About a third of auctioned Goddard items were restricted technology
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off late last month from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, capping 15 years of preparation and roughly $4 billion in spending. The telescope is supposed to collect more information than any other about how the universe is expanding and how many previously hidden planets might be in the galaxy. But the engineers who built much of the observatory at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told NPR that the months before launch were marked by disruption, as NASA management ordered them out of their labs repeatedly — most recently about a month before Roman lifted off.
NASA’s management said in internal documents reviewed by NPR that the moves were aimed at reducing costs and eliminating “waste and redundancies,” and that emptying more than 80 facilities aligned with a previously published master plan for changes to Goddard’s campus and would let the center avoid paying tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance. But seven current and former Goddard scientists and engineers — who asked NPR not to identify them, citing fear of retribution — said the moves have had a concrete toll on specific missions. “That only adds a whole lot of risk to an already risky endeavor,” said Jack Kiraly, chief of advocacy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit that champions space science and exploration. “These are potentially billions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer investment. We don’t do ourselves any favors by putting the people that make this happen in precarious situations.”
Propulsion engineers preparing Roman had to run fuel tests using less sensitive gear, two engineers said, because some of their higher-quality, more precise tools had been lost in a move months before launch. NASA staff at a radio communications lab were asked to test an antenna for Roman before liftoff, but they had already lost almost all their equipment. “We can’t do the work because we don’t have our $6 million antenna chamber anymore,” an engineer said.
An engineer working on DAVINCI, a spacecraft being built to explore Venus, said the team’s work was delayed in August because they had no place at Goddard to do their part of the job. The team’s lab and a specialized clean room for working on large spacecraft had been moved out of another Goddard building in November. “We do not have a replacement lab,” the engineer said. “I did not have anywhere to start laying out the components and figure out what we have, what we need and all of that.” As of August, the lab space they were rushed out of remained vacant. “They clearly don’t have a long-term plan,” the engineer said, “which was not really how we feel you should be treating world-class engineering labs.”
Another engineer said they had been forced to launch a satellite before it was ready — something they said they had never done in more than a decade at Goddard. The project, called GRITSS, launched in July to help other satellites accurately track changes to Earth’s water levels and landmasses from space. The team had not been able to test its radio communications back to Earth before launch. “We are half-blind in terms of trying to troubleshoot it,” the scientist said. “The project had to eat the risk.”
NASA management moved the radio communications lab out of its previous space at Goddard in November, while employees were home during the government shutdown, engineers said. The lab’s staff lost almost all their equipment and their one-of-a-kind radio communication testing facility, and they were not allowed to stop their machines from being taken away. “We were actively prevented from going to recover material,” an engineer who worked with the lab said. “This was ripped away from the hands of NASA employees that would have been most capable of utilizing the equipment.”
The accounts from scientists largely contradict a June report from the NASA Office of Inspector General that concluded moving teams out of Goddard labs had not hurt ongoing projects and would “not impact NASA’s anticipated missions.” NASA did not respond to NPR’s questions about the impacts of the relocations. NASA officials acknowledged in the OIG report that there was “an increased risk that property may not have been properly accounted for during this process,” though the agency said it did not violate policy. Internal emails, interviews and data reviewed by NPR indicate the accounting fell short in practice — some equipment ended up auctioned, donated or thrown in the trash, and NASA’s rules for disposing of supplies were not always followed during the moves.
Barbara Thompson, a physicist and founder of NASA’s Center for HelioAnalytics, said she watched dumpsters fill with equipment and thousands of books as scientists were rushed out of their old labs. “These items were purchased with taxpayer dollars,” Thompson said, “so it felt unethical to me.”
More than 300 items from Goddard were posted on the U.S. General Services Administration auction site over the past six months, NPR found. The original cost to NASA for those materials — including dozens of pieces of specialized lab gear and parts of telescopes — was around $5.4 million. Although some of the items were categorized as salvage or scrap, employees said those descriptions weren’t always accurate, since the items were sometimes labeled by people who weren’t engineers and did not understand the equipment. An aspheric test blank — a piece of unpolished material used to test imaging systems for telescopes — was originally purchased by NASA for more than $250,000. The last bid before the sale closed in May was $300.
About a third of the NASA items auctioned by GSA, including that test blank, were classified as items whose sale was supposed to be restricted because of their importance to missile technology, national security, anti-terrorism or regional stability, according to an NPR analysis of GSA’s catalog data. Buyers of those items are typically subject to heightened restrictions, including U.S. citizenship requirements and a statement outlining how they plan to use the materials, GSA confirmed. NPR asked NASA whether the agency was aware the items were restricted when they were put up for auction, but the agency did not answer the question. A GSA representative said all bidders on the restricted items signed online statements that certified they were allowed to buy them. Kiraly said it was deeply unusual that so many restricted items and pieces of advanced technology from NASA were put up for auction. “Say it does fall into the hands of another country’s military or civil space program,” said Kiraly. “It’s the fact that they have access to it — that is the big concern.”
NASA also gave away other equipment to educational institutions, a practice that is permitted if scientists no longer need the materials. But NASA donated hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of radio communications equipment to Capitol Technology University without the knowledge of the scientists who had used it, NPR found. When those scientists discovered what had happened, internal emails show, they asked a supervisor whether they could get the equipment back and were told that reclaiming it was unlikely. Jeffrey Volosin, the professor at Capitol Technology University who received the donation, said he had not asked for the equipment. He invited the NASA scientists to borrow the gear and initially offered to return some of it. But the equipment now belongs to the university, Volosin confirmed in August, and is being installed in a campus lab primarily for student use. NASA did not respond to NPR’s questions about the donation. “The fact that scientists are not being consulted about what their instruments are going to be used for, what their hardware is going to be used for, is really outside of the norm,” Kiraly said. “That center leadership can just give away materials without that buy-in is beyond the pale.”
The relocations come on the heels of a significant federal workforce reduction. Goddard lost about a third of its employees in 2025, which left the center’s staffing out of balance with the work the agency had to do, a government watchdog group concluded in a July report. More scientists are leaving now. Thompson, the physicist, worked for NASA for 30 years but lost trust in NASA’s leadership after her lab was moved and decided to quit in June. Almost 60 percent of Goddard engineers surveyed by NASA this year said they plan to leave soon, according to internal survey results reviewed by NPR.
The White House budget request proposes $5.6 billion less for NASA in 2027, a 23 percent decrease from the agency’s 2026 budget. Some scientists say the agency will not be able to perform at nearly the standard it did before. “When we were packing up our labs,” an engineer who helped work on Roman said, “we were pretty much point-blank told to ‘pack as if you are never going to build another propulsion system again.’”