So your spacecraft breaks down and your 8-day space jaunt turns into a 9-month orbital sleepover. Surely NASA backs up a Brinks truck full of hazard pay, right? Sorry!
Turns out our intrepid space explorers Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who just splashed down after their involuntarily extended vacation on the International Space Station, got paid exactly what any random bureaucrat gets for a Hampton Inn stay in Toledo — a whopping $5 per day in "incidentals." No overtime. No danger pay. Not even weekend rates for literally living at work.
As NASA spokesman Jimi Russell told the NY Times: "While in space, NASA astronauts are on official travel orders as federal employees."
The math works out to about $1,430 in extra pay for 286 days of floating around in a tin can while their bones slowly dissolve. And that's actually generous compared to astronaut Clayton Anderson's 2007 mission — that poor sap only got $1.20 per day. As Anderson later noted on social media: "Being an astronaut was amazing and his dream job, but it is a government job with government pay." And now that Musk is running the government, we can expect astronauts will soon have to start paying him for the privilege of risking their lives for the betterment of humankind.
At least Williams maintained her sense of humor about the whole thing. "This is my happy place," she told reporters, presumably while doing zero-gravity backflips with her measly per diem. "I love being up here in space. It's just fun, you know?"
Previously:
• I've been texting with an astronaut
• Musk calls pilot the R-word over astronaut delay — then delays SpaceX flight to ISS
• Astronaut describes what space smells like
