NASA Madrid wildfires damage appears limited to cables
NASA says its Madrid deep-space antennas and buildings avoided major wildfire damage, while The Register reports burned cables at the site.
By Dominic Okoye · Staff Writer
· 3 min read
NASA Madrid wildfires damage appears to be limited rather than catastrophic: the agency said its Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex showed no major structural harm to antennas or buildings, while a person familiar with the situation told The Register that some cables appear to have burned. For space operators, the near miss matters because the facility is one of three ground complexes NASA uses to talk to spacecraft beyond Earth orbit.
NASA said over the weekend that the fire situation was still changing and that more inspections would be needed. The agency did not disclose how many cables were affected, whether any antenna was taken out of service, or how long local repairs could take.
NASA said its Space Communications and Navigation program moved mission support to the Deep Space Network’s other complexes in Goldstone, California, and Canberra, Australia. According to NASA, that shift preserved spacecraft communications without interruption. The agency’s statement did not name the missions affected by the transfer of support.
Was NASA's Madrid complex damaged by the wildfires?
NASA’s public position is that the Madrid complex avoided serious damage to its large dishes and buildings. The narrower reported damage is to cabling, based on a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke to The Register, and NASA has cautioned that inspections are not finished.
The Madrid site is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, the ground infrastructure used for two-way communications with planetary probes and other spacecraft. The network is geographically split among Spain, California and Australia so spacecraft can remain in contact as Earth rotates.
The Madrid complex includes DSS-63, a 70-meter antenna. NASA has two other 70-meter dishes, one at Goldstone and one at Canberra. Those antennas began as 64-meter dishes and were enlarged between 1982 and 1988 to improve sensitivity for Voyager 2’s Neptune encounter.
The fallback to Goldstone and Canberra is standard network resilience, but the margin is not unlimited. NASA’s 70-meter Goldstone antenna was damaged last year when it over-rotated during support for the Juno mission. NASA classified that incident as a Type A mishap and said the structure and cables suffered excessive stress, while the fire suppression system was damaged and caused significant flooding. Repairs and upgrades are expected to run until October 2028.
What happened to ESA's Cebreros antenna?
The European Space Agency also had ground infrastructure exposed to the Spanish fires. ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the Cebreros antenna, about 77 kilometers west of Madrid, had been declared green for normal operations as of yesterday.
Cebreros, also called Deep Space Antenna 2, supports missions including Mars Express and Solar Orbiter. The station marked 20 years since its inauguration in September 2025.
The immediate result is a contained infrastructure event rather than a reported loss of deep-space communications capacity. The open questions are operational rather than dramatic: how much cabling at Madrid must be replaced, whether inspections find hidden damage, and how NASA balances load across a network already dealing with a long-running Goldstone repair program.
This story draws on original reporting from The Register.
