What's happening on the International Space Station while the government is shut down?

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.

Thankfully for the NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), their wellbeing falls into the category of "protection of life and safety," which NASA is tasked with maintaining while the government's doors are closed.

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.

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."