NASA's Swift rescue fails, and Goddard's emptied labs raise a bigger question

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies said on Wednesday they are giving up on the robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit. Ars Technica and NBC News reported the decision. The rescue attempt had been running against a hard clock from the start.

The telescope launched in 2004 and has far outlived its original two-year design. Astronomers still rely on it to detect and locate gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known universe, so that other observatories can follow up. Swift has no thrusters to maintain its orbit. A servicing mission was the only way to keep it alive.

NASA's own numbers explain why nobody tried before. The observatory cost $500 million. Less than a year ago, the agency awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build and launch the rescue satellite, called Link.

A nine-month schedule and three reaction wheels

Ars Technica reports that Link launched on July 3 aboard Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rocket. The spacecraft is about the size of a refrigerator. It has two solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters meant to lift Swift into a higher orbit. It also carried three robotic arms to grab the observatory. NASA normally takes several years to ready a first-of-its-kind satellite for launch. Katalyst did it in nine months.

Ars Technica says the timeline forced hard trade-offs. Schedule pressure drove engineers to tolerate technical risks they might not otherwise have accepted.

Everything looked fine for the first few weeks. Then, in late July, Link spun out of control. Ars Technica reports that two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for attitude control, stopped working. Cold gas thrusters used for finer pointing also had problems. That left the three low-impulse plasma thrusters as the only way to regain orientation while the spacecraft zipped around Earth at nearly 5 miles per second. NBC News, citing NASA, put the spin rate at about 9 degrees per second. Mission managers fired the thrusters and slowed the rotation this month, but the underlying attitude control problems 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.

Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee, in a statement carried by both outlets, said the company "took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge" and would turn the lessons into "a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing."

Link is not dead. Katalyst says it will keep operating the spacecraft and may still get close enough to Swift to demonstrate its close-in navigation system. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, said in a statement that the agency is assessing "what milestones remain ahead."

Why Swift was falling in the first place

Every satellite in low Earth orbit loses altitude to atmospheric drag. When the Sun's activity ramps up, it heats the atmosphere, increases that drag, and orbits can decay quickly. NBC News reports that Swift's problems began in 2024 during a period of intense solar activity. That is why NASA's rescue effort had a deadline instead of a plan. The near-term loss is scientific.

Swift's combination of multi-wavelength instruments and agile pointing lets it find gamma-ray bursts and hand coordinates to other telescopes fast. Domagal-Goldman said the agency was hoping for more science from the observatory. He argued the takeaways from the rescue attempt would be worthwhile either way. The longer-term question is whether NASA can still build and fly spacecraft on the timelines it used to. That question is not hypothetical.

Goddard's empty labs

NPR reported on September 15 that seven current and former NASA scientists and engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said management forced them out of labs and facilities repeatedly over ten months. The result was the loss of specialized workspaces, staff and expensive machines used to build spacecraft. The relocations affected the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which launched late last month after 15 years of preparation and $4 billion.

Two engineers told NPR that propulsion teams had to test Roman's fuel with less sensitive gear because higher-quality tools had been lost in an earlier move. A radio communication lab asked to test an antenna for Roman had lost almost all of its equipment.

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

Current employees spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution for talking to the media, NPR said. NASA management told the network that moving scientists out of more than 80 facilities was aimed at reducing costs and eliminating "waste and redundancies," and that it aligned with a previously published master plan for the Goddard campus. The cost of that plan is showing up in the schedule.

NPR reported that one engineer said they had to launch a satellite before it was ready, something they had not done in more than a decade at Goddard. The satellite, called GRITSS, launched in July to help track changes to Earth's water levels and landmasses from space. Scientists told NPR they do not know whether it will work as intended because they could not test its radio communications before launch.

"We are half-blind in terms of trying to troubleshoot it," a scientist who worked on GRITSS told NPR. "The project had to eat the risk."

Another engineer said work on DAVINCI, a spacecraft being built to explore Venus, was delayed in August because the team had no place at Goddard to do its part of the job. Their lab and a specialized clean room for large spacecraft were moved out of another building in November. As of August, the space they were rushed out of remained vacant, the engineer said. Jack Kiraly, chief of advocacy at the Planetary Society, told NPR that the situation adds risk to an already risky endeavor. "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."

What the two stories have in common

Read together, the Swift failure and the Goddard account point at the same tension. NASA wants to move fast and take smart risks, as Isaacman put it, because low Earth orbit is getting crowded and commercial servicing is becoming a real capability. The Swift rescue was a bet on exactly that: a private startup, a small spacecraft, a nine-month sprint. But the Goddard reporting suggests the agency's ability to absorb risk on its own institutional side is thinner than its public statements imply.

Custom clean rooms and antenna chambers are not off-the-shelf purchases. Once they are gone, the workarounds are less precise, and the delays show up years later, on missions that have not launched yet. There is also a gap between the public accounting and the private one. Katalyst has not said what caused Link's failure, beyond the attitude control issues. NASA has not said what it will do next for high-energy astronomy. The agency's new PRIMA far-infrared telescope, announced this week, is slated for launch in 2033, which leaves a long stretch without Swift.

Swift is still up there for now, expected to reenter later this year. Link is still alive, still spinning down, still possibly useful for a rendezvous demonstration. The lessons NASA says it will learn are real, but they are arriving after the hardware, and after the labs, have already gone.