The director of Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA announced her resignation on Monday, marking another high -level departure while questions are looming on the budget and the future of the agency.
Makenzie Lystrup, who has been director of the center of Maryland since April 2023, will leave the agency on August 1, according to a statement from NASA. Goddard oversees a certain number of NASA key missions, including the Hubble space telescope, the solar dynamic observatory and the Osiris-Rex mission which collected samples from an asteroid.
The resignation of Lystrup comes less than two months after Laurie Leshin resigned as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in Pasadena, California.
Departures take place while NASA and other government agencies are facing significant funding and personnel discounts, as part of a wider thrust to reduce the size of the federal labor. The questions swirl internally at NASA and on Capitol Hill on how the space agency can do its work with much less staff and why such cuts are progressing before the congress has authorized the agency’s budget.
Meanwhile, more than 2,000 higher level employees are expected to leave NASA in an effort to reduce the agency’s workforce, as reported for the first time by Politico. These include people with management positions and people with specialized skills, has reported politico, which raises concerns about a “brain flight” at the space agency.
Workers of the space agency have until Friday to accept “deferred resignations”, buyouts or early retirement offers.
The budget proposed by President Donald Trump for 2026 would reduce approximately 25%, or more than $ 6 billion, from the NASA budget. The stiff cuts would come out of the divisions of space science, earth sciences and the agency’s mission, according to the BluePrint budget.
If it is promulgated by the congress, the budget would also eliminate the NASA spatial launch system and the Orion space vessels, which the agency developed to make astronauts on the moon.
In response to the budgetary plan, more than 280 current and former NASA employees have signed a letter to Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA, declaring that recent Trump administration policies “have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human security, weaken national security and undermine the basic mission of NASA”.
The letter, known as the Voyager declaration, said that changes have caused “catastrophic impacts” on the agency’s workforce and have “prioritized the political dynamics on human security, scientific progress and the effective use of public resources”.
Before Duffy replaced the previous NASA acting administrator, Janet Petro, the employees pressed it to explain how the budget cuts and the current restructuring served the best interest of the space agency, according to the internal correspondence read by NBC News.
It is not clear if the departures of Lystrup and Leshin are linked to the disorders in the course of NASA and other government agencies. In NASA’s announcement on Leshin’s resignation, he said it resigned “for personal reasons”.
The agency has not provided reason for the resignation of Lystrup. In an internal email obtained by NBC News, Lystrup said that it goes with “confidence” to the management team of Goddard “and all of you who will shape the next chapter of this center”.
“I am honored to have been part of this incredible trip with you,” she wrote in the email. “It was my privilege.”
NASA said on Monday that Cynthia Simmons, assistant director of Goddard, would take over as director of the interim center in August.
