Su space.com è stato pubblicato un lunghissimo reportage sulla distruzione del Goddard, supportato da una serie di testimonianze di dipendenti ed ex-dipendenti, alcuni sotto anonimato, e da una ampia raccolta di comunicazioni interne che documentano come - a dispetto delle dichiarazioni ufficiali - l’agenzia stia da tempo implementando illegalmente il budget presidenziale (PBR) e i relativi tagli.
“The atmosphere, from my perspective, at least, has been incredibly dark and depressing,” Goddard astrophysicist Casey McGrath told Space.com, clarifying that he was not speaking on behalf of NASA or his agency contract employer. “I feel like the people I work with, myself included, have just been demoralized, exhausted, terrified, frustrated and angry, for months and months on end with no pause whatsoever.”
L’articolo è ricco di dettagli (molto deprimenti).
“When we had DOGE coming on site, we had some supervisors saying that if DOGE asks you for access to your laptop, you should give it to them. Basically, just hand over the keys,” Wendy said. “That direction was implied to come from Engineering management, but not put in writing.”
“It’s really hard for us to get anything in writing from Engineering management, because I think they know that what they’re doing shouldn’t be put in writing,” she added.
The move out of the GISS building was chaotic. Equipment for one NASA mission, PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) — a satellite launched in February 2024 that measures the health of Earth’s oceans — had to be hurriedly moved between agency sites to avoid program setbacks.
“There was about, I don’t know, a million dollars worth of [PACE] equipment,” Claire estimated. “They told us to get out of the building … So the PI (principal investigator) rented a car, and he put all of the stuff in the car and drove through the night to put it on another NASA facility so that it’d be safe.”
[…] Today, the GISS building presumably still sits empty, with NASA apparently continuing to foot the bill. “The super has told us the building is not rented out,” Claire said. “He thinks it’s still being paid for. They’re not showing it off to anyone else.”
Employees on some teams were told that if they were unable to complete evaluations of their lab equipment, whatever wasn’t designated give-away or keep would be thrown out. “All items not marked in labs by COB Monday 10/20 will be excessed,” an Oct. 16 email, obtained by Space.com, said. “There’s equipment that is being planned to just be abandoned in place,” Wendy said. All that hardware adds up. Peter said losses will include “tens of millions of dollars and decades’ worth of investment in these facilities that historically have been considered core to Goddard’s capabilities.”
Un intervento di David Grinspoon, ex NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy, sullo stesso argomento:
Il thread completo parte da qui:
[…] When I myself was in leadership at NASA (until my job was terminated one month ago today), we were required to take regular trainings—on ethics, the Hatch Act, cybersecurity, and more. […] Since January, though, it’s become routine to see the top leadership of the agency violating all these norms and laws—with crude political messaging, questionable corporate collusion, and blatant unethical behavior. Directives of questionable legality—often never put in writing—were issued to staff. DOGE infiltrated our systems, photographed our offices, and intimidated employees with arbitrary and wasteful edicts. […]
