Keith’s 15 December update: This long-time GSFC website (nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov) now has a maintenance notice saying “The NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive website is temporarily offline for maintenance.” But people intimately involved with the site at NASA tell me that it has been unreachable for months prior to my mentioning it on NASAWatch for months – and that no one is actually updating or doing maintenance it. Three months ago (September 2025) someone posted on Reddit that this site was unreachable. This outage was also noticed on Facebook and forum-conquete-spatiale. If you look below you will see a screengrab from the Internet Archive Wayback machine and it stopped being able to ping the site in August 2025. So what is going on NASA? This is an immensely valuable and useful public-facing website.
- Keith’s 10 December Update: Suddenly, after months of being unavailable, NASA made the nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov link work again (a little) but all you see is “The NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive website is temporarily offline for maintenance.” Curious.
- Keith’s 9 December note: The NSSDCA (NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive) website and database (nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov) – managed at NASA Goddard has been blocked from public access since before the government shutdown. NSSDCA represents NASA’s most complete collection of information on all spacecraft and has been maintained and updated since the mid-1960s. The website also has other generally useful pages unrelated to the database, but these are all blocked as well. Here is what it looked like before it was turned off. NASA’s Education website points to it as an educational resource. Why did a useful, albeit benign, public-facing resource like this go dark?
Spite while exiting? You understand the feeling, yes?
NASA is prohibiting staff from reporting issues arising from changes enacted this year. For example, it’s harder to get replacement equipment ordered and installed because of dramatically reduced staff in some areas. The “DRP” let large groups of people not work for 6 months but NASA still had to pay them. I don’t know if that’s the case for this site, but there are quite a few impacts of this nature that are not reported – broken items that would ordinarily be repaired quickly.
Maybe someone can do a FOIA request.
Yes – you can go to the NASA FOIA page and they will tell you how to submit a FOIA request. Any citizen can.
If you’re really concerned, I suggest reaching out to one of the team members first. Chances are they’re already trying to get it fixed with limited staff, so a formal information request will make a challenging situation even harder.
I am way ahead of you on this.