Space Capsules

A few miles east of campus, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been home base for missions ranging from the Vanguard Project, which launched some of the nation’s first satellites, to the Hubble Space Telescope and a suite of recent spacecraft observations of the Earth, the sun and more.

This year is the center’s 60th anniversary, so the scientists, engineers and others who work there have had plenty of time to pile up and squirrel away a vast trove of material that tells those stories, along with important elements of the overall history of American space exploration.

It’s the job of Holly McIntyre M.L.S. ’10, who three years ago founded the Goddard Archives, to track it down and make sense of it all.

Frequently, a move of one sort or another—between offices, to a new home, retirement, even death—spurs a donation of material to McIntyre’s archive. When she goes to pick up the folder or wheel away the handcart, she’s not aiming for important public records, the kind that are permanently housed by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), where she worked before coming to NASA in 2015.

Instead, she’s going after the far larger category of temporary documents and items that would eventually be disposed of—from papers to digital documents to audiovisual artifacts (aided by her undergraduate film degree from Towson University).

“These are things that would be slated for disposal,” she said. “Some people get really freaked out—destruction! But you really can’t keep everything.”

She tries to keep the best of it, however—items that could be useful to the center’s current staff, precious records that future historians or scientists might draw on, along with sometimes humorous slices of life from bygone days at Goddard.

Some finds include:

• A set of meticulously handwritten personal notebooks from H. John Wood III, an astrophysicist and engineer who was crucial to the success of the Hubble Space Telescope. His notes detail his work leading the team that solved Hubble’s potentially catastrophic mirror problem while in orbit, allowing the most detailed images ever seen of deep space. (Wood also taped in a snapshot of himself mugging with a puppet.)
   
• A collection of NASA swag from over the years, including a chunky ‘70s-era Voyager program belt buckle (perfect to wear while cranking “Space Trucking,” perhaps). Part of McIntyre and her staff’s job is creating custom storage boxes for such artifacts.
   
• Photos collected by June Clark, late wife of the center’s second director, John Clark, including a sheaf of pictures that show former UMD head basketball coach Lefty Driessell attending what appears to be a meeting at Goddard in the early 1970s.
   
• Reams of old center newsletters, including a 1965 one headlined “Goddard Wives Plan a Fur Clinic and Fashion Show,” and a 1977 edition that heralded the Goddard clinic’s new “Automatic Blood Pressurometer with digital readout and on-line computer program that provides a cardiovascular risk assessment.”

The scope of her task might be daunting to some, but McIntyre, a self-described “big-picture person,” became intensely excited about the job when she learned during her interview that it included building an archive from the ground up. “I called my best friend and said, ‘I have to get this job. I’m going to be heartbroken if I don’t. The idea of starting an archive is my dream.”

A few years in (and with a storage room she expects to reach capacity by early 2020), McIntyre regularly hires interns from UMD’s College of Information Studies, where her former NARA colleague, Ken Heger, is director of the archives and digital curation specialization.

“Holly's archives is a great place for a field study site,” Heger said in an email. “She's the one who created that archives; that gives students a chance to work with someone who saw the need for an archives, designed it and got the administration to approve it … Her work also gives students a chance to do virtually all aspects of archival work, e.g. appraisal, processing, description and preservation.”

Beyond the basics of archiving, McIntyre is aiming for a culture shift at Goddard, where greater recognition of the past can inspire future exploits.

“Instead of this constant push forward to the next project and the discovery, which is kind of the nature of the beast with science, I'd like for us to have some way to slow down for a minute and say, wow, we made that happen, we discovered this, we created this,” she said. “And then to be able to preserve and celebrate that and push it out to the American public so they understand the incredible work we’re doing here.”