Makenzie Lystrup stepping down as director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Another NASA bigwig is stepping down.

NASA announced on Monday (July 21) that Makenzie Lystrup, director of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, will leave the agency on Aug. 1.

It will be the second high-profile departure for the agency in just a two-month span; Laurie Leshin, head of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, left her post in June.

Goddard is home to the nation’s largest concentration of space scientists and engineers, according to NASA. The center, which was named after rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, features a workforce of more than 8,000 employees and contractors.

These people do a wide variety of work. Goddard is home to Hubble Space Telescope operations, for example, and served as a proving ground for that iconic observatory’s successor, the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.

The center has particular expertise in Earth observation, but its researchers study objects and phenomena across the solar system and beyond.

“Goddard scientists stare into the sun, grind up meteorites for signs of life’s building blocks, look into the farthest reaches of space and untangle the mysteries of our own changing world,” NASA officials wrote in a description of the center. “Goddard engineers construct sensitive instruments, build telescopes that peer into the cosmos and operate the test chambers that ensure those satellites’ survival.”

Lystrup has led Goddard since April 2023. She earned a doctorate in astrophysics from University College London and has used space- and ground-based telescopes to study planetary atmospheres and magnetospheres.

“Having served in a variety of science and aerospace civilian and government roles in her career, Makenzie has led development of, and/or contributed to, a variety of NASA’s priority science missions, including successful operations of our James Webb Space Telescope and Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, as well as development of the agency’s Roman Space Telescope, and more,” Vanessa Wyche, acting NASA associate administrator, said in a statement on Monday.

“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,” Wyche added.

Cynthia Simmons, currently Goddard’s deputy director, will take over from Lystrup in an acting capacity, NASA officials said in the statement. The release did not say what Lystrup plans to do next.

The departures of Leshin and Lystrup come during a turbulent time for NASA.

President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget, for instance, would slash the agency’s overall funding by 24% and cut the money for its science programs nearly in half. The budget, if enacted by Congress, would slash the agency’s workforce by about one-third and lead to the cancellation of dozens of missions, including a number that are currently operational.

JPL and Goddard are two of NASA’s 10 major research centers. The others are Ames Research Center and Armstrong Flight Research Center in California; Glenn Research Center in Ohio; Johnson Space Center in Texas; Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Langley Research Center in Virginia; Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama; and Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.