Updated NASA’s Goddard Center Director, Makenzie Lystrup, is to depart after just over two years in the role.
The announcement was made on the same day past and present NASA staffers “exercised their expression of Formal Dissent” regarding the agency’s direction via the Voyager Declaration.
Lystrup became Goddard Center Director in April 2023, having previously worked at Ball Aerospace for almost a decade. Her most recent position at the company was Vice President and Manager of Civil Space.
Lystrup follows Laurie Leshin, former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who stepped down in June and was replaced by JPL veteran David Gallagher. Lystrup – who swore into the agency more than two years ago on a copy of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot – is set to leave the space agency on August 1. Cynthia Simmons, the current deputy center director, will then serve as acting center director.
The departures come at a time of turmoil within NASA. After a budget proposal that almost halved the agency’s science funding and bills aiming to put some or all of the money back in place, the mood among staff could charitably be described as “concerned,” as one insider put it. Reports have suggested that thousands of staff members might leave the agency before the cuts are formally announced.
The Voyager Declaration
Further evidence of unhappiness regarding NASA’s direction of travel emerged yesterday in the publication of the Voyager Declaration, a letter addressed to the space agency’s interim administrator, former reality TV performer Sean Duffy. The letter was signed by 287 current and former NASA employees; 156 chose not to be identified “due to the culture of fear of retaliation cultivated by this administration.”
“The last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce,” it says.
The letter, which references NASA’s procedures [PDF] for handling formal dissent, lists concerns including “indiscriminate cuts” to science and aeronautics research and “changes to NASA’s Technical Authority capacities that are driven by anything other than safety and mission assurance.”
“The culture of organizational silence promoted at NASA over the last six months already represents a dangerous turn away from the lessons learned following the Columbia disaster.” ®
Updated to add at 1320 UTC:
A NASA spokeswoman responded our queries about the Voyager Declaration with a statement: “NASA will never compromise on safety. Any reductions –including our current voluntary reduction – will be designed to protect safety-critical roles.
“Thanks to the innovators, risk-takers and researchers, NASA shocked the world in 1969 by ensuring Americans became the first to step on the moon. But the United States hasn’t been back since 1972. That’s a shame and means we shouldn’t continue down the same path we’ve been on for decades. We must revisit what’s working and what’s not so that we can inspire the American people again and win the space race.”
Referring to the letter published on the website of the Stand Up for Science group, whose advisory board includes several Nobel Prize contributors including highly influential RNA researchers and computer science boffins, as “claims” on a website that “advances radical, discriminatory DEI principles,” the spokeswoman added that “the reality is that President Trump has proposed billions of dollars for NASA science, demonstrating an ongoing commitment to communicating our scientific achievements. To ensure NASA delivers for the American people, we are continually evaluating mission lifecycles, not on sustaining outdated or lower-priority missions.”
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