NASA gave 105 acres of wooded land to the US Fish and Wildlife Service on July 7, 2026. The parcel, located near NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, is now part of the Patuxent Research Refuge, a large federal wildlife area established in 1936. This refuge is unusual in American conservation because it was created specifically to support scientific research.

NASA nicknamed the forest "Hundred Acre Wood," a playful reference to the woodland in A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh stories, as well as a nod to the land's original estimate of roughly 100 acres. Jamie Dunn, the director of NASA's Goddard center, participated in the official handoff. To mark the occasion, both agencies held up a US 250th anniversary pennant, tying the transfer to the country's semiquincentennial.

This agreement took years to finalize. The US Fish and Wildlife Service first approached NASA about acquiring the land in 2021. The conversation started after NASA identified the area, called Area 400, as land it no longer needed, according to a campus development plan the space agency approved in 2022. That plan described the parcel as roughly 100 acres of undeveloped forest.

When NASA announced plans to divest the land, environmental groups raised concerns. In 2022, conservationists warned that if the forest were sold to a private developer instead of added to the refuge, it could break up animal habitats that currently connect to the refuge's existing land. The Washington Post published an opinion article in January 2022 making this same argument. A few weeks later, the Bay Journal reported that the refuge's manager, Jennifer Greiner, said the Fish and Wildlife Service did not have enough money to buy the land on its own, which meant the forest's future depended on whether federal agencies could work together.

The final deal solved both problems. Instead of a sale, the land was transferred directly from one federal agency to another at no cost. This approach avoided the funding shortage and kept the forest out of private hands.

One important detail: the land has an industrial history. NASA documents show that the site has housed a chemical storage facility since 1964 and also contains a facility used for testing rocket fuel. Before NASA could hand over land with that kind of history, both agencies had to assess whether any chemical contamination remained and who would be responsible if problems arose later. This environmental review and safety agreement likely explains why the transfer took five years to complete, though neither agency has released details about the specific cleanup work done.

For NASA, the transfer freed up land the agency no longer needed for its current operations. For the Fish and Wildlife Service, it expanded the refuge by connecting existing forest patches—the kind of land consolidation that usually goes unnoticed but matters a great deal for keeping animal populations healthy and connected over the long term.

NASA owns substantial amounts of real estate that were built during the Cold War era for testing and research purposes, much of which the agency no longer uses for active missions. As NASA reassesses its facilities, the agency is likely to divest more of this inherited property. In this author's view, the significance here is not the acreage itself but rather that direct transfer between federal agencies proved capable of resolving a land-use dispute that a simple sale could not have—a model that may guide similar decisions elsewhere.