NASA Astronomical Data Center terminated 2002 with no formal successor

The NASA Astronomical Data Center, a federally funded archive of stellar, galactic, and extragalactic catalogs operated by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for 25 years, was terminated in October 2002 after NASA determined that its services "sufficiently overlap those provided by [other services] to allow termination" (S-0035).

Users were redirected informally to the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg, with no formally designated successor and curation responsibility fragmented across multiple independent services.

This is C-0020's discontinuation pattern at the federal-agency scale. Even a federally-funded national archive in active scientific use was terminated on a single agency's strategic decision. The redirect mechanism was informal — there was no preservation contract enforceable against future erosion. The data has continued to be accessible through CDS and other follow-on services, but the architectural property holds: a single organizational decision determined the data's continued availability, and the institution that made that decision had no continuing obligation to maintain access.

The 25-year operational life sits well above the §3.4 median of 12 years (E-0006) but is still well below the timescales scientific archives are usefully measured against.