Now NASA is closing its largest library, some of which may be lost forever: Jalopnik

On Friday, NASA closed the doors of the Goddard Information and Collaboration Center, the 100,000-volume library of the legendary Goddard Space Flight Center. These documents contain accounts of real and theoretical lunar missions, American and Soviet. The history of these efforts, ideas and failures is invaluable for any future lunar mission – like this new space race we’re trying to win. But with the closure of the Goddard Building, just one of many closures at the site as NASA endures severe budget cuts, the future of this archive remains unclear. At least some of them will be preserved and moved to other NASA libraries, but many of them may be lost forever. A cosmic shame.

The New York Times reports that NASA has been closing libraries for years. At the beginning of 2022, the space agency had eleven; as of Friday, there are now only three. This initiative is technically bipartisan in that sense, although it appears to have become more aggressive during the Trump administration. “This is a consolidation and not a closure,” NASA spokeswoman Bethany Sevens told the NYT. The building closures in Goddard, also planned since 2022, will save tens of millions of dollars over time. However, the original plan was to build new facilities, and that has not been followed up at all.

In addition to Goddard’s own historical archive, the closure of so many other NASA libraries meant the same other archives were stored there. Notably, when the library at NASA Headquarters in Washington DC was closed, the archives apparently went to Goddard. NASA Headquarters! There are some pretty important documents in there, I think. What happens to that now?

The icing on the cake is that the union is claiming that this is all against the contract. How that plays out, whether through internal pressure or public litigation, could determine the fate of these volumes. But such consolidation appears to be the general trend the Trump administration is following with the agency, along with buyouts and early retirements. Perhaps that will lead to big cost savings that will in turn enable growth, as new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman believes. And perhaps these documents will simply find a new home in the remaining NASA libraries. Let’s hope so. The alternative is that all this research and history is lost to the black hole of austerity.