Last week, news emerged that NASA’s largest library at its iconic Goddard Space Flight Center (GFSC) in Maryland was being shut down.
The optics — especially considering the wider context of the Trump administration’s nakedly anti-science vision for the future of the agency and the shuttering of over a dozen buildings at the center — were bad, to say the least.
At least 13 buildings at Goddard, as well as more than 100 labs, are set to have been shut by March of this year, a major downscaling effort that highlights the Trump administration’s desire to slash NASA’s science budget by more than half in its proposed 2026 fiscal year budget. (The exact budget is still being actively debated, despite already being three months into NASA’s fiscal year.)
NASA insiders are dismayed at the situation playing out at GSFC, arguing that the library was an extremely important resource that’s being unjustifiably wiped out.
“I have a hard time imagining a research center of the high quality that Goddard is, or any center at NASA, how they will operate without a library, without a central collection,” planetary scientist David Williams, who has curated space mission data for NASA’s archives, told NBC News.
“It’s not like we’re so much smarter now than we were in the past,” he told the NYT. “It’s the same people, and they make the same kind of human errors. If you lose that history, you are going to make the same mistakes again.”
In some ways, others have pointed out, it’s business as usual for a large government bureaucracy.
“NASA has been closing its libraries for a long time,” Keith Cowing, a former NASA astrobiologist who now blogs about the agency at NASA Watch, wrote in a recent post. “Budgetary and building issues are usually the prime reason. Usually, stuff gets moved around and put in storage for years until the storage costs mount and then a portion ends up in someone’s library — somewhere — and the rest gets shipped to some generic [General Services Administration] warehouse — or thrown.”
But the process is agonizing, and important records can be lost through carelessness or error.
“Now it is GSFC’s turn to go through this painful process,” he added.
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