NASA fact sheets—missing and found
November 25, 2025 at 9:50 PM by Dr. Drang
While I was putting together my recent post on Maya calendar calculations, I tried to get some information on the Moon from a NASA website. Specifically, a page with the prosaic name Moon Fact Sheet at the URL
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html
The gsfc part of the domain refers to the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the nssdc part refers to the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive (formerly the National Space Science Data Center, which explains the missing a). It’s one of several similar pages with nicely summarized information on planets and other bodies in the solar system.
Did I say it is one of several such pages? I meant it was one of several such pages. They’re all gone and apparently have been for a few months now. Why? Well, my first thought was some sort of DOGE-inspired budget cut that saved the US taxpayer the untold billions of dollars necessary to host maybe as much as a half-megabyte of static HTML.
Or maybe NASA itself was to blame. Maybe it decided to replace the dry but wonderfully useful tables of numbers with this page and similar, which have lots of nice images but very few numbers. Or maybe the various Fact Sheets have been moved where neither Google nor Kagi can find them.
Whatever the answer, I was sad for the loss. But only momentarily. Because the Internet Archive still had the Moon Fact Sheet and all the other Planetary Fact Sheets. Hooray!
I’ve bookmarked the planetary sheet, as it has links to all the others. For what it’s worth, the last archived versions seem to date from August of this year.
As an early Christmas present to myself, and to the rest of the internet, I made a donation.