NASA Veterans Disgusted by Plans to Shut Down Its Largest Library

""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.""

""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 gene"

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is closing its largest library amid a broader shutdown of at least 13 buildings and over 100 labs by March, reflecting a proposed more-than-half cut to NASA's science budget in the 2026 fiscal proposal. Agency personnel express alarm at loss of central collections and institutional memory, warning that losing archival records and curated mission data will increase risk of repeated human errors. Historical patterns show NASA has reduced library services before for budgetary and building reasons, often placing materials into long-term storage that later becomes costly and fragmented.

Read at Futurism