A term hire is still a federal employee, just with the uncertainty of your term being renewed or extended. I’m not really sure what they are hoping to get out of this- even if they were hiring at the highest step, this is trying to hire an engineer from the space industry with significant experience for 200k. That’s total comp because you don’t get options as a federal employee and the retirement matching for a short term is insignificant.
It really seems like they haven’t done anything to change the value proposition of being a government employee, they just made a cool name and website.
But the _qualified_ people who are willing to work for the government in the space industry would already be familiar with their options. Anyone who wasn’t already willing to work for NASA probably isn’t swayed by the fancy name and website. As soon as they get into the actual paperwork process and talk to someone they’ll realize it’s not that different from having applied through the regular process.
It seems to me like they are trying to find good people without having to struggle to fire bad ones. They get automatic churn because of the term and can offer the good employees permanent roles.
Given how difficult it can be to fire government employees, I think that's a good strategy.
Not really sure there's any benefit here to the applicant. Perhaps NASA is just trying to capture a bit of the Artemis 2 hype for recruiting.