There is a word for what is happening at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and it is not “modernization” or “consolidation.” It is epistemicide: the killing of ways of knowing, and the deliberate destruction of the institutions that store, validate, and transmit knowledge. NASA is permanently closing its largest research library at Goddard, a 100,000‑volume collection that has underpinned missions from Hubble to Webb since 1959, and a significant share of that material is slated to be “tossed away.”

Epistemicide is usually discussed in the context of colonialism, where dominant powers erase indigenous knowledge systems to replace them with their own. What is happening at Goddard is more perverse: a state turning the mechanism inward, dismantling its own high‑resolution memory system while insisting it is simply cleaning house.

NASA officials and Trump‑era reorganization language frame the shutdown as a cost‑saving move: close 13 buildings and more than 100 labs on the 1,270‑acre campus, save around $10 million a year, and avoid tens of millions in deferred maintenance. The library’s holdings will be “reviewed” over two months; a small fraction will go to government storage, while the rest will be handed to the General Services Administration and physically discarded.​

The Goddard engineers’ union reports that only perhaps 10–15 percent of the collection can realistically be saved, with 85–90 percent of books and documents bound for dumpsters, along with specialized electronics and equipment designed to test spacecraft that has already been thrown out. You do not see flames or banned‑book lists; you see pallets, warehouses, euphemisms, and a press line about “consolidation” instead of “closure.”

Once the doors close, staff are told they can still use a digital “Ask a Librarian” service or request inter‑library loans from other federal libraries. On paper, that sounds like continuity; in practice, it is a downgrade from a dense, researcher‑controlled knowledge environment to a thin, mediated helpdesk bolted onto an already incomplete digital corpus.​

A physical research library is not just a room of objects; it is an architecture of serendipity, tacit knowledge, and context that lives in how materials are collected, shelved, browsed, and recombined by people who understand both the domain and the archive. When you fragment that into boxes in a warehouse and a web form, you have not “modernized” anything; you have narrowed what can be known in practice to whatever is digitized, licensed, and easy to route through an online query.

The timing and rhetoric around Goddard’s closure do not exist in a vacuum. While NASA public affairs insists this is a neutral consolidation that predates Trump, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen is openly accusing the Trump administration of a haphazard assault on Goddard’s workforce and scientific mission. This is the same political ecosystem where news executives brag about ignoring “academics and elites” on air, and where expertise is recast as a liability rather than a safeguard.​

Epistemicide thrives in that atmosphere because you do not need to censor research if you quietly destroy the infrastructure that makes deep research possible. You cut science librarians; you shutter labs; you toss specialized instruments and unique documents; you point to cost savings; you tell people they can still get PDFs. What you actually erase is the capacity to challenge bad policy, flawed data, and convenient myths with long‑memory, high‑resolution evidence.

NASA Goddard’s library was not a museum piece; it was an active cognitive organ inside a complex system. Shuttering it, after already closing seven other NASA libraries since 2022 and leaving only a handful of physical collections, is not a neutral administrative tweak but a structural lobotomy performed on a leading science agency.​

Epistemicide is often imagined as something done to marginalized communities by outside powers. The Goddard case shows a different pattern: a government sabotaging its own capacity to remember, verify, and imagine, and doing it under cover of spreadsheets and real‑estate plans instead of matches and manifestos. You do not have to burn books if you can persuade a space agency to treat its library like trash; the outcome for knowledge is the same, but the paperwork looks respectable.