How does astronaut pay work?

35 AoA said:
Interesting topic, and man, SpaceX does pay a more appropriate rate, IMHO.

Side topic, or point of order......there are places in the civilian aerospace industry where you can be salaried, while also filling out a daily/weekly time card. Because that is what Bill Sr. wanted in 1916, before they had invented salaried employees. Not sure if Starliner will fly with just NASA crew, but if there are company astronauts on it, you can bet they will be filling out a timecard. Yes, it is electronic. I presume they have the internet in space, but I wonder how connectivity to the company VPN works up there. @nauga knows what the hell I'm talking about :)
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Bill Sr. ???
 
TCABM said:
I supervised civilians while in active duty and was a time card approver. I could make any time card look like I wanted it to.
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I'm not sure what you mean by this. I assume you're not saying you would routinely change your employees' time cards to reflect differently than what they actually worked.
 
Mxfarm said:
considering a new career path? ;)
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Hah! No, just curious. I do actually have a friend who was on the ISS for 6 months a few years ago. But he was from the military, so he's salaried.

I actually find it very interesting talking to people about how they're paid, if they're willing to discuss it with me. It's fascinating to learn about all the different ways people get paid (hourly, salary, commission, by the job, bonuses, etc), and saddening to learn about the different policies employers have come up with that aren't in the best interest of their employees.
 
luvflyin said:
Bill Sr. ???
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Boeing

WRT salary and timecards, they are not mutually exclusive. If you work multiple unrelated projects with separate budgets, you need some way to account for time spent on these projects to properly manage each budget. I was salaried for my entire career, and the only time I *didn't* have to fill in a timecard was at the very end when I was working for companies that had a single purpose. In these cases each individual was funded entirely by their department, so budget could be tracked by name instead of charge number.

Nauga,
from the Crimson Permanent Assurance
 
nauga said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_E._Boeing

WRT salary and timecards, they are not mutually exclusive. If you work multiple unrelated projects with separate budgets, you need some way to account for time spent on these projects to properly manage each budget. I was salaried for my entire career, and the only time I *didn't* have to fill in a timecard was at the very end when I was working for companies that had a single purpose. In these cases each individual was funded entirely by their department, so budget could be tracked by name instead of charge number.

Nauga,
from the Crimson Permanent Assurance
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Along those lines, in my current organization I actually have to fill out two of what you could call "time cards". One is my Time and Attendance, which is what shows strictly how many hours I worked each week, any overtime, comp time, or leave. The other "time card" is "Labor Distribution Reporting" on which we have to specify how many hours went to each type of job function. There are thousands of different codes but any given employee will typically have somewhere around 5-10 that they use regularly - some of them are pretty general like "training" or "travel", and some are for specific functions of the organization.

While I have to fill out both each pay period, the first one (the T&A, yes, jokes please) is the one that's important to me. The LDR is allegedly important for the accountants and such to do studies and reports on how we're spending our time.

Other government agencies I have been in did not have two, they only had the T&A (regardless of their term for it).
 
RussR said:
I'm not sure what you mean by this. I assume you're not saying you would routinely change your employees' time cards to reflect differently than what they actually worked.
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No, I did not do it willy-nilly. But as a timekeeper I have when required for a correction or employee’s inability to do so. .
 
RussR said:
Along those lines, in my current organization I actually have to fill out two of what you could call "time cards". One is my Time and Attendance, which is what shows strictly how many hours I worked each week, any overtime, comp time, or leave. The other "time card" is "Labor Distribution Reporting" on which we have to specify how many hours went to each type of job function. There are thousands of different codes but any given employee will typically have somewhere around 5-10 that they use regularly - some of them are pretty general like "training" or "travel", and some are for specific functions of the organization.

While I have to fill out both each pay period, the first one (the T&A, yes, jokes please) is the one that's important to me. The LDR is allegedly important for the accountants and such to do studies and reports on how we're spending our time.

Other government agencies I have been in did not have two, they only had the T&A (regardless of their term for it).
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I did that T&A thing to. Had to record exactly when arriving to work and exactly when leaving. Now, how many hours actually 'worked' in between was another story.:fingerwag:
 
At my last job I and most of my coworkers were salaried. They insisted that we fill out time reports twice a month. Everyone agreed that it was a stupid and pointless exercise, and had been for years, and that the data provided was as meaningless as it was inaccurate. None of that mattered, it was still required.
 
nauga said:
WRT salary and timecards, they are not mutually exclusive. If you work multiple unrelated projects with separate budgets, you need some way to account for time spent on these projects to properly manage each budget.
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Yup. When I started with Boeing, the secretaries did the time cards. Never even knew about them. About the 1990, Boeing made the engineers responsible for their cards. These were physical cards. Eventually, they converted to the online Employee Timekeeping System (ETS).

With ETS, you were required to keep your time to 6-minute resolution (0.1 hour) and update it whenever you changed tasks. So if you were working a job, and got a phone call about another job that took ten minutes, you had to access ETS to reflect two changes of task over that ten minute interval. Don't know anyone who actually DID it that way, but we were continually warned to make sure our entries were accurate, and that we might be liable to fraud charges for errors.

I was technically salaried, though I did get paid for overtime work...standard rate plus $5 (later raised to $7.50).

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
With ETS, you were required to keep your time to 6-minute resolution (0.1 hour) and update it whenever you changed tasks. So if you were working a job, and got a phone call about another job that took ten minutes, you had to access ETS to reflect two changes of task over that ten minute interval. Don't know anyone who actually DID it that way, but we were continually warned to make sure our entries were accurate, and that we might be liable to fraud charges for errors.
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Ours was supposed to work that way as well. For some reason they didn't like it when I logged admin time every week for time card management. I was told not to do that. All of my time had to be charged to projects.
 
wanttaja said:
Yup. When I started with Boeing, the secretaries did the time cards. Never even knew about them. About the 1990, Boeing made the engineers responsible for their cards. These were physical cards. Eventually, they converted to the online Employee Timekeeping System (ETS).

With ETS, you were required to keep your time to 6-minute resolution (0.1 hour) and update it whenever you changed tasks. So if you were working a job, and got a phone call about another job that took ten minutes, you had to access ETS to reflect two changes of task over that ten minute interval. Don't know anyone who actually DID it that way, but we were continually warned to make sure our entries were accurate, and that we might be liable to fraud charges for errors.

I was technically salaried, though I did get paid for overtime work...standard rate plus $5 (later raised to $7.50).

Ron Wanttaja
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Same here when I worked at Boeing. As you, when switching between projects I was expected to track it in the ETS. But rather than spend the time going outside the scif, logging in, tracking the time, then logging out, back to the scif....I was spending almost as much time doing the back&forth. So I kept track in a notebook and at the end of the day, on my way out, did the ETS stuff. Got dinged by HR for "duplicate time keeping". Fortunately, my boss and his boss explained to the bean counters how stupid the process was and how much time was being wasted. Of course the "process" was required since we were on a Federal contract. So we just didn't tell anyone after that.
 
AlleyCat67 said:
My former boss was an ex-astronaut. As I recall pay was not nearly as good as you might think – GS 13 or 14 depending on experience and education. GS 15 is normally reserved for supervisory positions, and astronauts are not necessarily supervisory.
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I would have assumed the pay was "basic", but the perks of being able to walk into any bar and announce that you're an astronaut, then promptly walk out with 6 arms worth of talent -- makes up for it.
 
Wonder if a senior military astronaut would make more. They are also receiving allowances for off base housing and food for them and family. Plus they should receive flight pay (not to be confused with hazardous duty pay). The flight pay is probably less than $250/month. And probably doesn't apply once on the space station where they are no longer flying or it is more like a permanent station or base.
 
wanttaja said:
Yup. When I started with Boeing, the secretaries did the time cards. Never even knew about them. About the 1990, Boeing made the engineers responsible for their cards. These were physical cards. Eventually, they converted to the online Employee Timekeeping System (ETS).

With ETS, you were required to keep your time to 6-minute resolution (0.1 hour) and update it whenever you changed tasks. So if you were working a job, and got a phone call about another job that took ten minutes, you had to access ETS to reflect two changes of task over that ten minute interval. Don't know anyone who actually DID it that way, but we were continually warned to make sure our entries were accurate, and that we might be liable to fraud charges for errors.

I was technically salaried, though I did get paid for overtime work...standard rate plus $5 (later raised to $7.50).

Ron Wanttaja
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Lockheed was pretty similar. We used something called STARS ("Salaried Time and Attendance Reporting" IIRC), but as long as we made a daily entry no one got upset. I don't think anyone tried to track it throughout the day. Some jobs were paid by multiple customers and we'd have a matrix giving the percentages to divvy up an hour across contracts.

Typical federal contractor stuff, reporting was to be to the nearest 0.1 hour. That's pretty silly for engineering design work; it's not like we were bolting together widgets on an assembly line. Many of the metrics and timekeeping rules were really targeted at well-defined labor tasks and don't work well for things like R&D, but we were forced to use them. I truly came to hate Earned Value metrics.

Historical labor hours were to be used in estimating future contracts, but the contracts were usually so dissimilar that it didn't work very well. Designing a servo amplifier for a ground-based missile launcher is entirely different from designing one for a nuclear ICBM, with wildly different environments, reliability requirements, redundancies, fault detection, etc., so design hours never compared very well. Estimated required taking some historical number and applying a "complexity factor" that was mostly a judgement call.

I wasn't paid for OT, but lower salary grades were paid standard rate for hours over 45 when OT was authorized. The first 5 hours beyond 40 was considered "casual" and not paid, theory being that things like a phone call or office visitor happen at close of business once in a while and shouldn't trip an OT circumstance. In reality, most of us who didn't get paid for our OT were putting in 50 or 60 hour weeks pretty regularly anyway.
 
wanttaja said:
Yup. When I started with Boeing, the secretaries did the time cards. Never even knew about them. About the 1990, Boeing made the engineers responsible for their cards. These were physical cards. Eventually, they converted to the online Employee Timekeeping System (ETS).

With ETS, you were required to keep your time to 6-minute resolution (0.1 hour) and update it whenever you changed tasks. So if you were working a job, and got a phone call about another job that took ten minutes, you had to access ETS to reflect two changes of task over that ten minute interval. Don't know anyone who actually DID it that way, but we were continually warned to make sure our entries were accurate, and that we might be liable to fraud charges for errors.

I was technically salaried, though I did get paid for overtime work...standard rate plus $5 (later raised to $7.50).

Ron Wanttaja
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Yessir, I can attest that none of this has changed (aside from the pre-ETS stuff) to this day. I think Nauga's explanation is more accurate than mine. As an aside, have any of you former employees worked on the Commercial side, and if so, is it the same as well? I was kind of under the impression that those of us on mil contracts did it very differently than PNW (non-MacAir), who may be just logging overhead?
 
If on flight status or made their gates the military guys get flight pay…it’s was harder for the Army guys to get time time for a while but when the local guard unit had a couple of Blackhawk’s and OH-58s they could but that’s units pure AH-64 now. AF and Navy pilots have the T-38 to play with. Fly pay charts are a little weird they max at about 12-14 years and then decline after 20 depending on rank and service branch. I think it’s 1K a month max these days…
 
Warlock said:
Fly pay charts are a little weird they max at about 12-14 years and then decline after 20 depending on rank and service branch. I think it’s 1K a month max these days…
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At least in the Navy, back in the early 80's I think, they changed "Flight pay" to "Aviation Career Incentive Pay" so basically they figure at 14 if you've met you're gates for orders characterized a "Duties involving flying" then they figure they have you for a career.
 
The pay is great, but the cost of room and board will break you.
 
Pugs said:
At least in the Navy, back in the early 80's I think, they changed "Flight pay" to "Aviation Career Incentive Pay" so basically they figure at 14 if you've met you're gates for orders characterized a "Duties involving flying" then they figure they have you for a career.
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Exactly. In the Air Force too, it's always just been an incentive pay to improve retention. Once you're at a point in your career where they feel they don't need to incentivize you to get you to stay in, there's no point in paying you extra to do so.
 
Warlock said:
If on flight status or made their gates the military guys get flight pay…it’s was harder for the Army guys to get time time for a while but when the local guard unit had a couple of Blackhawk’s and OH-58s they could but that’s units pure AH-64 now. AF and Navy pilots have the T-38 to play with. Fly pay charts are a little weird they max at about 12-14 years and then decline after 20 depending on rank and service branch. I think it’s 1K a month max these days…
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Years ago at North Island they had a U-11. Piper Apache. The old farts used that to get their flight skins. The HMFIC at Lemoore, a Captain, was out 'playing' in an A-4 one day. Got behind the plane and effed up the pattern. He went screamin' in for the break after being told not to. Screwed things up when ACLS locked on to him while looking for another plane doing an ACLS Approach.
 
Warlock said:
If on flight status or made their gates the military guys get flight pay… Fly pay charts are a little weird they max at about 12-14 years and then decline after 20 depending on rank and service branch. I think it’s 1K a month max these days…
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Similar scenario for us in the USN. We have two scales for AvIP (aka flight pay). The baseline scale tops out at years 14-22 at $840/mo. The second scale is applied if you are hitting your administrative career milestones, aka aviation department head, CO/O-5 command, major command (or I would presume Astronaut duty in this case is considered equivalent). That one peaks starting at years 10-22, at $1000/mo. In short, all Navy astronauts should be making $1000/mo until they go beyond 22 years of service. It then tapers off pretty rapidly.
 
Ok….so my home town is famous for a number of reasons……seriously, it was mentioned in The Karate Kid, the Sopranos, Seinfeld, a famous actress went to my high school, as did an actual astronaut. I reached out to said astronaut the first time when I tried to one-up @EvilEagle by asking if he’d take the monkey into outer space. Needless to say he never replied and most likely put a restraining order against me. But man, how effing cool would that have been?!? Anyways, I figured I’d try him again when this question came up and after a couple of weeks he replied. Here’s what he has to say:

“The short answer is that astronauts get paid as salaried civil servants except for those still on active military duty who get paid the same as any military officer. There is no hazard pay for spaceflight but you do get to fill out a travel form and claim reimbursement for 'incidentals' which amounts to about $2 per day...”

So I don’t know if that answered your question, but that’s straight from a real life astronaut. I also tried to get him to join this chat but he might have literally anything better to do.
 
The pay's not great but you make it up in mileage.
 
This is super secret and I should not be divulging this...





...but they beam up cash to the astronauts from a super secret location in the mountains not far from me...
 
eman1200 said:
Ok….so my home town is famous for a number of reasons……seriously, it was mentioned in The Karate Kid, the Sopranos, Seinfeld, a famous actress went to my high school, as did an actual astronaut. I reached out to said astronaut the first time when I tried to one-up @EvilEagle by asking if he’d take the monkey into outer space. Needless to say he never replied and most likely put a restraining order against me. But man, how effing cool would that have been?!? Anyways, I figured I’d try him again when this question came up and after a couple of weeks he replied. Here’s what he has to say:

“The short answer is that astronauts get paid as salaried civil servants except for those still on active military duty who get paid the same as any military officer. There is no hazard pay for spaceflight but you do get to fill out a travel form and claim reimbursement for 'incidentals' which amounts to about $2 per day...”

So I don’t know if that answered your question, but that’s straight from a real life astronaut. I also tried to get him to join this chat but he might have literally anything better to do.
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Now that you have his attention, ask him about the monkey again! :)
 
eman1200 said:
Ok….so my home town is famous for a number of reasons……seriously, it was mentioned in The Karate Kid, the Sopranos, Seinfeld, a famous actress went to my high school, as did an actual astronaut. I reached out to said astronaut the first time when I tried to one-up @EvilEagle by asking if he’d take the monkey into outer space. Needless to say he never replied and most likely put a restraining order against me. But man, how effing cool would that have been?!? Anyways, I figured I’d try him again when this question came up and after a couple of weeks he replied. Here’s what he has to say:

“The short answer is that astronauts get paid as salaried civil servants except for those still on active military duty who get paid the same as any military officer. There is no hazard pay for spaceflight but you do get to fill out a travel form and claim reimbursement for 'incidentals' which amounts to about $2 per day...”

So I don’t know if that answered your question, but that’s straight from a real life astronaut. I also tried to get him to join this chat but he might have literally anything better to do.
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Awesome! Thanks for asking. The thing is, though, I'm not looking for the short answer, although the information about no hazard pay is interesting. I'm interested in more of the "long" answer. Was your friend a civilian astronaut or military?

He mentions they get paid as "salaried" civil servants but in actuality, most civil servants are not salaried, they are hourly. I am a pilot for a federal agency, and if the mission takes 10 hours that day, I get paid 2 hours of overtime (or I could take it as comp time if I wanted). If I work on a Sunday or holiday or at night, I get additional pay for that too.

I would hope astronauts operate under similar pay rules, and if they don't I'd be curious of the history of "why not", when they are clearly not working 8 hour days.

But you asked an actual astronaut, and that's pretty cool. Thanks.
 
RussR said:
Awesome! Thanks for asking. The thing is, though, I'm not looking for the short answer, although the information about no hazard pay is interesting. I'm interested in more of the "long" answer. Was your friend a civilian astronaut or military?

He mentions they get paid as "salaried" civil servants but in actuality, most civil servants are not salaried, they are hourly. I am a pilot for a federal agency, and if the mission takes 10 hours that day, I get paid 2 hours of overtime (or I could take it as comp time if I wanted). If I work on a Sunday or holiday or at night, I get additional pay for that too.

I would hope astronauts operate under similar pay rules, and if they don't I'd be curious of the history of "why not", when they are clearly not working 8 hour days.

But you asked an actual astronaut, and that's pretty cool. Thanks.
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I just assumed astronauts were treated like SESs..i.e. no time cards.
 
Brad Z said:
I just assumed astronauts were treated like SESs..i.e. no time cards.
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As some others earlier in the thread reported, they are apparently just in "normal" pay grades like GS-12 through 14. If that is true, then I would expect that the "normal" OPM or OPM-like pay rules apply. But I could also see that not being the case.

However, it also would seem odd to me if I, as a line pilot, make more than an astronaut.
 
It’s not just the incidentals. You also get bragging rights, and those aren’t taxable.









Yet.
 
RussR said:
As some others earlier in the thread reported, they are apparently just in "normal" pay grades like GS-12 through 14. If that is true, then I would expect that the "normal" OPM or OPM-like pay rules apply. But I could also see that not being the case.

However, it also would seem odd to me if I, as a line pilot, make more than an astronaut.
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I’m sure they can charge more than you for a speaking event. :)
 
Oh yeah, they get per diem, too, since they are more than 200 miles from home (unless you count straight line distance?).
 
My friend retired recently making about 140k a year he does some hits on Fox News and others and has a deal with a Asian watch company….spent six months on the space station…worked for NASA prior to multiple applications to the program to become an astronaut…it’s not a money deal.
 
RussR said:
As some others earlier in the thread reported, they are apparently just in "normal" pay grades like GS-12 through 14. If that is true, then I would expect that the "normal" OPM or OPM-like pay rules apply. But I could also see that not being the case.

However, it also would seem odd to me if I, as a line pilot, make more than an astronaut.
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I agree, it seems weird. Is there an astronaut Union? GS12-14 seems quite low considering many astronauts hold MDs and PhDs. I guess it's fair to say astronauts don't do it for the money, unless they're getting a crap-ton of overtime and keeping it on the down-low.
 
Supply and demand... How does it work?
 
Astronaut pay works via direct deposit, but that's not important right now.
 
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