The Goddard Space Flight Center library, NASA’s largest research library, is closing due to the Trump administration’s decision to reduce staff and laboratories. The publications and documents stored there are planned for disposal or storage.
This is reported by The New York Times.
The collection contains tens of thousands of books, documents, and magazines dating from the early 20th century to the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In particular, these are books by Soviet rocket scientists describing missions in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as experiments on NASA missions. Many of them have not been digitized and are not available anywhere else.
According to NASA spokesman Jacob Richmond, the library’s holdings will be reviewed within the next 60 days, after which some materials will be transferred to government storage for safekeeping, and the rest will be thrown out.
The closure of the library at Goddard Space Flight Center is part of a broader Trump administration reorganization that will see the closure of 13 buildings and more than 100 science and engineering labs on the 1,270-acre (5.1-square-kilometer) campus by March 2026.