A senior NASA senior official among the thousands of employees out of the agency
Can add Another name of thousands of employees who leave NASA, as the Trump administration, considers a space agency to reduce the budget by 25 %.
On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave his post as director of Godard Space Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has been doing the top in Godard since April 2023 and with the supervision of more than 8,000 government employees and contractor and the budget of about $ 4.7 billion last year.
These figures make Godard the largest 10 NASA field centers dedicated to scientific research and development of robotic space missions, comparable to NASA’s human flight centers in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Authorities are managing James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and Godard engineers collecting the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another flagship observatory planned for late next year.
“We are grateful to Machanzazi for his leadership in NASA for more than two years, including his work to inspire the Golden Age of Kashfan, scientists and engineers,” said NASA’s co -worker director.
Cynthia Simmons, the deputy director of Godard, will take over as an actor in the space center. Simmons started as a contract engineer 25 years ago in Godard.
Lystrup from Ball Aerospace, now part of Bae Systems, came to NASA, where he managed the company’s work in civilian space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining the Aerospace Ball, Lystrup obtained a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of London College and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.
Makenzie Lystrup in a discussion with the IAEA managers at the Artemis 2024 Conference in Washington DC.With goodwill from Joel Kuski/NASA
Formal opposition
The Listrope departure announcement was released hours after the release of a free letter to NASA’s interim manager, the secretary of Shan Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former agency employees. In the letter titled “Voyager’s Declaration”, what signatories call “recent policies that are wasting public resources or threatening public resources, endangering human security, weakening national security and weakening NASA’s main mission.”
“The major programming changes in NASA need to be strategically implemented so that the risks can be carefully managed,” the letter said. “Instead, the past six months have witnessed rapid and futile changes that have weakened our mission and created catastrophic impacts on NASA. We have to speak when our leadership is to prioritize political movement on human safety, scientific progress and efficient use of public resources.”
The letter is modeled on similar documents by employees to protest the decline and change of policy at the National Health and Environmental Protection Agency.
