NASA Goddard Center Director quits as agency staffers issue dissent letter NASA's Goddard Center Director, Makenzie Lystrup, is to depart after just over two years in the role. Hubble Space Telescope by NASA NASA veteran warns Hubble faces death by a hundred cuts READ MORE The announcement was made on the same day past and present NASA staffers "exercised their expression of Formal Dissent" …
"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."
As per: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/trump_shoots_climate_messenger/ perhaps?
"Thanks to the innovators" should read "thanks to those German scientists and rocketeers we poached from Europe"
No surprise that since that source drained, USA never returned to the Moon... and Trump is ensuring foreigners see America less and less a welcoming place to work.
I salute her courage and her own form of protest. She is not reponsible for the budget cuts of the orange baboon and his clique of crazed monkeys.
The message is clear : the US is no longer interested in funding Science.
Another year and Trump will find a way to get rid of STEM classes entirely.
Oh wait, he's already cut the budget of education as well . . .
They won't get rid of STEM classes, just insist on teaching a 'patriotic' version. Whatever conclusion they want reached will be taught towards. HHS has already adopted the new MAHA Lysenkoism, and shit flows downstream. Medical science, biology more broadly and Earth-science will be the first to be corrected to be philosophically in-line with the party.
Even the canned statement from NASA sounds reflective of the new administration:
"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."
The Apollo programme was famously/infamously risk averse (leading to overconfidence and a backlash against it for the Shuttle programme), especially after Apollo 1. And I don't think NASA shocked anyone with the achievement - they'd spent 10 years incrementally leading up to it.
That statement gives the impression it was a gung-ho frontier-land approach that no-one saw coming.
>The Apollo programme was famously/infamously risk averse
The first manned Saturn V launch was the first one that hadn't exploded
Not sure Apollo was risk averse. They did think a little more about safety after the Mercury oppsie but it was probably more like a 60s military attitude; over-plan, over-build, over-prepare but expect you are going to lose some people because accidents happen at the cutting edge
Don't forget Apollo 1 or Apollo 13 (at least those guys made it home, barely). I was a young teenager during the Apollo program and vividly remember all the triumphs and tragedies. Although not Apollo specific there were two preventable (what's a little too cold temperature or falling ice going to do?), Space Shuttle tragedies.
The United Sates America is well on the way to becoming a bit player on the world scene in science, trade, democratic principles (OK we've always been a bit wobbly there), and humanitarianism all because of one man and the congressional and judicial sycophants that kowtow to his every undeniably stupid whim.
You've slightly conflated the assumption and the conclusion there. NASA *did* assume that they were going to lose people to Apollo, due to the levels of unknown they were facing and the sheer size of the challenge, and as a result leaned very heavily into risk management processes to minimise this outcome.
The Shuttle programme, as a result, inadvertently took a different approach and assumed that the Apollo success would carry through, and so minimise the risk management, leading to 2 failures (and dozens more close-calls).
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190002249/downloads/20190002249.pdf
The "normalisation of deviance" is another interesting thing to look at, where NASA effectively learned to ignore issues outside of tolerance *because the mission didn't fail* and allowed them to accumulate. There were multiple o-ring issues and tile degradation events before the losses.
"NASA will never compromise on safety. Any reductions –including our current voluntary reduction – will be designed to protect safety-critical roles."
If the "wrong" people decide to leave,ie those in "safety-critical roles", are they going to force them to stay? As we all know, when an organisation is in trouble, those with the most marketable skills and foresight are the first to leave. Those left are the ones near retirement hoping for a good redundancy payout and the those who either think they can weather the storm or don't feel they have the option to go job hunting until they have to because they are not the high-skilled, in-demand people..
