Inside NASA’s race to staff the moon missions

When the Artemis II rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on April 1, Jerry Traster was standing on the ground in Florida watching it rise.

He isn’t an astronaut. He isn’t an engineer. He’s the Director of the Human Capital Office at NASA's Glenn Research Center. And as that rocket climbed into the sky, he had a moment of self-reflection.

"I'm not the one pushing the button at the end of the countdown," Traster said. "But I helped hire a lot of people who helped launch that rocket. And that's exciting."

It gives him chills, he admits, even now, as he continues to rewatch the video on his phone every few days.

Clearly, Traster loves his job.

And it’s easy to see why. That moment captures something HR leaders rarely get to experience so vividly, seeing the direct connection between the people you hire and the outcomes they make possible. For Traster and his team at Glenn, that connection runs all the way to the moon.

Hiring for missions that can’t fail

Glenn sits at the technical heart of Artemis. The center has been instrumental in nearly every NASA space exploration mission, providing expertise across propulsion, power, physics, materials, and cryogenic fluid management, and manages several mission-essential projects and hardware development efforts for Artemis.

Hundreds of Glenn employees contributed to Artemis II directly. Their work on the Orion spacecraft's power systems and the European Service Module, the spacecraft's primary powerhouse, was fundamental to whether four astronauts made it around the moon and back safely.

With Artemis III scheduled for late 2027, Artemis IV targeting the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo in 2028, and annual lunar missions planned beyond that, the pressure on Traster's office is only intensifying.

"There's a bias towards action right now," Traster said, referring to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's directive to accelerate the mission schedule. "That means we need to move people around quicker, hire people quicker, and make sure we're hiring the right people."

For an HR office he describes as "small but mighty," delivering on that mandate is a significant undertaking.

Rebuilding after the cuts

The pressure to hire fast comes in part from the significant workforce losses NASA absorbed in 2025. Traster does not shy away from the reality.

"It's not a secret. We did have quite a bit of downsizing last year across the federal government, including NASA. We had a lot of knowledge walk out the door," he said.

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NASA has a knowledge transfer program in place, but as Traster acknowledges, some things cannot simply be passed on.

"I've seen people with 60 years here. You can't replace that level of knowledge,” he said.

The deeper challenge now is rebuilding fast enough to keep pace with a mission schedule that waits for no one.

To help close those gaps, NASA launched NASA Force in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management earlier this year. The initiative is designed to recruit top engineers and technologists on focused one- to two-year term appointments, moving faster than traditional federal hiring typically allows.

Fortunately, interest hasn’t been a problem. According to Traster, a single posting for an aerospace engineer drew more than 2,400 applications in just a few days.

"There's definitely a renewed interest in working for NASA right now," Traster said.

The talent race behind Artemis

Artemis spans a decade of increasingly complex missions, and staffing it requires thinking well beyond the next launch. Traster's team uses an internal platform called Talent Marketplace, where NASA centers post rotational and detail opportunities so employees can broaden their skills across different mission areas.

"That cross-pollination between different projects and mission directorates benefits the employee and the organization," he said. "It's one of the ways we make sure we have the right skill sets as our missions continue to evolve."

Alongside that, NASA is actively insourcing roles that had been contracted out during periods of hiring freezes. Mission control functions at Johnson Space Center, for example, were largely contracted positions. The new administrator's position is that those are core NASA functions that belong in-house. Add that to the existing hiring surge and the pressure on Traster's office is considerable.

"You're not talking hundreds of positions," he said. "You're talking potentially thousands."

Investing in the next generation

At Glenn, Traster said roughly 35 to 40% of hires over the past decade have been early career, within three years of graduation. That is not an accident. While many employers have pulled back from graduate hiring in recent years, NASA has held its course, and Traster expects that proportion to grow under the current administration.

"With the path our administrator has outlined, I would anticipate that we are going to continue to hire a lot of early career individuals," he said. "He has a lot of passion for early careers and internships."

NASA's Pathways internship program remains the primary pipeline for that talent, bringing in students pursuing bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and PhDs into roles across the agency's research centers. The program is designed to build the institutional knowledge NASA will need for missions that are still years away, developing talent long before the work demands it.

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There is a practical logic to it. With an accelerating Artemis schedule and a wave of insourcing underway, NASA needs people who can grow into the work over time, not just fill a seat today. Early career hires, developed deliberately and given room to build expertise, are central to that longer-term thinking.

"One of the things we continue to do is develop our workforce so that we're ready to go when that work starts to pick up," Traster said. "We have a system called Talent Marketplace where all the different NASA centers can post detail opportunities or rotational opportunities. If someone's looking to broaden their expertise, they can go apply and spend six months doing something a little different."

That cross-pollination between projects and mission directorates, he says, benefits everyone. The employee gains breadth. The organization gains flexibility. And NASA gains a workforce that is ready to move when the mission demands it.

From intern to NASA leader

For Traster, none of this is abstract. He is, in many ways, a product of the very pipeline he now oversees. He grew up in Cleveland, applied for an internship at Glenn in 2007, and was selected into the same HR office he now leads. Nearly two decades later, he has not left.

As a kid visiting his grandfather in Florida, he remembers hearing the sonic boom of a Space Shuttle launch. He did not know then that he would one day stand on that same stretch of coastline watching humans head back toward the moon. He did not know he would spend his career helping to build the workforce that made it possible.

"It really raised me," he said of NASA. "Not just professionally, but personally."

That sense of personal investment runs through everything Traster describes, from the urgency of rebuilding after a difficult year, to the deliberateness of the early career pipeline, to the bold ambition of the missions still ahead. At NASA, workforce strategy is not a back-office function. It is mission-critical, in the most literal sense of the phrase.

When that rocket lifted off in April, Traster watched it rise with the particular satisfaction of someone who understands exactly what it took to get there. Not the engineering. Not the physics. The people.

“I watched that rocket and I was like, man, I played a part in that."