Without a crew, however, the antennae would quickly loselock with Mission Control, and the ISS computers would not receive commands from the flight controllers.
The only gameplay flaw would be the fact that early dominance often leads to an imbalanced "turn 9" lock where it becomes rapidly impossible to lose with the current set of game pieces in circulation.
When rifling through your inventory, picking a lock, or doing any other small time-consuming task, you basically lose temporary control over your character.