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You can add Another name for the thousands of employees who leave NASA while the Trump administration prepares the space agency for a budget cut of 25 percent.
On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave its position as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has occupied the main work in Goddard since April 2023, supervising a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and employees of contractors and a budget last year of approximately $ 4.7 billion.
These figures make Goddard the largest of the 10 NASA field centers dedicated mainly to scientific research and the development of robotic space missions, with a budget and workforce comparable to the NASA human space flight centers in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Goddard officials manage James Webb and Hubble in space, and Goddard engineers are gathering the Roman Nancy Grace Space Telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled for launch at the end of next year.
“We are grateful for Makenzie for her leadership in NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a golden age of explorers, scientists and engineers,” said Vanessa Wyche, associate administrator of NASA action, in a statement.
Cynthia Simmons, deputy director of Goddard, will assume the position of interim chief in the space center. Simmons began working in Goddard as contract engineer 25 years ago.
Lystrup arrived at NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of Bae Systems, where he administered the company’s work in civil projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup obtained a doctorate in astrophysics at the University College of London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.
Makenzie Lystrup in a discussion panel with the directors of the agency’s center at the Artemis 2024 Conference in Washington, DC.Courtesy of Joel Kowsky/Nasa
Formal dissent
The announcement of Goddard’s departure from Lystrup arrived hours after the launch of a Open letter to NASA’s interim administratorSecretary of Transportation Sean Duffysigned by hundreds of current and previous employees of the agency. The letter, entitled “The Declaration of Voyager”, identifies what the signatories call “recent policies that have threatened to waste public resources, compromise human security, weaken national security and undermine NASA’s central mission.”
“The main programmatic changes in NASA must be strategically implemented so that the risks are carefully administered,” says the letter. “On the other hand, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes that have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce. We are obliged to speak when our leadership prioritizes political impulse on human security, scientific advancement and efficient use of public resources.”
The letter is modeled in similar documents of dissent written by employees who protest the cuts and changes in policies in the National Health Institutes and the Environmental Protection Agency.
