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.
But the relocations are hurting NASA's mission, workers said. For decades, NASA helped the U.S. lead the world in the race to space, and Goddard built the spacecraft vital to that mission. Goddard's diminished capacity has been delaying projects and hindering the agency's ability to produce spacecraft in the future, scientists said.
"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."
One engineer said they had to launch a satellite before it was ready — something they had never done in their more than a decade of working at Goddard. The project, called GRITSS, was launched in July to help other satellites accurately track changes to Earth's water levels and landmasses from space.
But scientists interviewed by NPR say they don't know whether the satellite will be able to do that, because they weren't able to test its ability to radio communications back to Earth before it launched.
"We are half-blind in terms of trying to troubleshoot it," said a scientist who worked on the GRITSS satellite. "The project had to eat the risk."
NASA's management moved a radio communications lab out of its previous space at Goddard in November while employees were home during the government shutdown, engineers told NPR. The engineers lost almost all their equipment and their one-of-a-kind radio communication testing facility, they said, and they were not allowed to try to stop their machines from being taken away.
"We were actively prevented from going to recover material," said another engineer who worked with the lab. "This was ripped away from the hands of NASA employees that would have been most capable of utilizing the equipment."
An engineer on a different team said their work on a spacecraft being built to explore Venus, called DAVINCI, was delayed in August because they didn't have a place at Goddard to do their part of the job. Their team's lab and a specialized "clean room" for working on large spacecraft were all moved out of another building at Goddard 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."
Meanwhile, as of August, the lab space they were rushed out of at Goddard remains vacant, the engineer said.
"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."
The statements from scientists largely contradict a report issued in June from the NASA Office of Inspector General that said moving teams out of labs at Goddard had not hurt ongoing projects and would "not impact NASA's anticipated missions."
NASA didn't respond to NPR's questions about the impacts of the relocations.
NASA officials acknowledged in that report that there was "an increased risk that property may not have been properly accounted for during this process," though the agency said it didn't violate policy.
Internal emails, interviews with scientists and data reviewed by NPR indicate that this wasn't always true. NPR tracked down equipment and found that some of it was auctioned, donated or thrown in the trash, and that 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 it disturbed her to see dumpsters filled with equipment and thousands of books that scientists weren't able to keep as they 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 NASA Goddard were also posted on the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) auction site over the past six months, NPR found.
The original cost to NASA for the materials, which included dozens of pieces of specialized lab gear and pieces 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 didn't understand the equipment.
Bidders tried to get incredible deals. An aspheric test blank, a piece of unpolished material that can be used to test imaging systems for telescopes, was originally purchased by NASA for more than $250,000. The last bid on it, before the sale closed in May, was for $300.
The government restricts who can buy its spacecraft hardware. 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.
People who buy those sorts of items are typically subject to heightened restrictions, like U.S. citizenship requirements and a statement that outlines how bidders plan to use the materials, GSA confirmed to NPR.
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," Kiraly said. "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 used it, NPR found.
When those scientists discovered their equipment had been given away, they asked a supervisor whether they could have it back, internal emails show, but were told that reclaiming it was unlikely.
Jeffrey Volosin, the professor at Capitol Technology University who received the donation, said he didn't ask for the equipment. As soon as he learned that NASA scientists were looking for their machines, he said he invited them to borrow the gear and initially offered to return some of it. But the equipment belongs to the university now, Volosin confirmed in August, and is being installed in a campus lab for primarily student use.
"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," said Kiraly. "That center leadership can just give away materials without that buy-in is beyond the pale."
NASA didn't respond to NPR's questions about the donation.
The government's actions 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 report published in July. Even more scientists are leaving now. Thompson, the physicist, worked for NASA for 30 years. But she lost trust in NASA's leadership after her lab was moved and decided to quit in June.
She isn't alone. Almost 60% of Goddard engineers surveyed by NASA this year said they plan to leave soon, according to internal survey results reviewed by NPR. More cuts could be on the horizon. The White House budget request proposes $5.6 billion less for NASA in 2027, a 23% decrease from the agency's budget in 2026.
Some scientists say the agency won't be able to perform at nearly the standard it did before.
"When we were packing up our labs," said an engineer who helped work on Roman, "we were pretty much point-blank told to 'pack as if you are never going to build another propulsion system again.'"
NPR would like to hear from more people who work with federal agencies and have information to share. You can email the reporter of this article, Chiara Eisner, at ceisner@npr.org or contact her on Signal here, username ceis.78.
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