How does the US government shutdown affect the ISS or other missions? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

A government shutdown comes with exceptions. Employees are deemed “excepted” - meaning they are permitted to continue to work - if their work immediately involves the safety of human life, the protection of property, or a few other reasons determined per agency.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a national asset worth billions of dollars and it is occupied by human beings. That means that continuing to operate the ISS does involve the safety of human life and does involve the protection of property.

So, the flight control teams will continue to show up on console (although a smaller than normal team may be used). But, the activities conducted on the ISS during that shutdown will be reviewed and those that are not time critical or safety critical may get delayed. For example, if the crew are scheduled to talk to a school, that activity may get canceled because it isn’t related to their safety or the protection of the vehicle and thus the ground support for that activity may not be allowed to come to work to support the activity.

The big impact is on the work being done for future ISS operations. For every crew that is onboard, there are additional crews on the ground training to replace them. For every flight controller on console, there are additional flight controllers training to replace them. For every experiment, spacewalk, or public affairs activity the crew will do in the future, there are people on the ground preparing that activity - doing the analysis, writing the procedures and flight rules, finding room in the timeline. For every cargo and crew exchange vehicle that comes to the ISS, there are people working months in advance to prepare that activity to happen. Almost all of those people will be deemed “not-excepted” and legally prohibited from engaging in their work.

Government shutdowns are a major pain in the ass for government agencies. Their schedules get blown to hell, their expensive facilities get unused, and massive amounts of productivity is destroyed.

Even the possibility of a government shutdown begins the burning of money. In 2013, every time the possibility of a shutdown arose, we would have to stop some of the work we were doing and start working on plans for how to handle the shutdown should it happen. There are hundreds of variables that have to be addressed each time. For an international program, like the ISS, there are a lot of people traveling to work with partners. We would have to look ahead and see how much of that would be severely impacted. For example, there could be half-a-dozen Japanese flight controllers coming to Houston to receive training and prepare operations products to prepare for a future Japanese cargo vehicle mission. That trip may have been on the schedule for months and suddenly we face the possibility that there would be no one to process their badging to allow them on-site and no one on-site to meet with them, should the shutdown kick in at midnight on Friday. Do we cancel the trip just in case? Do we not cancel it and have them travel for no reason? Do we hope the talk of shutdown will be just another bluff and everything will be fine?

That’s the big thing that they never talk about on the news. Whenever politicians start threatening a government shutdown, a lot of productive work has to stop so that people can do the unproductive work of preparing for a possible shutdown. In other words, whenever politicians start threatening a government shutdown, they start burning taxpayer money.

When that shutdown happened in 2013, it lasted for sixteen days. During those sixteen days, every student got behind in their certification flow, every procedure author got behind in their procedure writing, every software tester got behind in their software testing, every HR processing to bring in new hires got stalled, and expensive and highly in-demand facilities remained empty and had their schedules for the foreseeable future thrown into chaos.

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