LAS VEGAS — The head of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is resigning while hundreds of current and former agency employees voice their concerns about the direction of NASA under the new administration.
NASA announced July 21 that Makenzie Lystrup would step down as director of Goddard effective Aug. 1. She will be replaced on an acting basis by Cynthia Simmons, Goddard’s deputy center director.
“We’re grateful to Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers,” Vanessa Wyche, acting associate administrator of NASA, in a statement. That statement did not give a reason for Lystrup’s departure or a comment from her.
NASA hired Lystrup as Goddard director in April 2023. She came to the agency from Ball Aerospace (now BAE Systems), where she was vice president and general manager of civil space programs. She was the first woman to lead the Maryland center.
She is the second center director to leave in recent months. Laurie Leshin, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, announced May 7 she would leave effective June 1, citing personal reasons. She remains at Caltech, which runs JPL for NASA, as a professor of geochemistry and planetary science. David Gallagher, JPL associate director for strategic integration, took over as director.
Both JPL and Goddard are heavily involved in NASA science programs, which the administration sought to drastically cut in its fiscal year 2026 budget request. NASA requested just $3.9 billion for science, compared to $7.3 billion in 2025. However, a Senate spending bill would fully restore science funding, while its House counterpart partially restores funding to $6 billion.
The budget proposal also projected cutting NASA’s civil servant workforce by a third to about 12,000 employees. The proposed reductions were even steeper at Goddard, with NASA anticipating reducing the number of civil servants there from about 2,880 today to 1,549 in fiscal year 2026, a cut of 46%.
The Voyager Declaration
The announcement of Lystrup’s departure came the same day as the release of a statement signed by hundreds of current and former employees expressing a “formal dissent” to NASA’s current direction.
The Voyager Declaration, based on similar declarations involving National Institutes of Health and Environmental Protection Agency employees, tells NASA’s new acting administrator, Sean Duffy, of their concerns about budget cuts, workforce reductions and other changes.
“Major programmatic shifts at NASA must be implemented strategically so that risks are managed carefully. Instead, the last six months have seen rapid and wasteful changes which have undermined our mission and caused catastrophic impacts on NASA’s workforce,” the declaration reads.
The document is modeled on NASA’s processes for handling dissent regarding technical, programmatic and other decisions within the agency. The signatories call the declaration a formal dissent, or “substantive disagreement with a decision or action” that requires action by management.
The issues included in the declaration include budget cuts and closing out of ongoing missions, as well as canceling projects involving international partners. They also oppose “non-strategic staffing reductions” through ongoing deferred retirement and buyout plans.
The declaration is signed by 287 people that the document says includes current and former NASA employees representing every center and mission directorate. Of that total, 156 signatories are people “who share our concerns but choose not to be identified due to the culture of fear of retaliation cultivated by this administration.”
Those who did identify themselves include several former astronauts, such as Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Garrett Reisman, John Grunsfeld, John Herrington and Cady Coleman. Others include former top-level agency officials like Krista Paquin and Joe Rothenberg.