Now NASA Is Closing Its Biggest Library, Some Of Which Could Be Lost Forever

On Friday, NASA shuttered the doors of the Goddard Information and Collaboration Center, the 100,000-volume library of the storied Goddard Space Flight Center. These documents include records of Moon missions real and theoretical, American and Soviet. The history of these efforts, ideas, and failures are invaluable to any future Moon mission — like, say, this new space race we're trying to win. But with the shuttering of the Goddard building, just one of many closures at the site as NASA endures deep budget cuts, the future of this archive remains unclear. At least some will be saved and moved to other NASA libraries, but many may be lost forever. A cosmic shame.

The New York Times reports that NASA has been shutting down libraries for years now. At the start of 2022, the space agency had eleven; as of Friday, it's now down to just three. This initiative is technically bipartisan in that sense, although does seem to have gotten more aggressive during the Trump administration. "This is a consolidation not a closure," NASA spokeswoman Bethany Sevens told the NYT. The building closures at Goddard, also planned since 2022, will save tens of millions of dollars over time. However, the original plan was to build new facilities, and there's been no follow-up on that at all.

The library staff are currently reviewing the whole archive to determine the fate of each document. According to the union that represents the workers at Goddard, only about 10-15% is going to be preserved by NASA directly. The rest go to the General Services Administration, essentially the branch of the federal government responsible for the actual functioning of the federal government. Standard procedure is to warehouse some and discard the rest. Given this administration's cavalier attitude to reducing the size of government, it's very unclear how much will actually be saved.

On top of Goddard's own historic archive, the very fact that so many other NASA libraries have shut down meant that other archives were being stored there. In particular, apparently when the library for NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. was closed down, its records went to Goddard. NASA headquarters! Some pretty important documents in there, I imagine. What happens to those now?

The icing on this cake is that the union claims this is all in violation of contract. How that plays out, whether through internal pressure or public lawsuits, may determine the fate of these volumes. But consolidation like this seems to be the general trend the Trump administration is taking with the agency, along with buyouts and early retirements. Maybe that will lead to big cost savings that in turn enable growth, as new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman believes. And maybe these documents will just find new homes in the remaining NASA libraries. Let's hope so. The alternative is losing all this research and history to the black hole of budget cuts.