Nasa's Artemis workers build moon rockets whilst wondering how to pay rent
America races to maintain its lunar schedule as thousands labour without paycheques, exposing how political dysfunction reaches into supposedly protected programmes
At Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians mate the Orion spacecraft to its rocket booster. In Alabama, engineers test propulsion systems. In Texas, flight controllers rehearse emergency procedures. The Artemis II mission—America's return to the moon after half a century—marches towards its February 2026 launch date.
None of these workers are being paid.
Nearly four weeks into a government shutdown, about 15,000 of Nasa's 18,000 civil servants sit at home, furloughed. Yet thousands more continue reporting for duty on Artemis, deemed "excepted activity" and a "presidential priority". Here lies a peculiar contradiction: the American political system can authorise complex spacecraft development but cannot authorise payment for that work. Workers assemble rockets whilst wondering how to pay rent.
Kirk Shireman, who manages the Orion programme at Lockheed Martin, chose his words carefully when speaking at an aerospace conference last week. The shutdown initially created a "nuisance", he said. Then came the warning: "I do think we're rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact."
What concerns him are "secondary impacts"—the cascading effects when you ask thousands of skilled workers to perform demanding technical work whilst creating uncertainty about their next paycheque. For a preview of where this leads, Shireman suggested, look at air traffic control.
The arithmetic of who suffers
Federal employees are guaranteed back pay by a 2019 law. They'll be made whole eventually, even if mortgages go unpaid and savings drain in the interim.
Federal contractors get nothing.
Workers doing identical tasks—sometimes at adjacent desks—operate under fundamentally different rules. The Nasa employee testing an Orion heat shield knows payment will arrive. The contractor performing the same test has no such guarantee. During past shutdowns, contractors rarely received back pay. The work simply became uncompensated labour.
Todd McCracken, president of the National Small Business Association, states the scale plainly: "There are hundreds of thousands of small business contractors. Those people probably aren't going to get paid. They have not gotten paid in the past."
Small firms operate on profit margins around 8 per cent. Payment delays measured in weeks jeopardise payroll. For machine shops fabricating specialised components, software firms writing mission-critical code, the financial cushion doesn't exist. Shireman's warning about infrastructure focused here: "Small companies, here in Huntsville and across the nation, are not getting paid, and ultimately they're not going to be able to continue working."
The distinction is deliberate. Large aerospace contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing treat government IOUs as bankable instruments. They have credit lines to absorb delays. Small suppliers do not. When a machine shop in Ohio stops work—not from technical problems but exhausted cash reserves—spacecraft assembly in Florida stalls. Artemis II depends on thousands of coordinated tasks. Each depends on suppliers continuing despite uncertainty.
Even "fully funded" contracts face obstacles. Aron Beezley, who leads the government contracts practice at Bradley law firm, explains the mechanics: invoices require government employees to review and process them. "If nobody is home to process the invoice, it can be challenging to get paid, which can create cash flow issues, particularly for small businesses."
The preview playing out overhead
More than 10,800 air traffic controllers manage America's skies. All are deemed essential, required to work during the shutdown. On 28 October, they received their first zero-dollar paycheques—two weeks of unpaid labour made official.
Since 1 October, aviation authorities have logged at least 264 staffing shortages. Controllers already worked mandatory six-day weeks and ten-hour shifts before the shutdown. Now they're calling in sick at increased rates. Some drive for Uber between shifts. Others deliver food for DoorDash. They need to pay rent.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy stated the implications without euphemism at a news conference this week: "As this shutdown continues and air traffic controllers are not paid for the vital work that they do, that leads to an unnecessary distraction, and they cannot be 100 per cent focused on their jobs, which makes this system less safe. Every day that this shutdown continues, tomorrow, we'll be less safe than today."
Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, described the impossible position: "I'm going to work right now, and I'm thinking about, how do I pay my rent? Rent is due in a few days, how to put food on the table, how to put gas in my car just to show up to work."
Air traffic controllers manage aircraft separation in three-dimensional space. Aerospace engineers design and test spacecraft systems where failures kill astronauts. Both require absolute focus. Both now depend on workers mentally present despite mounting financial stress.
The "essential work" designation, intended to protect critical operations, creates worse conditions than shutting down. If Artemis II work stopped, workers would avoid accumulating unpaid labour whilst facing bills. The "essential" label forces continuation under degraded conditions—precision tasks performed under circumstances least conducive to doing them well.
When damage appears months later
Shutdown damage to technical programmes doesn't manifest as immediate missed deadlines. Costs accumulate through secondary effects that become visible months later, after the causal connection has been obscured.
The 2018-2019 shutdown—35 days, the longest in American history—cost Nasa $244 million and 1,541 lost worker-years. Scientific missions delayed by a full year. Equipment maintenance deferred, causing $1 million in facility damage. Employees left the agency, taking expertise that couldn't easily be replaced. The Congressional Budget Office found that shutdown reduced GDP by $11 billion, including $3 billion never recovered.
Shutdowns consistently cost more than keeping government open. The mechanisms designed to protect taxpayer money—furloughing workers, halting contracts—cost more through lost productivity, contractor uncertainty premiums, and guaranteed back pay for hours not worked.
For Artemis II, the current impacts won't be immediately visible. Spacecraft assembly continues. Tests proceed. Training happens. Beneath that surface, secondary effects accumulate. Small suppliers burn cash reserves. Experienced workers field recruitment calls from SpaceX and Blue Origin—companies without funding interruptions. Equipment maintenance gets deferred. Documentation falls behind.
When funding resumes, Nasa will assess what was lost. Some effects will be quantifiable. Others emerge only later, when a delayed component causes schedule slips or departed expertise proves irreplaceable.
What the gap reveals
Why would talented engineers choose Nasa when politics can arbitrarily stop their paycheques whilst demanding they still report for work? SpaceX doesn't have this problem. Neither does Blue Origin. Nor do international space agencies—Europe's ESA, Canada's CSA, Japan's JAXA—which operate under more stable funding.
Each shutdown demonstrates to prospective employees that political dysfunction reaches into personal finances regardless of performance or mission importance. The message is unmistakable: your financial security is subordinate to congressional budget negotiations unrelated to space exploration.
But the recruitment challenge merely symptomises something deeper. When America can authorise work but cannot authorise payment, it exposes a mismatch between political mechanisms and technical programme requirements.
Government shutdowns emerged from a 1980 interpretation of appropriations law. The mechanism assumes work can cleanly stop and restart—like closing a national park for days. You cannot partially build a spacecraft. Artemis II requires integrated work across thousands of specialists in multiple states. Stopping and restarting doesn't save money; it costs more through schedule disruption and lost productivity. Continuing work without payment creates financial stress that undermines precision and drives away talent.
The mechanism was designed for routine operations. It fails when governing long-term technical programmes where "maintaining schedule" and "treating workers fairly" become incompatible.
Shireman's warning about "coming" impacts reflects understanding born from experience. Large aerospace contractors know what delayed payments mean for small suppliers. They've watched past shutdowns demonstrate the pattern. The immediate crisis is workers missing paycheques. The lasting damage is accumulated stress, departed expertise, and schedule disruptions that emerge months later labelled "technical challenges" rather than political dysfunction.
America may yet launch Artemis II in February 2026. The spacecraft is real. The engineering is sound. Workers remain skilled and, so far, still reporting despite unpaid labour. But the gap between declaring space exploration a national priority and creating conditions that undermine the people performing that work continues widening.
Whether secondary effects become visible before the shutdown ends may determine not just the mission's timeline, but whether highly skilled workers decide ambitious public programmes are worth the personal financial risk. The countdown to the moon continues. The question is who'll still be there when it reaches zero.
