For the past 32 years, David Williams has curated former space mission data and spaceflight journals for NASA’s Space Science Data Archive.
The large research library NASA has at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was an incredibly important resource in that work. The library is a hub for thousands of books and scientific journals, many of them containing information that can’t be found anywhere else.
“I was there all the time,” Williams said. “It was just one of the main sources of information for me in order to make this database complete and to make this data useful for researchers.”
That source is no longer available.
According to the Goddard Engineers, Scientists and Technicians’ Association (GESTA)— a union representing hundreds of NASA employees — all in-person library services at the Goddard Space Flight Center were paused on Dec. 9 while staff completed a 60-day review of the collection.
The in-person services paused included checking out books from the library.
Around that same time, NASA management told GESTA that the library was set to close Friday, Jan. 2.
“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,” Williams said.
A Goddard research scientist through a co-op, Kyle, says having an accessible resource hub is beneficial for immediate projects.
“A lot of the services provided are not just the physical media, but also having those digital access,” Kyle explained. “When you need it, you definitely need it, and it’s going to, you know, slow things down and make things inconvenient.”
The changes at the center come almost a year after Maryland leaders spoke about Goddard’s impact after planned cuts by the Trump administration.
“It is the heart of the space science mission around the country,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said last April. “It’s critical for us to move forward with these investments because we need to make sure that we are in the lead when we move forward.”
NASA administrator Jason Isaacman released a statement on social media about the library closing.
In that statement, Isaacman said the library “is closing as part of a long-planned facilities consolidation approved in 2022 under the previous administration,” and “NASA researchers will continue to have access to the scientific information and resources they need to do their work.”
He added that “NASA follows a deliberate process to evaluate materials, ensuring they are digitized, transferred to other libraries, or otherwise preserved for historical purposes.”
The longer statement pushed back against claims made in a story about the library closure published by the New York Times, saying that story “does not fully reflect the context NASA shared.”
“This is unfortunate at a time when the world should be energized by a plan to send NASA astronauts farther into space than ever before, return us to the lunar environment with a commitment to stay, alongside historic investments in an orbital economy and a renewed pursuit of science and discovery,” Issacman said in the statement.
Williams believes the loss of the library could be detrimental for research and finding information in the future.
“We want to restore the data so that it can be used, and in order to restore the data, we need to know, like I said, how the instruments worked, how they were calibrated,” Williams said. “And that information is all over the place and you have to gather it. And, really, the library is one of the main resources for me and people in the future.”