NASA Research Centers and NSF funded centers

[Simfish]

So... NASA has 10 research facilities:

"Research and test facilities: Ames Research Center · Dryden Flight Research Center · Glenn Research Center · Goddard Institute for Space Studies · Goddard Space Flight Center · Independent Verification and Validation Facility · Jet Propulsion Laboratory · Langley Research Center · Scientific Balloon Flight Facility · Stennis Space Center"

And the NSF seems to have a lot of funded centers. I only realized that after reading - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6032/905.full - it seems that the NSF is ending funding for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). But the NSF has many more research centers.

Anyways - how does employment in these places compare to academic employment? Are there more restrictions or fewer restrictions on the type of research people do in them? The one thing I notice in them is that researchers tend to be less open than professors on university faculty (for example, very few researchers at these places seem to have personal homepages).

 

[eri]

While NASA might hire you on as a civil servant for some advertised salary, the truth is that you have to raise that entire salary yourself by applying for research grants (many of them through NASA). They don't pay you if you don't get grants. And you often have to support your entire research team (grad students, postdocs, contractors) the same way. I'm doing a postdoc, and my boss spends a great deal of time not doing science but instead writing grant proposals. But also a lot of science, since he needs to keep getting these proposals.

As far as compared to academia, well, you need a security badge just to get in the gate so you can't easily invite people to visit (especially if they're foreigners). They require you submit papers to them for internal review before submitting to journals to make sure you're not giving away government secrets. All equipment is tightly controlled (if they buy you a laptop for your research, you have to constantly carry around documentation for it). While I haven't seen restrictions on research topics, you do have to continue funding yourself so you can't go off on a tangent that doesn't provide anything useful for 5 years like you can in academia after getting tenure. While you don't have to teach, many scientists at NASA centers and other labs have students and postdocs doing research with them from colleges in and out of the US.