Government Shutdown

So the Federal government is in shutdown mode after Congress fails to pass a budget to keep the government working.  What does this mean for NASA's Mission Control for the ISS?

Lots of empty parking spots at Johnson Space Center.  Of the 18,100+ civil servants who work for NASA only 600 are still on the job (This is across all the space centers from Washington DC to Houston to Huntsville to Ames to JPL).  The other 17,500 are furloughed.  That is 96.685% or roughly 97% of NASA civil servants that are not working.  This is not counting the many contractors who contracts are in flux.

Some contractors like the one I work for have funding for a few more weeks, many do not.  Outside of the people staffing MCC and some critical operations people like the folks trying to figure out if its still safe to do an EVA in an EMU (See the earlier post about drowning in space), there is no one here but the security guards and the folks who maintain the buildings (through most of the buildings have their A/C turned off, water turned off, and lights turned off).

Here is still what is going on:

• The International Space Station Mission Control Center will still be continued to be manned to support the 2 Americans, 3 Russians, and 1 Italian in space
• Robotic missions that are already in operation such as the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn or the Mars rovers.  But this is to gather data only, no analysis of the data will be performed
• NASA's satellites will still function but their data analysis will be put on hold

One of the biggest threats of the shutdown is the postponement of NASA's MAVEN mission to Mars by 26 months because of orbital alignment between Earth and Mars.  The spacecraft is scheduled to launch on November 18th and a lot of launch prep needs to happen.

Some good news for MAVEN is that on Oct. 3rd, the MAVEN team got the GO to keep working through the shutdown to make its launch window because it has been deemed essential to ensuring future communication with current NASA robots on Mars, such as the Curiosity rover.  See story HERE.  Not to mention that we (US Citizens tax payers) only paid $650 million dollars to build the spacecraft, we might as well launch it so it can do its job.

So the ISS MCC at JSC is where most of those 600 civil servants are located, and its a ghost town here.

Also if you were wondering all of NASA's media has gone dark, no Twitter, no Facebook, no NASAtv, no NASA website.

This all happened on NASA's 55th anniversary.  Kind of sad, right?

I did my best to leave all my political feelings out of this but do not be surprised if a rant ends up on here at some point.