\n<\/p>\n
You can add<\/span> another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut.<\/p>\n On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees and a budget last year of about $4.7 billion.<\/p>\n These figures make Goddard the largest of NASA\u2019s 10 field centers primarily devoted to scientific research and development of robotic space missions, with a budget and workforce comparable to NASA\u2019s human spaceflight centers in Texas, Florida, and Alabama. Officials at Goddard manage the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and Goddard engineers are assembling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled for launch late next year.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re grateful to Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers,\u201d Vanessa Wyche, NASA\u2019s acting associate administrator, said in a statement.<\/p>\n Cynthia Simmons, Goddard\u2019s deputy director, will take over as acting chief at the space center. Simmons started work at Goddard as a contract engineer 25 years ago.<\/p>\n Lystrup came to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of BAE Systems, where she managed the company\u2019s work on civilian space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup earned a doctorate in astrophysics from University College London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Makenzie Lystrup at a panel discussion with agency center directors at the 2024 Artemis Suppliers Conference in Washington, DC.<\/span>Courtesy of Joel Kowsky\/Nasa<\/span><\/p>\n The announcement of Lystrup\u2019s departure from Goddard came hours after the release of an open letter to NASA\u2019s interim administrator, transportation secretary Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former agency employees. The letter, titled the \u201cThe Voyager Declaration,\u201d identifies what the signatories call \u201crecent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMajor programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully,\u201d the letter reads. \u201cInstead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA\u2019s workforce. We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety, scientific advancement, and efficient use of public resources.\u201d<\/p>\n The letter is modeled on similar documents of dissent penned by employees protesting cuts and policy changes at the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut. On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11825,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[2239,498,438,3331,5323,2161,1152,1168],"class_list":{"0":"post-11824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-agency","9":"tag-among","10":"tag-leaving","11":"tag-nasa","12":"tag-official","13":"tag-staff","14":"tag-thousands","15":"tag-top"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Formal Dissent<\/h2>\n