NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has named Dr. Makenzie Lystrup director of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, effective immediately. She will make history as the first female center director at Goddard.

Lystrup succeeds Dave Mitchell, who has served as Goddard’s acting center director since January 2023, and now resumes his duties as the agency’s chief program management officer at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Goddard Space Flight Center is one of NASA’s largest field centers. Its sites include the primary campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, as well as Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility in West Virginia, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the White Sands Complex in New Mexico, and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas. Goddard is responsible for the oversight and execution of a $4 billion portfolio and is home to the nation’s largest concentration of scientists, engineers, and technologists dedicated to Earth and space science. Its workforce consists of more than 10,000 employees, both civil servants and contractors.

Prior to joining NASA, Lystrup was vice president and general manager of civil space at Ball Aerospace, where she was responsible for the company’s portfolio of civil space systems that span across all science fields, operational weather and Earth observation, as well as advanced technologies development objectives. In this role, she led Ball’s contributions to several missions, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), Landsat 9, and the Roman Space Telescope.

Lystrup has also served as senior director for Ball’s Civil Space Advanced Systems and Business Development, where she managed new business activities for NASA, NOAA, and other civilian U.S. government agencies as well as for academia and other science organizations.

For more information on Lystrup, please see her biography online at https://go.nasa.gov/43cQOgn.