It was at Goddard in the mid-1980s that I learned I had a gift for technology, and, better still, I could explain it to other people. Put simply, that’s where my career as a tech journalist began. While there, I also got to know the engineers and scientists who’d pioneered space. This closure is a disgrace.
I mean, who closes down a research library? (It’s not like they cost a lot of money, and libraries like this one contain a mountain of material that’s never been digitized.) The answer: an administration that has no interest whatsoever in science, knowledge, wisdom, or expertise, that’s who.
While personally painful to the people who used that library, there have been worse. NASA itself faces cuts, for example. As John Grunsfeld, an astrophysicist and astronaut who flew five shuttle missions, said: “America is stepping back from leadership in virtually every science area.… The proposal for the NASA science budget is…cataclysmic for US leadership in science.”
