You can add a different name to the thousands of employees who leave NASA while the Trump administration prevents the space agency for a budget reduction of 25 percent.
On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her position as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday 1. August. Since April 2023, Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard, who supervises a staff of more than 8,000 officials and contractors and a budget of around $ 4.7 billion last year.
These figures make Goddard the largest of the 10 field centers of NASA, mainly devoted to scientific research and development of robot rooms, with a budget and staff members similar to NASA's Human SpaceFlight centers in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Goddard officials manage the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and Goddard -ingieurs collect the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a different flagship observatory planned for launch at the end of next year.
“We are grateful to make seeking for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists and engineers,” said Vanessa Wyche, acting associate manager of NASA, in a statement.
Cynthia Simmons, Deputy Director of Goddard, will take over as acting head in the Space Center. Simmons started working at Goddard 25 years ago as a contract engineer.
Lystrup came to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of Bae Systems, where she managed the work of the company for civilian space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before he came to Ball Aerospace, Lystrup obtained a doctorate in Astrophysics at the University College London and did research as a planetary astronomer.
Formal disagreements
The announcement of Lystrup's departure from Goddard came hours after the release of an open letter to the interim manager of NASA, transport secretary Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former employees of the agency. The letter, entitled the “The Voyager Declaration”, identifies what the signatories “recently calls policy that has or threatens to waste public resources, to jeopardize human security, to weaken national security and undermine the NASA mission core.”
