Yes! Agreed! Earthbound observatories in second line are in a constant struggle of acquiring proper funding. Which means, that they are operated by people with passion - for the science. The unfortunate side effect is, that everything that isn't operations and academia takes second place again. Employing someone dedicated to just cybersecurity isn't perceived as a priority - after all, 'why would anyone hack an observatory?'

That is the kind of fallacy that can only be avoided if you already had an expert in house, unfortunately. I have been working with researchers, too, and I got the general impression that the appreciation for and crossover of ideas between departments has a lot of room for improvement. So that could also be a factor.

[–] freeman@lemmy.pub 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean. My dream job would be to run infra/ops for a place like this, or really anything at nasa.

My skill set is generally running infrastructure with the basics of security (I did netsec for a bank for a while).

But I wouldn’t be able to be paid my salary and benefits, even though I take a much smaller stake than I could working at non profits. It would be even less in these fields.

Even for a place like nasa the jobs are really hard to come by and the hiring is no where near straightforward. And there’s a lot of regulatory capture that has contractors handling a lot of it with grift and generally poorer benefits as a result.

[–] Agamemnon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

That is identical to my observations from a data science perspective.