What’s happening on the International Condo Station while the government is shut down?

The Sundarban

NASA astronauts continue their work on the International Condo Station no matter the ongoing government shutdown.
(Image credit rating: NASA)

Despite the truth that the U.S. government is shut down, NASA’s astronauts in space are silent anticipated to advise up for work each day.

As the shutdown continues into its second month, many federal staff are furloughed. Some, then once more, preserve working (largely without pay at the second), because they’re considered valuable to the continued operation of the nation’s functions, admire the provide of the mail.

Like all federal agencies, NASA has had to severely decrease assist on its day-to-day activities, as bigger than 15,000 NASA civil servants had been furloughed since Oct. 1. Only valuable personnel deemed “necessary to protect life and property” are granted “excepted” repute, in response to NASA’s shutdown guidance. This includes astronauts in space and the technicians in mission control on the ground who crimson meat up them.

For the most section, existence aboard the ISS has continued as traditional. The Expedition 73 crew currently occupying the space station contain spent the previous month conducting microgravity research and other experiments on their rotation and performing scheduled upkeep.

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 final three are NASA’s Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke. Like their international counterparts, they’ve continued pulling their beautiful share of the chores in space. They simply are no longer getting paid for it. Like every other federal staff forced to work sooner or later of the shutdown, they will later receive backpay compensation for the time they’re currently striking in.

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This previous week, as an illustration, Japan’s contemporary HTV-X1 cargo spacecraft launched and rendezvoused with the ISS. All three NASA astronauts were on hand for that seize and were scheduled to abet unload its cargo on Friday (Oct. 31).

One ingredient NASA’s astronauts are no longer doing is updating their social media feeds or other lines of public communication. Yui, although, has been filling that gap. Over the final month, he has posted elegant views of Earth which contain included the HTV-X arrival, comet Lemon above the skinny line of Earth’s ambiance, 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 additionally categorized work on the agency’s Artemis moon program as valuable and therefore continues work to start the four-astronaut Artemis 2 mission around the moon as early as February 2026.

While work on Artemis has progressed, the continued shutdown would possibly additionally establish a stress on agency belongings as an increasing form of staff are forced to work without pay. Delays would possibly well push the mission’s hopeful February purpose date further into the start window, which extends via April.

And any delay to Artemis 2 would possibly additionally very neatly be substandard information for the timeline of Artemis 3, that will most definitely be NASA’s first mission to land astronauts on the lunar ground since the finish 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 contain once more and once more wired the importance of winning this contemporary “moon race.”

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Josh Dinner is the Team Author for Spaceflight at Condo.com. He is a writer and photographer with a passion for science and space exploration, and has been working the space beat since 2016. Josh has lined the evolution of NASA’s industrial spaceflight partnerships and crewed missions from the Condo Flit, in addition to NASA science missions and more. He additionally enjoys constructing 1:144-scale mannequin rockets and human-flown spacecraft. Get dangle of some of Josh’s start images on Instagram and his online web page, and prepare him on X, the save he largely posts in haiku.

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