NASA's $30 million Swift rescue fails as Goddard loses labs and staff

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced on 19 August that their robotic rescue of the Swift gamma-ray telescope had failed. Ars Technica noted that the LINK spacecraft, launched on 3 July, was supposed to fly up to Swift, grab it with three robotic arms and raise its orbit beyond a looming reentry. It will not happen.

Swift launched in 2004. It was designed to run for two years and has survived nearly 22. Astronomers still depend on it to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions known, and to point other observatories at them quickly. The rescue was always a long shot. NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract less than a year before launch. The company had nine months to design, build and fly a first-of-its-kind servicing satellite. The schedule drove engineers to accept technical risks they would normally refuse, Ars Technica reported.

What went wrong on LINK

LINK got off the ground on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on 3 July, according to NBC News. Mission managers established contact. Then, less than two weeks into the flight, teams began reporting problems with the probe's orientation. On 15 July, NASA officials said Katalyst engineers had "addressed early communications and attitude control issues," NBC News reported. Software patches failed. On 28 July, NASA said the spacecraft's attitude control systems had malfunctioned, "causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications." LINK was rotating at about 9 degrees per second. Thrusters slowed the spin this month, but the underlying problem did not go away.

"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement.

Ars Technica reported that two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for attitude control, stopped working. Cold gas thrusters used for fine pointing also had issues. That left three low-impulse plasma thrusters as the only way to regain control of a spacecraft moving at nearly 5 miles per second. Katalyst has not said what caused the failure. The company said in a statement that "ongoing attitude control issues" would prevent LINK from completing the rescue. NASA and Katalyst are still assessing what milestones remain. Katalyst will try to approach and rendezvous with Swift to demonstrate close-in navigation technology. The spacecraft is still alive.

Swift itself has no thrusters. Atmospheric drag has been pulling it down since 2024, when intense solar activity heated Earth's upper atmosphere and accelerated the decay. Ars Technica put the observatory's cost at $500 million. It is expected to reenter and break apart later this year.

Goddard's missing equipment

The failure of a rescue mission is one problem. A separate report suggests NASA's ability to build the spacecraft that would come next is being damaged closer to home.

NPR reported on 15 September that seven current and former NASA scientists and engineers at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said abrupt relocations over the past 10 months had cost them specialized workspaces, employees and expensive machines. Current employees asked NPR not to use their names because they fear retribution. NASA's management said the moves were aimed at reducing costs and eliminating "waste and redundancies," according to internal documents NPR reviewed. Moving scientists out of more than 80 facilities aligned with a previously published master plan for the campus and would let the center avoid tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, NASA has said.

The timing was awkward. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched from Kennedy Space Center late last month after 15 years of preparation and $4 billion, NPR reported. Engineers told NPR that teams working on Roman had been operating under tenuous conditions. Management forced them out of their labs multiple times since November, including as recently as a month before launch. Propulsion engineers had to test Roman's fuel with less sensitive gear because more precise tools had been lost in an earlier move. A radio communication lab asked to test an antenna for Roman had lost almost all its equipment.

"We can't do the work because we don't have our $6 million antenna chamber anymore," an engineer told NPR.

One engineer said they had to launch a satellite called GRITSS before it was ready. They had never done that in more than a decade at Goddard. The satellite went up in July to help other spacecraft track changes to Earth's water and landmasses. Scientists told NPR they do not know whether it will work, because they could not test its radio communications before launch. A team working on the DAVINCI Venus spacecraft lost its lab and a clean room for large spacecraft in November, and work was delayed in August. "We do not have a replacement lab," the engineer said. As of August, the space they were rushed out of remained vacant.

Two ways to lose a mission

Jack Kiraly, chief of advocacy at the Planetary Society, told NPR the relocations add risk to an already risky business. "These are potentially billions of dollars' worth of taxpayer investment," he said. "We don't do ourselves any favors by putting the people that make this happen in precarious situations."

NASA's public line on Swift is that the attempt was worth making. "NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did," Isaacman said. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the mission had "already strengthened America's space industry pipeline, advancing in-space servicing capabilities in completely new ways." Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said the company would turn its lessons into "a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing." That is the commercial bet: rendezvous sensors and robotic arms are the building blocks of a future market for refueling and repairing satellites in orbit.

But the near-term ledger is grim. Swift's science ends. LINK is a testbed rather than a rescue. And the engineers who build NASA's spacecraft say the rooms and machines they need are gone, with no long-term plan in sight. Both stories are about the same thing: capability that is easier to lose than to rebuild.