NASA rushed engineers out of their labs. They say it risks future space missions

Technicians connect the inner and outer segments of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in 2025 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Jolearra Tshiteya/NASA via AP hide caption

When NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida late last month, engineers were anxious.

Expectations were high. The telescope is supposed to collect more information than any other has before about how the universe is expanding and how many previously hidden planets might be in the galaxy. Fifteen years of preparation and $4 billion had led to this moment.

But with spacecraft, the smallest of mistakes can derail everything. And at NASA's premier space flight complex, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., engineers knew that teams working on the telescope had been operating under tenuous conditions. NASA's management had forced scientists to quickly move out of their labs at Goddard multiple times since last November — and as recently as a month before Roman's launch, engineers said.

That affected work on the telescope. Propulsion engineers had to run tests on Roman's fuel using less sensitive gear, two engineers told NPR, because some of their tools — which they say were higher quality and more precise — had been lost in a move months before. NASA asked staff at a radio communication lab to test an antenna for Roman before launch, but they'd 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.

NPR spoke with seven current and former NASA scientists and engineers at Goddard who said the moves that have continued over the past 10 months have resulted in the loss of specialized workspaces, employees and expensive machines that were critical to making Roman and other spacecraft. Current employees requested that NPR not use their names because they fear retribution for speaking to the media.

NASA's management said that moving scientists out of buildings last year was aimed at reducing costs and eliminating "waste and redundancies," according to internal NASA documents reviewed by NPR. Moving scientists out of more than 80 facilities aligned with a previously published master plan for changes to Goddard's campus and would allow the center to avoid paying tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, NASA has said.