NASA announced Friday that it would permanently shut down the popular Space Science News website, which over the past three years had interpreted more than 400 studies and discoveries for a wide audience of space enthusiasts.

A source said large numbers of messages, bemoaning the decision, flowed into the electronic mailboxes associated with the site on Friday. The announcement had been made by e-mail to more than 150,000 subscribers of a site newsletter.

Meanwhile, it is clear that reinstating the project would require reassembling a team to run it.

The decision to kill Space Science News, operated by the Marshall Space Science Center, comes less than a month after the departure of science writer Dave Dooling, who had authored a healthy portion of the in-depth articles.

Dooling's contract expired December 21, and Marshall management chose not to renew it, taking the first step toward the shutdown.

"None of us wanted it to discontinue," Dooling said in a telephone interview Friday. "We had a lot of support in the lab. We really enjoyed working with the scientists."

The success of the site reached far beyond the lab, garnering more than 6 million visits in 1999, a "Webby" award and a Popular Science "50 Best of the Web" award.

The articles, produced by Dooling, Tony Phillips (who doubled as a "techie") and two interns, focused heavily on NASA researchers or work funded by NASA. They were read not only by scientists, but also by journalists as valuable background pieces for stories, and by the public as well.

Those who ran Space Science News saw their audience as anyone interested in space science, including people who might read Scientific American or watch the popular Nova television program. The site's popularity "cut across demographic boundaries," Dooling said.

Space Science News' leader was John Horack, a gamma-ray astronomer and overall director of Science Communications at Marshall. It was unclear Friday whether Horack has a job or not.

"John tried very hard to keep it going," Dooling said. "Central management decided it was not an area where they wanted to put their resources."

In an opinion article written for space.com and published November 19 as part of the "Space Visions" series, Horack and Rick E. Borchelt, former press secretary for science and technology in the Clinton White House, wrote of the need for scientists to improve their communication skills to more effectively reach the general public with their research results.

"As federal research budgets stagnate or decline, and despite public clamor for more and better scientific information, communication of basic research results continues to rank among the lowest agency priorities, mortgaged against traditional public relations activities to polish an agency’s image or control negative information flow to the press and public," Horack and Borchelt wrote.

"If new knowledge is generated but not communicated," the two argued, "only half the job has been done. This is a reflection of the transition of NASA from primarily an engineering organization used to help win the Cold War to a producer of new knowledge and technology in the national interest for the 21st century."

Space Science News, while clearly designed to promote NASA and its activities, did more. On occasion it served as photo album for professional and amateur pictures (and video footage) during an eclipse, and it was at times a clearinghouse for data and firsthand accounts of sightings during meteor showers.

And regardless of its goals, the science was always accurate, interesting and well explained.

And Dooling, at least, will continue writing about space science research, having found a job in the public relations department of a separate program on microgravity at Marshall.

"I'm very fortunate," Dooling said. "I landed on my feet."