Nasa News, Lego nasa, Nasa Acting Administrator Sean Duffy

Nasa News, Lego nasa, Nasa Acting Administrator Sean Duffy 

 

Mackenzie Lystrup will leave her position as director of the Goddard Space Flight Centre on Friday, August 1, according to a Monday NASA announcement. Since April 2023, Lystrup has been the head of Goddard, managing a budget of around $4.7 billion last year and a workforce of over 8,000 government and contractor employees.

With a manpower and budget similar to NASA's human spaceflight centres in Texas, Florida, and Alabama, Goddard is the largest of the agency's ten field centres devoted primarily to scientific research and the development of robotic space missions. Goddard engineers are putting together the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled to launch late next year, while Goddard staff oversee the Hubble and James Webb telescopes in orbit.

In a statement, NASA Acting Associate Administrator Vanessa Wich stated, "We are grateful to MacKenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two decades, including her work to inspire a golden age of explorers, scientists, and engineers."

Cynthia Simmons, a deputy director at Goddard, will take over as the space center's acting chief of staff. Twenty-five years ago, Simmons started working as a contract engineer at Goddard.

Before joining NASA, Lystrup oversaw Ball Aerospace's civil space projects for NASA and other federal organisations. Ball Aerospace is now a part of BAE Systems. Lystrup worked as a planetary astronomer and obtained a doctorate in astrophysics from University College London before joining Ball Aerospace.

Official disagreement 

Lestrup's retirement from Goddard was announced just hours after an open letter signed by hundreds of current and former NASA personnel was released by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the agency's acting administrator. The signatories signed the letter, which is headed "The Voyager Declaration," "condemn recent policies that waste public resources, compromise human safety, undermine national security, and threaten to undermine NASA's core mission."

 

Major programming changes in NASA must be performed thoughtfully so that risks are carefully managed." Instead, we have witnessed swift and inefficient changes over the last six months that have weakened our mission and severely impacted NASA's personnel. We must speak up when our leadership puts political momentum ahead of scientific progress, human safety, and the effective use of public funds.

The letter is an extension of similar dissenting documents that staff members at the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institutes of Health wrote to protest cuts and policy changes.

"We urge your not to implement the detrimental cuts made by this administration, as they are not in NASA's best interest," the note continues. "We want to continue NASA's important work as Congress has approved and appropriated it.

Current high-ranking NASA officials are not among the signatories who opted to remain anonymous, and there is no indication that the letter and Lestrup's departure from Goddard are related.
What's Written on the Wall

However, it's crucial to remember that the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts will have a significant negative impact on the Goddard Space Flight Centre, located in Greenbelt, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. The White House’s year-end 2026 budget demand asks Congress for $18.8 billion for NASA, which is approximately 25 less than this year’s the allocated funds. Numerous NASA projects that are either in space or under development would have to be cancelled as a result of the reduction in funding for the Science Directorate from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion.

In February, spending plans that would bring NASA funding back to close to this year's budget of roughly $25 billion were presented by appropriations committees in both chambers of Congress. Prior to being sent to the White House for President Trump's signature, the budget bills must be approved by both the Senate and the entire House.

 

However, senators fear that the administration of Donald Trump may attempt to thwart any congressional budget and proceed with longer-term sequester cutbacks to NASA and other federal agencies. That would probably lead to a legal dispute regarding the power of the president to decline to use funds that Congress has allocated.

The Trump administration is continuing to offer federal civil servants buyouts, deferred resignations, and early your golden years. At a meeting of the public last month, Brian Hughes, the chief of staff of NASA and a political appointee of Trump, stated that the agency is functioning under the presumption that the White House's budget will be implemented. Thus, the tale is far from over.

The funding for science at NASA is linked to Goddard's work. NASA's astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics, and planetary science accounts, all under its Scientific Missions Directorate, provide Goddard with about 60% of its budget.

Goddard is in charge of a number of NASA sites, such as the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas, the White Sands Complex in New Mexico, the NASA Katherine Johnson Autonomous Validation and Verification Facility in West Virginia, and the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

Caltech's subsidised Jet Motion Laboratory within Pasadena, California, is another NASA facility that has been slashed. The majority of NASA's robotic endeavours to explore the solar system, including the Voyager probes, a string of increasingly advanced Mars rovers, and most recently, the Europa Clipper mission, which launched from Earth this past year to investigate Jupiter's enigmatic icy moon, were all designed by JPL.

Due in part to budget uncertainty related to the future of NASA's Mars Sample Return Program, JPL's centre director, Larry Leshine, resigned on June 1 after directing the layoff of over 10% of the lab's staff last year. The robotic Mars sample exchange program would be discontinued in favour of eventually returning rock samples from the Red Planet to future human expeditions, according to the Trump administration's budget proposal.

 

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