NASA is requiring employees involved in Artemis missions with contractors SpaceX and Blue Origin to stay on the job during the government shutdown. According to an email sent to staffers, their work will be unpaid during the furlough, but employees are expected to record their time and will receive pay after a reopening. NASA Chief Human Capital Officer Kelly Elliott wrote that while she understood the difficulty this would pose, it was a necessary step for “mission-essential personnel.”
In a separate memo, NASA’s acting finance chief, Steve Shinn, laid out details about missions that would be supported during a shutdown. Shinn wrote that NASA would continue to support “planned operations” of the International Space Station and any satellite mission that “is in the operations phase.” He added that NASA would also support “Artemis operations during any funding lapse,” including employees and contractors working on those projects. Shinn said NASA would furlough around 15,000 people and require around 3,000 staffers to keep working. The U.S. government shutdown began early Wednesday morning, setting the stage for the furlough of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
The Role of Contractors in Artemis Missions
The memos this week did not name the specific contractors associated with the various Artemis missions. However, SpaceX, which is led by Elon Musk, has major Artemis contracts for its Starship rocket, the tallest and most powerful ever launched. SpaceX has flown its full Starship rocket system on 10 test flights since April 2023, with four of them being successful. Artemis III, which is scheduled for 2027, would be the first mission to involve SpaceX directly, landing two NASA astronauts on the south polar region of the Moon.
Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was given another Artemis contract, and work on its lunar lander will also continue during the shutdown, according to NASA employees. The goal of Artemis IV+ HLS, with SpaceX, is to put astronauts into the first lunar space station to prepare for an eventual human mission to Mars. Artemis V is expected to involve Blue Origin. Early Artemis missions involved NASA working with contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing to build rockets that the agency would own.
What The Author Thinks
This decision to keep “essential” employees on the job, while necessary for the continuity of critical missions like Artemis, highlights the unseen costs of a government shutdown. By requiring employees to work without pay, the government is placing a significant financial and emotional burden on its workforce. This is particularly problematic for programs that rely on long-term planning and morale, where the uncertainty of a shutdown can lead to a loss of talent and a disruption of progress. The fact that these essential employees are forced to work for free is a sobering reminder of the human cost of political gridlock, and it raises questions about the long-term sustainability of using shutdowns as a tool for political negotiation.
Featured image credit: Heute
For more stories like it, click the +Follow button at the top of this page to follow us.