Although the U.S. government is shut down, NASA’s astronauts in space are still expected to show up for work every day.
As the shutdown continues into its second month, many federal employees are furloughed. Some, however, keep working (mostly without pay at the moment), because they’re considered critical to the continued operation of the nation’s functions, like the delivery of the mail.
Like all federal agencies, NASA has had to severely cut back on its day-to-day activities, as more than 15,000 NASA civil servants have been furloughed since Oct. 1. Only essential personnel deemed “necessary to protect life and property” are granted “excepted” status, according to NASA’s shutdown guidance. This includes astronauts in space and the technicians in mission control on the ground who support them.
For the most part, life aboard the ISS has continued as usual. The Expedition 73 crew currently occupying the space station have spent the past month conducting microgravity research and other experiments on their rotation and performing scheduled maintenance.
Of the seven astronauts currently living on the ISS, three are from the Russian space agency Roscosmos — Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov — and another is Japan’s Kimiya Yui, from Japan.
The remaining three are NASA’s Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke. Like their international counterparts, they’ve continued pulling their fair share of the chores in space. They just aren’t getting paid for it. Like every other federal employees forced to work during the shutdown, they will later receive backpay compensation for the time they’re currently putting in.
This past week, for example, Japan’s new HTV-X1 cargo spacecraft launched and rendezvoused with the ISS. All three NASA astronauts were on hand for that capture and were scheduled to help unload its cargo on Friday (Oct. 31).
One thing NASA’s astronauts aren’t doing is updating their social media feeds or other lines of public communication. Yui, though, has been filling that gap. Over the last month, he has posted stunning views of Earth that have included the HTV-X arrival, comet Lemon above the thin line of Earth’s atmosphere, and auroras from space.
今日は、少し違ったレンズでレモンさんを撮影してみました。ISSは地上から約400km上空ですので、地上がまだ夜でも、ISSでは既に陽が昇ってきます。彗星が太陽に近づく事で、ISSからの撮影機会がとても短くなってきました。HTV-X君のお迎えに集中する様にレモンさんが気を遣ってくれているのかも笑。 pic.twitter.com/4Ng456jOpZOctober 26, 2025
おはようございます！今日は、皆さんに特別見て頂きたい景色があり、仕事を早めに進めて、時間を作りつつ撮影しました。「きぼう」の窓から撮影した写真としては、歴代でも5本の指に入る絶景ではないでしょうか？自画自賛です笑(今日は、ISSが普段とは違う姿勢になったので窓の景色も変化しました) pic.twitter.com/a07yWavRbiOctober 14, 2025
NASA has also classified work on the agency’s Artemis moon program as critical and therefore continues work to launch the four-astronaut Artemis 2 mission around the moon as early as February 2026.
While work on Artemis has progressed, the continued shutdown may put a strain on agency resources as more and more employees are forced to work without pay. Delays could push the mission’s hopeful February target date further into the launch window, which extends through April.
And any delay to Artemis 2 could be bad news for the timeline of Artemis 3, which will be NASA’s first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo program in the 1970s. China, too, has aspirations of landing astronauts (or, as China calls them, “taikonauts”) on the moon, and NASA and U.S. lawmakers have repeatedly stressed the importance of winning this new “moon race.”
