You may add one other identify to the 1000’s of staff leaving NASA because the Trump administration primes the area company for a 25 % funds minimize.
On Monday, NASA introduced that Makenzie Lystrup will depart her publish as director of the Goddard House Flight Heart on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the highest job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a employees of greater than 8,000 civil servants and contractor staff, and a funds final yr of about $4.7 billion.
These figures make Goddard the most important of NASA’s 10 discipline facilities primarily dedicated to scientific analysis and growth of robotic area missions, with a funds and workforce corresponding to NASA’s human spaceflight facilities in Texas, Florida, and Alabama. Officers at Goddard handle the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in area, and Goddard engineers are assembling the Nancy Grace Roman House Telescope, one other flagship observatory scheduled for launch late subsequent yr.
“We’re grateful to Makenzie for her management at NASA Goddard for greater than two years, together with her work to encourage a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers,” Vanessa Wyche, NASA’s performing affiliate administrator, mentioned in a press release.
Cynthia Simmons, Goddard’s deputy director, will take over as performing chief on the area middle. Simmons began work at Goddard as a contract engineer 25 years in the past.
Lystrup got here to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now a part of BAE Methods, the place she managed the corporate’s work on civilian area tasks for NASA and different federal businesses. Earlier than becoming a member of Ball Aerospace, Lystrup earned a doctorate in astrophysics from College School London and carried out analysis as a planetary astronomer.
Formal dissent
The announcement of Lystrup’s departure from Goddard got here hours after the discharge of an open letter to NASA’s interim administrator, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, signed by a whole lot of present and former company staff. The letter, titled the “The Voyager Declaration,” identifies what the signatories name “current insurance policies which have or threaten to waste public assets, compromise human security, weaken nationwide safety, and undermine the core NASA mission.”
