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Nearly 3,000 people leave NASA, and this director is one of them

You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA because the Trump administration begins the space agency for a budget drop of 25%.

NASA announced on Monday that Makenzie Lystrup would leave her post as director of Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has been the first job at Goddard since April 2023, supervising staff of more than 8,000 officials and employees of entrepreneurs, and a budget last year of around $ 4.7 billion.

These figures make Goddard the largest of the 10 NASA field centers mainly devoted to scientific research and the development of robotic spatial missions, with a budget and a workforce comparable to NASA human flight centers in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Goddard officials manage the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and the engineers of Goddard assemble the Roman space telescope of Nancy Grace, another flagship observatory provided for the launch at the end of next year.

“We are grateful to Makenzie for his leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including his work to inspire a golden age of explorers, scientists and engineers,” said Vanessa Wyche, NASA acting administrator in a statement.

Cynthia Simmons, assistant director of Goddard, will take over as an acting chief at the Space Center. Simmons started working at Goddard as a contractual engineer 25 years ago.

Lystrup came to NASA of Ball Aerospace, which is now part of Bae Systems, where it managed the work of the company on civil space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup obtained a doctorate in astrophysics from the University College of London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.

Formal dissent

The announcement of the departure of Lystrup de Goddard occurred a few hours after the publication of an open letter to the interim administrator of NASA, the Secretary of Transport, Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former employees of the agency. The letter, entitled “The Declaration of Traveling”, identifies what the signatories call “recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human security, weaken national security and undermine the basic mission of NASA.”

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