While the majority of federal employees are furloughed, awaiting a funding bill to be passed by Congress, NASA teams and contractors are still working towards getting Artemis 2 ready to launch next year. However, that can’t last forever, and an industry official just shared that some parts may begin to grind to a halt.

Kirk Shireman, Vice President of human space exploration and Orion program manager at Lockheed Martin, talked on a panel last week at the von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. While work on Artemis 2 continues, Shireman shares that some contractors downstream may begin making it hard to justify unpaid work on the program.

While large contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Jacobs, and Aerojet Rocketdyne have the fat wallets to afford unpaid work through the shutdown, smaller subcontractors do not. These second-tier issues could be the reason the government shutdown will be one of many reasons for Artemis 2’s launch date to begin to slip.

Artemis is a large program, as with most government programs, and employs contractors from all 50 states. Most of these contractors are small, providing valves, screws, electronics, or other specialized components for the SLS rocket, Orion spacecraft, or another part of the program.

These parts all flow to larger “prime” contractors like Lockheed Martin or Boeing that are tasked with the final assembly of their respective components.

If the smaller guys stop working, the larger ones will eventually have to as well.

That doesn’t mean work has halted on Artemis 2 since the shutdown began. Work on Artemis falls under the exception due to its national importance. So, NASA employees tasked with Artemis duties continue their work unpaid, with the expectation that they will receive back pay for it.

During the shutdown, NASA hit a major milestone for Artemis 2, fully completing the stacking of the SLS rocket that will launch the crew of four around the Moon since the Apollo Program. It’s an important and historic moment, and while there is still a lot of work left to be done to get Artemis 2 off the ground, there is now a possibility that some of that work will have to be postponed.