U.S. President-elect Donald Trump greets Elon Musk as he arrives to attend a viewing of the launch of the sixth check flight of the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024 in Brownsville, Texas.
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NASA is requiring employees concerned in Artemis missions with contractors SpaceX and Blue Origin to keep on the job throughout the federal government shutdown, CNBC has realized.
Their work will probably be unpaid throughout the shutdown furlough, however employees ought to report their time, NASA Chief Human Capital Officer Kelly Elliott wrote in an e-mail to staffers on Wednesday. NASA employees are anticipated to obtain pay for his or her work after a reopening.
In a separate memo from Monday, NASA’s performing finance chief, Steve Shinn, laid out particulars about missions that will be supported throughout a shutdown.
NASA will proceed to assist “planned operations” of the International Space Station, in addition to any satellite tv for pc mission that “is in the operations phase,” Shinn wrote. He added that NASA would assist “Artemis operations during any funding lapse,” together with employees and contractors working on these tasks.
Shinn mentioned NASA would furlough round 15,000 individuals and require round 3,000 staffers to maintain working, half time or full time, throughout the shutdown.
The U.S. government’s shutdown started early Wednesday morning, setting the stage for the furlough of a whole lot of 1000’s of federal staff and the closing of plenty of key applications and providers. Government employees who’re thought of “essential,” like Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers and air site visitors controllers, are required to proceed working.
On its website, NASA describes Artemis as a marketing campaign to “send astronauts to explore the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and build the foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.” The memos this week did not title the contractors related to the assorted Artemis missions.
SpaceX, which is helmed by Elon Musk, gained main Artemis contracts with its Starship rocket, the tallest and strongest rocket ever launched. SpaceX has flown its full Starship rocket system on 10 check flights since April 2023, and plans to conduct one other on Oct. 13. Its prior Starship check flights included 5 failures, a partial failure and 4 successes.
Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was given one other Artemis contract, and work on its lunar lander will even proceed throughout the shutdown, NASA employees advised CNBC.
Artemis III, scheduled for 2027, would be the first to contain SpaceX instantly. The mission would land two NASA astronauts on the south polar area of the Moon.
Early Artemis missions concerned NASA working with Lockheed Martin and Boeing to design, construct, analyze after which purchase rockets that the company would personal outright. With Artemis II, which is scheduled for early 2026, NASA goals to ship 4 astronauts across the moon with out touchdown earlier than returning to Earth.
And the objective of Artemis IV+ HLS, with SpaceX, is to put astronauts into the primary lunar area station, serving to NASA and its companions to put together for an eventual human mission to Mars. Artemis V is predicted to contain Blue Origin.
Neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin has finalized the design of their lunar landers, and to this point have solely constructed check {hardware}.
Representatives of NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin did not instantly reply to a request for remark. An autoreply from NASA mentioned the company “is closed due to a lapse in government funding.”
“I am in furlough status; therefore, I am unable to respond to your message at this time,” mentioned the message from Cheryl Warner, information chief in NASA’s communications workplace.
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