A NASA space telescope is falling out of the sky, and to save it the agency skipped its own contractors and handed the job to a four-year-old startup that had never flown a spacecraft — nine months and $30 million after its own $2 billion rescue program c

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has spent 21 years as astronomy's first responder, swinging toward exploding stars faster than any other telescope. Now it is falling toward Earth. And on July 3, a…