In her new book, the space industry veteran Lori Garver, a former NASA Deputy Administrator ,chronicles her space career and highlights her struggle navigating a bloated bureaucracy to help realize the agency's true potential through the utilization of commercial crew. Garver recently sat down with Space. com to talk about the book, called " Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age (opens in new tab) " (Blackstone Publishing, 2022), as well as her views on the space agency, and the rocky relationships she had to maneuver with some of NASA's past and current top leadership officials.
When we spoke, I asked her if any former colleagues had reached out, bothered by her blunt transparency since the book's release on June 21. She's quick to point out that the book doesn't actually attack anyone personally, but instead only holds a magnifying glass to people's actions, even when they may have been unflattering. "I have heard from a lot of former colleagues who have said, 'touché, finally, this was a story that needs to be told.
' I was a little worried that a couple [of them who are] pretty senior in the administration might say, 'oh, you're airing some laundry there …' I think that the people who were on the other side of the policy argument are not commenting, which I expected, and, frankly, which I hoped," Garver said in our interview. Related: The best space books of 2022 Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age $28. 99 now $26.
49 at Amazon. (opens in new tab) Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver recounts her career at NASA and aim to shift the agency into a new era of commercial collaboration in space in her new memoir. "Escaping Gravity" is autobiographical, but Garver does an excellent job contextualizing her role in the history behind the beginnings of one of NASA's most daring and successful ventures in recent history: contracting private companies to fly NASA astronauts to space.
To many, especially these days, a SpaceX rocket launching a crew to the International Space Station (ISS) is not only no longer novel, but is viewed as completely routine. The decision to retire the space shuttle in 2011 left NASA with a singular option for transportation to the ISS — buying seats aboard Russian Soyuz rockets . Even before the shuttle's retirement, NASA's human spaceflight program stumbled with cost overruns and delays rooted in the muck of bureaucracy, political self-interests, legacy contracts and a dated way of doing business.
Garver cites the space shuttle Columbia and space shuttle Challenger accidents as extremely disruptive to the future of human spaceflight. She outlines how the government's dash to support launch vehicle development for Lockheed Martin and Boeing following the Challenger disaster led to the creation of United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the "giant self-licking ice cream cone" of billion dollar subsidies ULA and other legacy contractors receive annually. "The system eliminates the proven method for driving efficiency and innovation — competition," she writes.
"Members of Congress and industry who have perfected the system of lapping up all the ice cream for themselves understandably enjoy the sugar high, but over the longer term, it undermines the health of the [space] sector and the nation. " In our interview, Garver told Space. com that "the process and bureaucracy, and the system with Congress gets really cumbersome and keeps you from making progress.
I don't question that everybody wants to project progress. They're just really in a tunnel that has only allowed them to see that they can do things a certain way. " Before Garver worked for NASA, she worked to help guide NASA as part of the National Space Society (NSS), a nonprofit organization comprised of space-advocacy professionals whom Garver affectionately refers to throughout the book as "space pirates.
" "These are the people who raised me — my original space family," Garver writes in "Escaping Gravity," and she makes it clear she holds them to the highest regard. Broadly, the mission of the NSS is to advocate for spaceflight strategies toward the establishment of humanity as a spacefaring civilization. The efforts put forth by the organization to execute that strategy are equally broad, and include the 1984 Commercial Space Launch Incentives Act, which proposed tapping the private sector to more quickly expand technological advancements in the field.
Of NSS members' accomplishments toward their goals, Garver writes with admiration: "They have advanced important policies and legislation, kept the United States from signing treaties that would have blocked space development, started new companies and organizations, lobbied members of Congress, antagonized senior aerospace industry leaders, and often been ignored and marginalized by the established space community. " In 1988, Garver was promoted to Executive Director of the NSS while also earning her Master's degree in international science and technology policy, with a focus on space. That same year, she volunteered as a space policy advisor to the Michael Dukakis presidential campaign, hoping to guide a "worthwhile" space program in the event of a Democrat victory, she writes in her book.
Dukakis lost that election to President George H. W. Bush.
As Executive Director, Garver quickly filled positions within the NSS board with recognizable figures. She appointed three-time shuttle astronaut Charlie Walker as the organization's president, Buzz Aldrin as board chairman, and began bumping elbows with the likes of Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell , Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Hollywood A-lister Tom Hanks, just to name a few. As NSS director, Garver was not only able to boost the status of the organization, but her own reputation as well.
"Elevating NSS's reputation in the space community gave us the ability to convey a long-term purpose for space development," Garver writes in her book. In contrast, however, that statement is immediately followed in the book by her view that "NASA's narrow focus on the handful of elected leaders obsessed with preserving NASA jobs in their districts was in contrast to the Society's vision of creating a spacefaring civilization that would establish communities beyond Earth. " On the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1986, President Bush announced the creation of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) to "return humans to the Moon and go on to Mars .
. . [and] establish the United States as the preeminent spacefaring nation.
" SEI could be viewed as one the Artemis program's early precursor attempts. However, like similar programs that would follow, SEI fell victim to a lack of full support from Congress, which balked at NASA's $500 billion cost estimation. "Instead of reshaping projects to the President's articulated goal of becoming spacefarers, it was a rehashed version of Apollo for even more money.
The price tag drew headlines in the media, skepticism from Congress, and the ire of the Space Council," Garver writes in the book, as the "giant self-licking ice cream cone" continued to deliver its sugar high. Garver was appointed to NASA's Advisory Council in 1994, and began her first full-time position at the agency two years later as Associate Administrator for the Office of Policy and Plans. This set the course for a twenty-year effort to help realize the commercial space realities that exist today.
Garver says she sees a contrast in her background, compared to many in NASA. In her book and in our interview, she mentions the transformative power known as the Overview Effect — the psychological shift in perspective astronauts have described after seeing Earth from space for the first time. Garver draws a direct link between humanity's first view of our home planet and the age of scientific interests focused on Earth's climate.
"Those are direct things like the environmental movement, and modeling our climate to understand it, and to know we can have an impact that will allow us to have humanity be healthy, here on planet Earth. As well as to see that we are all in this together. That perspective is what NASA needs too.
Something that is different. And I think the reason I was able to come in and see that is because I didn't grow up just wanting to build a big rocket. " Her position at NASA in the '90s also marked Garver's first encounter with an aerospace subset the author refers to as "cup boys.
" Indicative of the "boys' club" mentality Garver and other female colleagues encountered in NASA's offices and in the aerospace industry in general, the moniker refers to individuals in the male-dominated field carrying around coffee mugs printed with their military call signs, "Mini, Zorro, Dragon, Panther, and so on," Garver writes. She describes the insular clique as resistant to new people and new ideas, which Garver viewed as opposite the space agency's core values. These "cup boys" could serve as a quick answer to the source for many of the roadblocks Garver faced in her efforts to alleviate NASA's budgetary overhead through the commercial cargo and crew programs.
As one excerpt from her book reads: "NASA's leaders were typically astronauts and engineers who didn't question the public value or relevance of their activities. Indeed, many considered flying themselves and their friends into space to be an entitlement that shouldn't require justification. They had little interest in transitioning what they enjoyed and got paid to do over to the private sector and they assumed that was their decision.
" Garver held her position as associate administrator from 1996 to 2001, after which she stayed in D. C. to work as a consultant to the aerospace industry.
She rejoined NASA in 2008, but writes about some notable occurrences she experienced in those interim years. One, in particular, involved several months of cosmonaut training to possibly fly on a Russian Soyuz rocket . Though launching herself was not Garver's first choice, she certainly didn't shutter at the opportunity when the stars seemed to be in alignment for it.
Garver tells of a deal struck between her consulting firm, the Russian space agency , a private agent and the Discovery Channel to secure a seat for herself in a commercial space publicity flight they named "Astromom. " The publicity drummed up a little competition for the seat, and Garver eventually found herself in training alongside NSYNC pop star Lance Bass. Unfortunately, Lance's involvement ultimately served to derail both their chances, and neither ended up going to space.
Garver continued her aerospace consulting until 2008, when NASA called again. This time, presidential candidate Barack Obama was on the line. Garver led the president-elect's transition team at NASA, and was later appointed as the agency's Deputy Administrator.
However, during her time on the NASA transition team, and throughout her years as Deputy Administrator, Garver ran into some of her biggest frustrations with the space industry's "cup boys" and their "self-licking ice cream cone. " Garver writes about her transition team being blocked at every turn in their attempts to learn anything substantial about the Constellation program, which had been planned to replace the aging Space Shuttle. She writes about former colleagues being forced to shun her in the hallways at NASA, saying "the message conveyed from the top was that being seen even talking with [the transition team] would be 'career limiting.
'" The wife of the sitting NASA administrator at the time even teamed up with a "former astronaut-turned NASA contractor" to circulate a petition calling for Garver's removal entirely. Garver rejoined NASA at a time when the space shuttle was already slated for retirement, and NASA's Constellation program was purportedly in line to replace it. Like the Space Exploration Initiative of the 1980s, the Constellation program had lofty goals of returning NASA astronauts to the moon .
But by that point, it would have been enough for the program to provide continued access to the ISS, but, as Garver points out, the Ares 1 rocket and Orion capsule designed to do so weren't on track to launch until after the space station's scheduled retirement at the time. The same 2004 policy which directed the end of the shuttle missions and earmarked billions for the Constellation program also kickstarted the funding that would eventually land SpaceX contracts for the company's cargo and crew Dragons, but getting there would be an uphill battle Garver had to fight without the support of NASA's top official. Garver's description of Constellation echoes her observations of the SEI.
"Constellation had been designed to utilize the infrastructure and workforce that had been built for the Apollo program. Being sized to use fifty-year-old existing, expensive facilities at their capacity in an attempt to gain political support was never going to be efficient. " Garver told Space.
com she approached her role as Deputy Administrator from the lens of her political science and economics background. "How can we align these programs to better humanity, to give ourselves the very best space program we can have, and to inspire it to continue? Because I say, on the backs of taxpayers, I'm a liberal! I believe in government, but I believe in government for doing those things to really lift up the people who need it most. And space can do that.
And we haven't done as much as we need to be. " Garver played second fiddle throughout her time as Deputy Administrator to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, though Bolden was not the Obama administration's first selection for the role. When it came time to select a new NASA administrator after the 2008 election, opposition from former Senator Bill Nelson thwarted the White House's first choices, which put into process a committee to find another selection.
Garver points out that Nelson and Bolden both flew together on a mission aboard space shuttle Columbia in 1986. She writes, "never in my wildest imagination could I have envisioned how the bond they developed on that flight would impact the space program and my own career. " "I couldn't believe a single Democratic senator's personal views were enough to sideline the President's extremely well-qualified nominee," she writes in the book.
"It didn't bode well for progress. " Nelson was a senator from Florida, home to an overwhelming number of NASA launches and contracting facilities. In her book, Garver points to a conversation between herself and then candidate Obama, in which the future president indicated Nelson's advice that the Shuttle program be extended beyond its already protracted retirement plan.
Bill Nelson was appointed NASA Administrator under President Joe Biden in 2021. Garver's reaction to Nelson's nomination was to be expected. "I was disappointed for very public reasons," Garver told Space.
com. "[Nelson's nomination] sent an unfortunate signal that the new president doesn't really understand what the best of NASA is right now. And I think with [Nelson] coming in there just sealed that we were
