NASA Goddard built the Roman Space Telescope. Workers there worry it couldn’t happen again
After a successful late-August launch, the $4.3-billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is cruising to its final orbit about a million miles from Earth. If all goes well, NASA’s latest “flagship” observatory will be sending back unprecedented cosmic panoramas and revolutionary images of exoplanets by the end of the year.
Like its predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope, Roman was designed and built primarily at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., just outside Washington, D.C. But some current and former Goddard workers say NASA would not be able to build another telescope like Roman today. There aren’t enough people or pieces of equipment left.
Budget cuts and workforce reductions by the Trump administration have arguably hit Goddard the hardest out of NASA’s 10 research centers. From March 2020 to January 2025, a period that included U.S. DOGE Service layoffs and several rounds of early retirements in 2025, Goddard lost 40 percent of its personnel, shrinking from 10,000 federal workers and contractors down to 6,000. Since then managers have hired back 600 workers. In addition, NASA shut down several testing and technology development labs and broke up engineering teams, making work more difficult for those who remain.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Goddard’s diminution is part of a broader pivot at NASA as the White House redirects the space agency to put American astronauts on the moon by 2028. Budget proposals for the past two years have slashed NASA’s science funding, and some of the nation’s best and brightest minds have now left the space agency because of uncertainty about their role in its future. According to a July 23 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), NASA lost a fifth of its civil servant workforce in the past year, with impacts to more than two dozen major projects. “The civil servant departures have left NASA’s workforce out of balance with NASA’s programmatic needs,” the report said.
NASA’s hardest hit centers were Goddard, its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Combined, the three had 14 space exploration missions that were proposed to be canceled or delayed, the report stated.
NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has dismissed the GAO report: “I would not read too much into dated news designed to needlessly elevate people’s blood pressure,” he wrote on X.
Congress has rejected most of the White House’s proposed science funding cuts, but many of the space agency’s remaining scientists and engineers still worry that NASA’s ability to build ambitious interplanetary missions and astrophysical observatories has been so damaged that any recovery, if it occurs at all, will take decades. Based on interviews with 10current and former Goddard workers, as well as several independent space policy experts, Goddard is ground zero for these sweeping changes.
“I really like doing hands-on work and in-house building of spacecraft,” says one engineer who left Goddard in April after being at the center for seven years, during which they mostly worked on Roman. According to this former employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal, what once was a robust “pipeline” of future spacecraft has now dwindled. The engineer says their work on Roman ended when their lab was abruptly closed in November 2025 and adds that Goddard’s leadership has failed to adequately explain the research center’s apparent shift in status under the Trump administration.
“It’s hard to fathom how management can be so out of touch with what the workforce wants and needs,” says the engineer, who began their NASA career as an intern. “How can they make so many decisions that seem only meant to drive people away?”
NASA officials dispute that Goddard won’t be able to build space telescopes like Roman now or in the future.
“Conceiving, designing, developing, integrating and operating flagship missions of discovery are core capabilities of the Goddard Space Flight Center,” a NASA Goddard spokesperson tells Scientific American. “Goddard has a long history of delivering complex spaceflight hardware and engineering solutions that have enabled some of NASA’s most consequential missions, delivering game-changing scientific discoveries, and that responsibility and capability remains unchanged.”
A separate review released in June by NASA’s Office of Inspector General found that NASA officials broke no laws or rules during the rapid closures and layoffs of 2025. But, as described in its summary at the office’s website, the report agreed with Goddard employees’ complaints that “communication failures throughout the process resulted in confusion related to the efforts and increased challenges to the Center’s workforce.”
During the federal shutdown last fall, NASA officials closed labs at Goddard that manufactured advanced optical detectors for spacecraft, a unique test facility called an anechoic chamber that simulated the quietness of space and machine shops that built parts for scientific instruments that are scheduled to land on the moon in the next two years. The detector labs were later reopened.
Last November NASA also shut down the Goddard propulsion lab that built the fuel tanks, valves and thrusters for Roman and other spacecraft; the center’s propulsion engineering team dropped from 30 people to just seven. And inJanuary space agency officials closed the building that housed Goddard’s library—NASA’s largest—which stored thousands of historical journals and spaceflight documents and was used as a meeting place for Goddard employees.
NASA said the closure was part of a 2022 master plan for the campus, but the employees’ union has sued over the issue. The library remains closed for now, employees have said.
The agency spokesperson says that the anechoic chamber hadn’t been upgraded since 1997 and that its microwave-absorbing foam spires were crumbling. Future tests will be conducted at NASA Langley Research Center’s Experimental Test Range in Hampton, Va., within a similar chamber that was used to test the antenna for the space agency’s Europa Clipper mission before its 2024 launch.
The Goddard propulsion lab was closed because “propulsion fabrication is now readily and more efficiently available from the private sector,” the spokesperson says, adding that Goddard will continue to design and integrate future spacecraft propulsion units.
Despite such justifications, these cuts, closures and layoffs have caused morale to plummet at Goddard, some current workers say, and have left management increasingly disconnected from the research center’s day-to-day operations.
“The real value of Goddard is not just the facility itself but that there was a huge amount of expertise there,” says Margaret Samuels, a materials scientist and research engineer at the research center. Samuels, who is also an officer of the union that represents Goddard workers, says that the loss of expertise will take a long time to replace. “We are an ecosystem, and we rely on each other’s capabilities.”
For their part, NASA officials have said that last year’s layoffs and lab closures are making Goddard more efficient and competitiveand that the consolidation of buildings was part of a 2022 master plan.
But a skeptical Congress has directed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to form an investigative panel on whether Goddard still has the equipment, personnel and infrastructure to ensure “future cutting-edge scientific discovery and crewed space exploration.” The panel’s report is expected in December.
Goddard’s director, Jamie Dunn, was promoted to the role in May, after delivering Roman under budget and ahead of schedule as the telescope’s project manager since 2018. “The mood is good” at Goddard, Dunn told the NASEM panel during an August meeting. “There is work that needs to be done,” he added, but “people can see that we’re starting to come on an upswing.”
“I acknowledge we’ve been through a turbulent time,” Dunn also said at the meeting. “There’s a confluence of events. It wasn’t just one thing, and it didn’t all just start last year. It’s been a number of things that have been piling up over the years.”
The research center’s funding and staffing have always fluctuated, Dunn said, depending on the missions being built there and budgetary battles between U.S. policymakers. He cited Roman as an example, noting that the Trump administration had repeatedly proposed defunding the telescope, only for Congress to rescue the project each time by keeping the money flowing. In the future, he told the panel, “I am hopeful I can find more money” for Goddard.
At present there are no major flagship missions being built at Goddard, although planning is underway for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), a space telescope that could launch a decade or more from now to image and study potentially Earth-like exoplanets. More immediately, Goddard engineers are building a mass spectrometer for the upcoming Dragonfly drone copter, which is set to launch to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in July 2028. The center has also been charged with developing DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry, and Imaging), a Venus probe that has faced funding and schedule delays but is presently set to launch sometime in the early 2030s.
Besides the high-level federal investigations into Goddard’s situation, smaller, more grassroots efforts are also seeking to raise the alarm.
The NASEM committee asked for a review of Goddard’s current capabilities by the Goddard Retirees and Alumni Association (GRAA). It revealed that the center faces a crisis in several areas. The findings, which came from a survey of 10 current workers and 27 former ones who left recently, stated that the safety and mission assurance team had lost half its staff as of July 2026. That means there are fewer people left to make sure labs and clean rooms pass all the required safety checks during tests that involve extreme temperatures, pressures and electrical discharges.
NASA officials say, however, that safety has not been compromised and that Goddard has one of the lowest mishap rates of any NASA center.
GRAA also found the center has lost expertise for coordinating robotic lunar spaceflights and questioned Goddard’s ability to “formulate and execute” large space telescopes such as HWO, as well as to perform other “complex research and operational missions, including maintaining world-class science, system engineering and project management.”
Carl Stahle, the report’s author and a retired Goddard engineer, tells Scientific American that the biggest loss was the people. “Many of the key skills and experience were lost in engineering,” he says.
The cuts to Goddard and NASA’s overall science and exploration mission will have implications for decades to come, according to Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society.
“There’s no market to replace what we’re losing as a public investment in scientific exploration,” Dreier says. “Ironically, the current public policy is to throw more money at the area where private money is already flowing and to cut money where there is no private money supporting it and to just stop doing it.”
Speaking anonymously, a senior Goddard astrophysicist who has worked on several spacecraft missions says rebuilding the renowned campus, which was established in 1959, will be difficult.
“We can’t do another Roman from Goddard because lots of essential things are gone,” the engineer says, citing the staggering attrition of the center’s personnel and the damage or destruction of mission-critical assets. “There were instances of people grabbing a friend’s pickup truck to save essential parts of their equipment before it was thrown away,” the engineer says. “This is not how you treat unique hardware that costs the taxpayer millions of dollars. It was basically a rapid, unplanned disassembly.”
Despite the disruptions, closures and changes at Goddard, the scientist isn’t ready to quit NASA.
“Being able to dream and to reach space and to make measurements to the end of the universe or the beginning of the universe,” they say, “I mean, it’s hard to give that up.”