UPDATE AT 9:30 A.M.: The protest is being held just outside the gates of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is located at 2101 NASA Pkwy.

NASA employees have endured three government shutdowns in the past year, each time halting their groundbreaking work as political skirmishes in Washington, D.C., are hashed out.

The first two came in the beginning months of 2018, but they were short: more of an annoyance, really.

But the current closure — which started Dec. 22 and has no end in sight — has been beyond frustrating for many, not just because of money lost but because of work delays. It’s been enough of a hindrance that some experts worry it could drive NASA engineers to the fast-growing space projects in the private sector.

“How long will the best and the brightest want to work at an agency that continues to get callously tossed into political churn?” Casey Dreier, chief advocate and senior space policy adviser for The Planetary Society, wrote in December. The society is a nonprofit involved in space research.

Nationwide, the shutdown has put 96 percent of the space agency federal workforce — or 16,700 employees — out of work as President Donald Trump holds firm on his demand that Congress fund a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. In Houston, NASA employees upset about the shutdown are expected to protest at noon Tuesday outside the gates of Johnson Space Center, 2101 NASA Parkway.

And unlike in decades past, NASA engineers and researchers have viable private options where they can continue their work.

SpaceX and Boeing each are in the process of building spacecraft to carry humans to the International Space Station; commercial companies have been tapped by NASA to construct unmanned probes destined for the moon; and there’s talk of heavy commercial involvement in the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, a mini-space station Trump wants to build to orbit the moon.

“If this frequency of shutdowns continues, I fear that we will see more and more NASA employees ask themselves why they put up with such needless disruptions and leave for jobs [in] the private sector,” Dreier said.

‘Shutdown pro’

Holly Griffith, a safety engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, now jokingly calls herself a “shutdown pro.”

“All you can do is laugh about it at this point,” said Griffith, who works in life support systems for Orion — the spacecraft being built to take humans back to the moon for the first time since 1972.

Griffith was part of the group of furloughed workers at Johnson for each of the three shutdowns in 2018. This one has been the longest.

She and the other 2,800 or so workers at Johnson who are furloughed have no idea when they will return to work. And on Friday they missed their first paycheck since the beginning of the shutdown .

Griffith said she isn’t thinking of leaving NASA — her husband isn’t on the federal payroll, they don’t have kids and they have some savings. They also can borrow money from family members if push comes to shove.

But Keith Cowing, editor of NASA Watch, a website devoted to space news, suspects the duration and frequency of the shutdowns soon will plant seeds of doubt in peoples’ minds about working at the history-making space agency.

“A lot of people take a salary cut to work at NASA,” Cowing said. “But when you can’t pay the bills and you have to do chores for your landlord for rent, there’s nothing worse than having your dream job taken away from you because of this.”

A decision like that is a heartbreaking one, Cowing said, but it’s one that the next shutdown could force people to make.

“There’s nothing worse than thinking, ‘My god, I got to NASA and I can’t afford to stay here,’” he said.

Further delays

But it’s not just furloughed employees’ wallets that are suffering — their work does, as well. NASA projects operate under deadline and budget constraints, so any interruptions have negative impacts.

This is a very real fear for Griffith, who works on Orion. The program already has experienced significant delays in its quest to take humans back to the moon for the first time since the Apollo era in the 1960s and early 1970s.

“We have international partners, like (the European Space Agency), so I’m worried about … how much work they can do without NASA?” Griffith said. “Orion is already delayed and it’s like, ‘What will this do in terms of schedule? Will we have to go in front of Congress and explain why we need more money?’”

The first Orion spacecraft mission, which will not have a crew, was supposed to fly in 2017. It was delayed until the mid-2020s, but then a NASA’s Office of Inspector General report last year found that it likely wouldn’t make that launch date either: cost and scheduling problems continue to plague the rocket that will send it into space.

That means the second Orion mission — being built to send humans around the moon no later than 2023 — could also experience delays.

So far, Griffith hasn’t heard if Orion’s schedule will be impacted by the shutdown, but that doesn’t put an end to her anxiety.

“I haven’t heard word of anything. We’re not allowed to check our email or use our government computers or anything like that,” she said. “If I see anything, it’s on Twitter or it’s on the news.”

NASA has, for the most part, remained mum about any negative impacts the shutdown may have on its projects.

Earlier this week, the space agency announced that the main camera on Hubble Space Telescope, its 29-year-old observatory, stopped working because of a “hardware problem.” The issue is being investigated, officials have said, but the majority of NASA employees aren’t allowed to work right now.

NASA’s SOFIA telescope — which is mounted to a Boeing 747 aircraft and is used to observe transient events that happen over oceans — isn’t operating because of the shutdown, according to SpaceNews.com, and space agency personnel are not allowed to speak at conferences, such as the American Astronomical Society held recently in Seattle.

“Missions will be delayed inevitably because of this,” Cowing said. “If this happens again this year, we’ll start seeing people scratching their heads like, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’”

Career considerations

Commercial companies aren’t immune, however, to the whims of political officials.

SpaceX — one of two commercial companies tasked by NASA to build spacecraft to take humans to the International Space Station — was forced to delay the launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket during the January 2018 shutdown. And this week, the company delayed the launch of its first, uncrewed test flight by about a month.

Though NASA officials said the delay was the result of additional testing and reviews, the current shutdown certainly didn’t help matters.

“SpaceX is assessing any impacts of the partial government shutdown to our commercial launches,” Eva Behrend, a SpaceX spokeswoman, said in a statement Thursday. “NASA continues to support Commercial Crew Program operations as we move toward our first demonstration mission of Crew Dragon next month.”

The company was hit with another blow last week when officials announced it would be laying off 10 percent of about 6,000 employees, saying it needed to be “leaner.”

Cowing said the recent government shutdown casts doubts on the feasibility of a career at NASA, which had been the end goal for kids like him who dreamed of exploring space.

“It’s already hard to get people because of competition from the private sector,” Cowing said. “It doesn’t take a lot of shutdowns to convince you working for NASA is not the wisest thing to do for your kid’s college education.”