NASA Races to Save Aging Telescope as DC Deletes Heat Safety Pages

A $500 million space telescope is on the verge of becoming the world's most expensive piece of atmospheric kindling — and NASA only has until October to stop it.

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has been circling Earth since 2004, quietly doing some of the most important astronomy of the last two decades. It specializes in detecting gamma-ray bursts — brief, violent explosions from the far reaches of the universe that give scientists a rare window into the cosmos as it looked billions of years ago. Losing Swift wouldn't just be a financial hit. It would mean losing a scientific instrument that genuinely cannot be replaced overnight.

The problem started with the sun. A series of powerful solar storms recently pushed Swift's orbit lower than it's ever been. The observatory now sits at roughly 224 miles above Earth, and without intervention, atmospheric drag will eventually pull it down to burn up. The catch: Swift was never built with a propulsion system. It has no thrusters, no way to save itself. It's essentially a very expensive, very scientifically valuable rock slowly falling.

So NASA did what any reasonable institution would do when facing an irreversible deadline — it threw money at a startup and told them to hurry up.

The company NASA tapped is Katalyst Space Technologies, which has developed a spacecraft called Link specifically designed for exactly this kind of orbital rescue. Link uses a three-armed docking mechanism to latch onto satellites that were never designed to be grabbed. From there, it can use its own propulsion to drag the attached satellite into a higher orbit. The target here is to raise Swift by about 150 miles, which would buy the observatory years of additional operational life.

What makes this story genuinely remarkable isn't the technology, impressive as it is. It's the timeline. NASA gave Katalyst nine months to design, build, test, and launch a mission to intercept a tumbling, propulsion-free observatory in low Earth orbit. For context, most space missions take years — sometimes decades — from concept to launch. Katalyst pulled this off for $30 million, which in space budget terms is roughly the cost of a firmly worded press release from a larger agency.

Link launched Friday. If everything goes according to plan, it will intercept Swift, dock using those three robotic arms, and fire its engines to push the observatory back up to a safer altitude. If something goes wrong — a docking failure, a navigation miscalculation — Swift's fate is essentially sealed.

The mission is a useful reminder that some of the most creative problem-solving in aerospace right now isn't coming from the giants. A small company, a tight budget, and a hard deadline produced something that the industry hadn't really seen before. Whether it works is another question entirely.

Extreme heat kills more Americans every year than floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes combined. This week, as temperatures in New York City hit triple digits for the second consecutive day, the Department of Energy quietly deleted roughly 6,000 pages of energy conservation guidance from its website.

The timing is hard to ignore. The deletions came in the immediate aftermath of a political pile-on targeting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who had asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats to 78 degrees during the heatwave to reduce strain on the electrical grid. It was, by any reasonable measure, standard public safety advice. The kind of thing utility companies send in automated text messages every summer.

That didn't stop Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley, and Representative Nancy Mace from treating it like a declaration of war. Cruz — who became briefly famous for leaving Texas during a deadly winter storm — framed the thermostat guidance as socialism. Mace characterized it as an attack on women going through menopause, a concern that would carry more weight if it weren't coming from a party that has spent years systematically dismantling healthcare access for those same women.

Here's the part that makes the political outrage especially hollow: 78 degrees was already the Department of Energy's official recommended thermostat setting during peak heat periods. Republican Governor Greg Abbott issued similar guidance in Texas. This is not a radical leftist position. It is a suggestion that has appeared on utility bills.

Regardless, the pages are gone. And the deletions weren't surgical. Yes, the thermostat guidance pages were removed. But so were pages about water conservation, home insulation types, and the agency's Solar Decathlon program — a competition that has nothing to do with air conditioning or New York City politics. Whatever the original motivation, the administration ended up deleting a broad swath of publicly funded educational resources during one of the most dangerous heat events the Northeast has seen in years.

The Internet Archive stepped in to preserve what was lost, which is doing a lot of civic heavy lifting for a nonprofit that runs on donations.

The practical stakes here are real. When temperatures stay above 95 degrees for days at a stretch — two of those days crossed 100 in New York — the electrical grid gets pushed to its limits. Voluntary thermostat adjustments during peak hours are one of the few tools available to prevent rolling blackouts. A blackout during a heatwave isn't an inconvenience. For elderly residents, people with chronic illness, and anyone without a backup option, it can be fatal.

Deleting the information doesn't change the physics. It just means fewer people have access to advice that could keep them safe.