HOUSTON – Left with nothing but time to think after being furloughed due to the government shutdown, NASA employees in contact with the International Space Station are hoping the astronauts ended up figuring out that hull breach.
“It happened right before the government shut down,” said Mission Control analyst David Barnett. “You know how when you’re taking a test in school and time’s up and the teacher says, ‘Pencils down?’ It was just like that.”
“We were told to just immediately get up and leave the room.”
With the radio link to the ISS still working, exiting staffers at Mission Control could still hear the increasingly frantic astronauts asking for guidance with no answer.
“It didn’t occur to me until a few days later that nobody gave the astronauts a heads up,” Barnett said. “That hull breach sounded pretty serious.”
With the shutdown entering its 35th day, no one at NASA has an answer as to what is happening on the ISS. The doors to all NASA facilities have been locked and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
According to reports, the last thing Mission Control remembers is flight engineer Anne McClain explaining that the breach resembles three “claw-like slashes” across the hull and that Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko had accidentally inhaled the unidentified spores that had begun to collect around the rupture.
