is 1 for every 2 that retires which would stabilize at about 13k. And from what I last saw that’s probably a good thing as many of them will be from the human space flight side and frankly they are probably not really needed anymore with so much of that is done through purchase of services.

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