NASA announced Friday that Janet Petro, the Director of Kennedy Space Center, is retiring after nearly two decades of agency service. Deputy Director Kelvin Manning will step in as acting center director, effective immediately. Petro was the 11th Administrator of the nation’s flagship spaceport.

The announcement came in a letter from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman to the agency workforce. Isaacman credited Petro with playing a central role in reshaping Kennedy from a Shuttle-era launch complex into the nation’s premier multi-user spaceport, and with guiding the center through the early stand-up of the Artemis campaign.

Space Is The Petro Family Business

Janet Petro is one of the Space Coast’s own. She grew up in Satellite Beach, the daughter of a Chrysler engineer who came to Florida in the early 1960s to build consoles for the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft and stayed on through Apollo and the Space Shuttle program. After graduating from Satellite High, she headed north to West Point, finishing in 1981 as part of the second class of women to earn commissions from the academy.

She served as an Army aviator in Germany before moving into the aerospace industry, eventually joining NASA in 2007 as Kennedy’s deputy director.

Petro was named Kennedy’s 11th leader in June 2021, succeeding Bob Cabana, who left to become NASA associate administrator. Her tenure saw the most concentrated launch tempo the Space Coast has seen since Apollo.

In January 2025, President Donald Trump appointed her acting NASA administrator, again the first woman to hold the role. She served until July 2025, when the President named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to succeed her, and returned to Kennedy as center director the same week. Friday’s announcement closes that return tour at roughly 10 months, with the Artemis II launch campaign running for most of that period.

The New Guy Is The Old Guy

The new acting director is a familiar face for KSC workers. Kelvin Manning, who held the same title from January through July of last year while Petro was in Washington.

Manning has spent more than 32 years at Kennedy, joining the center in 1992 inside the former Shuttle Processing Directorate. Over the course of the Shuttle program, he served as flow director for Atlantis, vehicle manager for Columbia, and NASA test director, the launch-room role responsible for orchestrating final countdown operations from the Launch Control Center. As the Constellation program stood up in the mid-2000s, he was selected as the first division chief for the Orion spacecraft at Kennedy, putting him at the leading edge of what would become the Artemis crew vehicle.

Manning served more than a decade as Kennedy’s associate director before being named deputy director in July 2021. His path to Kennedy began at the U.S. Air Force Academy followed by a six-year active-duty tour as a space operations analyst at Eglin Air Force Base and at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center.