Escaping Gravity

How I Rebooted NASA and Helped Bezos, Branson, and Musk Launch the New Space Age

Lori Garver

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781635767735
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A former NASA deputy administrator recounts how she battled greed and corruption to revolutionize the agency and usher in a new space age. Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver's firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries overcame the political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls "space pirates." Their quest to transform NASA put Garver in the crosshairs of Congress, the aerospace industry, and hero-astronauts trying to protect their own profits and mythology within a system that had held power since the 1950s. As the head of the NASA transition team for President-elect Barack Obama and second-in-command of the agency, Garver drove policies and funding that enabled commercial competition just as the capabilities and resources of the private sector began to mature. She was determined to deliver more valuable programs, which required breaking the self-interested space-industrial cycle that, like the military, preferred to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on programs aimed to sustain jobs and contracts in key congressional districts. The result: more efficiency and greater progress. Including insider NASA conversations and insights on how the US space industry has been transformed to become the envy of the world and is ushering in a new space age, Escaping Gravity offers a blueprint for how to drive productive and meaningful change. Praise for Escaping Gravity "Former NASA official Lori Garver offers a front-row seat to the decades-long struggles within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires. Bring popcorn, as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history." —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier "We are living at the most exciting time in space exploration since the Apollo era, in part because the world's largest space agency, NASA, got around to trying something new, the funding of commercial crews. Lori Garver tells it like it is... or was for a woman effecting change at NASA despite men of the military industrial complex—and their cost-plus contracts. It wasn't rocket science, it was much harder than that. Don't take my word(s) for it; read this book." —Bill Nye, CEO, The Planetary Society "A scathing memoir that shows the ugly side of NASA while offering hope for a better future for the space agency." — Kirkus Reviews

def. The universal force of attraction acting between all matter; the attraction of bodies toward the center of the Earth; great seriousness

1.

game changer

The first substantive conversation I had with Barack Obama about NASA was in June of 2008, when he had just become the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. I was introduced to him as the former space policy advisor to the Clinton campaign and the introduction seemed to pique the Senator’s interest. He told me his “friend Ben Nelson had been lobbying him to extend the Space Shuttle” and he asked if I agreed with the recommendation. There were two Democrats named Nelson in the Senate at that time—Ben, from Nebraska and Bill, from Florida. I responded, “I think you mean Bill” and “no, I do not agree.” I hadn’t intended for the remark to come off as disrespectful, and when he shot me his big signature smile, I was relieved to see he had taken no offense.

Quickly acknowledging that it was indeed Bill Nelson who had been lobbying him, he asked me why I didn’t think we should extend the Shuttle. I explained that while the Shuttle was the most visible part of NASA, its designated purpose—set over thirty-five years before—had been to lower launch costs and make space travel routine. Regrettably, it had never come close to achieving this goal. I reminded him of the loss of two astronaut crews and the accident investigation board’s recommendation that it be retired in 2010. I noted that the Shuttle was built on forty-year-old technology. Although it was designed to fly 40 to 50 times a year, it had only flown an average of five in its first twenty-seven years, at a cost of over $100 billion dollars. He listened to my rant and then asked, “What do you think we should do instead?”

Now it was my turn to give him a big smile, as I walked him through how I thought NASA could drive advanced technologies and cutting-edge science to better fulfill its promise to the American people. Instead of competing with the private sector by doing the same thing over and over, I suggested that incentivizing companies to take on the routine aspects of the program would free NASA to invest in programs of greater relevance to the taxpayer. I explained that NASA was formed to utilize the vantage of air and space to benefit the public, yet its programs to address our most current problems—such as those related to climate change—received less than ten percent of its budget. Allowing companies to open new markets would not just lower costs for more consequential research activities in space; the policy shift would produce broad economic and national security gains. If it was an interview, I knew I passed when I got a call a few weeks later asking me to lead the NASA transition team if he became President-elect in November.

I’d spent my twenty-five-year career training to be prepared for such an assignment, and although my background was different from everyone who had been in the position before, I believed that was a positive feature and not a bug.

I hadn’t been drawn to a career that involved space in order to build rockets or become an astronaut. I was attracted by the unlimited potential space activities offered our civilization. I was a child of the 1960s who loved a challenge, and by the early 1980s, when I was just starting out, space seemed like the most meaningful challenge ahead. After running the gauntlet of deterrence by high school teachers and counselors against entering male-dominated science and engineering fields, I pursued degrees in political economy and international science & technology policy. Determined to make a difference, I saw space as a blank canvas full of value and endless opportunity.

The rare alignment of the planets that allowed me—someone with a less traditional background—to lead President Obama’s NASA transition team, came at a significant point in history. Lured by the prospect of a growing space economy and frustrated by the lack of government progress, daring individuals were developing innovative technological advancements in spacecraft and space transportation that were beginning to succeed. I thought NASA should build bridges to these new entrants and ideas that could finally make space more accessible. Being assigned to this position gave me the opportunity—and the obligation—to ensure that the administration put forward policies and programs that would shift the paradigm and usher in greater progress.

I recruited a small volunteer team, and we began gathering information on current NASA activities, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of alternative paths, while teeing up options for more meaningful programs. Our final transition report was consistent with my initial conversations with the President-elect and closely aligned with his cross-government policy focus on science and innovation. It offered a transformative agenda that would reduce the barriers to access space and allow the public to reap the benefits of their investment.

Our report was so well received by the incoming administration that soon after his inauguration, the President expressed his intent to nominate me for NASA Deputy Administrator. He selected Steve Isakowitz as his intended nominee for the NASA Administrator position a few weeks later. Steve had topped my recommended list of people to lead the Agency, and his selection was affirmation of the administration’s alignment on its vision for NASA. Steve Isakowitz had multiple technical aerospace degrees from MIT and twenty years of experience working in the aerospace industry. He’d held senior positions at NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, the CIA, and the Department of Energy. Steve had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations and was widely respected by the community. His qualifications for the position were undeniably impeccable.

The White House planned to put our nominations forward simultaneously. Vetting procedures got underway, and we began to discuss how to develop a bold, sustainable plan. I hadn’t been an early supporter of candidate Obama, but I was already seeing how reshaping space activities could help translate his campaign’s “hope and change” mantra into more than a slogan. The Space Age envisioned fifty years earlier finally seemed within our grasp. All presidents dream of being transformational, and in February of 2009, I believed NASA could make that dream a reality for the Obama administration.

The first disturbance in the force came when Senator Bill Nelson declined to schedule a meeting with us. The Florida Democrat’s stated reasons were nebulous and didn’t involve me. The White House personnel office relayed to us later that the Senator had his own candidate. I didn’t consider the threat seriously at first, believing the President’s clout was sufficient to withstand foot dragging from a single Senator within his own party—especially for someone with Steve’s qualifications.

The Democrats controlled the Senate with 60 votes, so confirmation of virtually any NASA nominee was a near certainty. Nelson wasn’t even the committee chair responsible for holding the hearings. That was Senator Jay Rockefeller, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia. Rockefeller was a rare congressional overseer of the space agency—he had an open mind. He would clearly have had an open hearing docket for any NASA leadership team the new President put forward.

The White House could have proceeded without Senator Nelson’s support and scheduled our pre-confirmation meetings with Senator Rockefeller and other members of the committee, but these were the early days, when they hadn’t yet learned they’d need to fight for every ounce of progress. The personnel team told Steve they would consider a temporary appointment that would likely lead to later confirmation, but without the President’s willingness to take on Senator Nelson directly, Steve stepped aside.

I couldn’t believe a single Democratic senator’s personal views were enough to sideline the President’s extremely well-qualified nominee. It didn’t bode well for progress.

Bill Nelson was a lifetime politician most known for his out-of-this-world political junket in 1986: a taxpayer-funded ride on the Space Shuttle. Like other members of Congress from Southern states with NASA facilities in their districts, his interests often appeared parochial. When I’d been told by candidate Obama the year before that Nelson was lobbying him to extend the Space Shuttle program, it appeared to me that his agenda was shortsighted.

An investigative review board of the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident recommended retiring the Shuttle fleet by the end of the decade, and President Bush had agreed, establishing the policy in 2004. I supported flying one or two more missions, but fully reversing that decision in 2009 would have taken several years to implement, cost billions of dollars, and risked more astronauts’ lives. The NASA briefings I’d received during the 2008 transition period concluded that that ship had sailed. Worse, we’d learned that the planned replacement program—called Constellation—was badly off course. The new program was already costing $3–4 billion a year and had slipped five years in its first four years of development.

Constellation was established to support a long-term goal of returning a handful of astronauts to the Moon—something NASA had been hoping to do since the 1980s. It required an Apollo-sized budget but lacked a geopolitical or other rational, national purpose. Instead of driving technology as Apollo had, it was based on existing technologies—a reorganization of Space Shuttle parts and contractors.

Planned lunar missions were more than a decade away, so Constellation’s stated initial purpose was to transport astronauts to and from the Space Station. Unfortunately, the rocket- and capsule-funding needs already exceeded any realistic budget. NASA’s five-year plan put forward by the Bush administration and briefed to the transition team, was to make up the funding shortfall using money budgeted for the Space Station itself.

Defunding and therefore de-orbiting the Space Station early would leave the rocket and capsule without a destination. By the time the first elements of Constellation were ready to fly, the Space Station would have been charred fragments strewn across the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Not only would NASA lose its ability to launch astronauts for many years, all of NASA’s and its international partner’s spaceflight activities would have ceased.

NASA’s unstated plan was essentially to trap the next President into adding several billion dollars a year to keep money flowing to Shuttle, Constellation, and Space Station contractors. The human spaceflight side of NASA typically took precedence, so they also figured they could siphon more funds from Earth and space science to cover their overrun. Even then, no amount of money would be able to close the space transportation gap befalling human spaceflight. NASA’s intention—known well to Congress—was to pay the Russian Space Agency—Roscosmos—to carry its astronauts to and from the Space Station after the Shuttle retired.

Human spaceflight was in an untenable situation and without new leadership arriving soon, precious time to map a more realistic course was slipping away.

One other senator weighed in on selection criteria for the NASA Administrator position early in the process, Senator Barbara Mikulski. Senator Mikulski (D-MD) was in many ways more important to NASA than Senator Nelson, since she chaired the Agency’s appropriations subcommittee. At our first face-to-face meeting during the transition period, Senator Mikulski told me to relay the following to the President-elect: “No astronauts and no military people.” It made sense to me, and I took the note. We discussed other topics, and before I left, she circled back to her comment on Administrator qualifications. She said, “No astronauts unless it’s Sally Ride.” When I relayed her sentiment to the personnel team, they asked me to see if Sally would be interested.

I’d gotten to know Dr. Ride through her extensive post-astronaut service to NASA and was under no illusions that she’d evolved her position since President Clinton tried to recruit her for the job eight years before. Our conversation went as expected. Sally knew the game and didn’t want to play. She expressed her willingness to help in any other way, but practically begged me not to have Obama call her directly, since he’d be a lot harder to say no to than I was. I thought Sally would make a fantastic Administrator and knew that if she said yes, Senator Nelson would have likely supported her alongside Senator Mikulski. But Sally didn’t want the job and we were back at square one. The White House continued to interview potential candidates for the Administrator position, but none made it very far through the vetting process, so the standoff continued.

The delay stalled progress at a crucial time in the budget process. Anticipating my own nomination as deputy, I had left my formal transition team role on January 20. I’d been able to oversee the development of NASA’s portion of the stimulus bill, which included significant funding for our new priorities, but after I left, the acting Administrator worked with the Hill to transfer much of what was allocated to Constellation. Budgets for the following year had to be developed that spring, and without NASA’s willingness to craft a more sustainable plan for human spaceflight, the administration needed a workaround.

In lieu of a new leadership team, we established a presidential committee to review the human spaceflight program and form a more realistic path forward. The administration appointed ten esteemed technical experts and policy leaders—including Sally Ride—to a group that became known as the Second Augustine Committee, named for its Chair, Norm Augustine, the former CEO of aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

The human spaceflight review board was made public in May. A few weeks later, the President announced his nominee to run NASA, Charlie Bolden. Charlie was a marine general and astronaut who’d flown on the Shuttle with Congressman Bill Nelson twenty-five years earlier. My nomination for Deputy Administrator was concurrent, but un-noteworthy by comparison. We sailed through the process and were confirmed by Senate acclimation in July.

The Augustine Committee’s findings were released a few months after we were confirmed. The panel found that “the US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory.” Their report said NASA was “perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources.” They outlined potential options that pursued new technologies to utilize the burgeoning commercial space sector to generate new capabilities and potentially lower costs.

The Augustine Committee’s views—consistent with those of the transition team report—combined to inform and underpin President Obama’s proposal to shift NASA away from developing and owning systems for routine operations and incentivize the private sector to provide space transportation services for cargo and astronauts—crew—allowing NASA to invest in more cutting-edge technologies and breakthrough scientific discoveries.

On February 1, 2010, the administration’s first full budget publicly requested $19 billion for NASA to fly out the Shuttle safely and extend the Space Station; increase funding for Earth sciences, advanced technology, rocket engine development, and infrastructure revitalization; and begin a partnership with US industry to transport astronauts to the Space Station, referred to as Commercial Crew. The transformational agenda was structured to allow the Agency to begin to shed the institutional burdens that constrained progress, which required terminating its beleaguered Constellation program.

The established space supporters in Congress and industry were outraged by the plan. Entrenched aerospace interests had spent their careers designing versions of Constellation-like programs to keep expensive infrastructure and jobs in key congressional districts at the expense of more competitive programs, regardless of operational effectiveness. The companies with contracts worth tens of billions of dollars cried foul and combined their lobbying might against the plan. Ignoring numerous government audits and the public results of the Augustine Committee, traditional stakeholders argued we’d proposed radical changes that would damage the NASA institution. They claimed to be blindsided by the proposal.

The Administrator had difficulty explaining the proposal’s merit, so it was assumed he hadn’t devised or supported the strategy.

I became the target of the campaign against the plan.

I was attacked by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, by the aerospace industry, and by hero astronauts for proposing an agenda that didn’t suit their parochial interests. The elation and promise of the administration’s potential to drive meaningful change was already being threatened by the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex, and I was the one taking fire.

Senator David Vitter from Louisiana accused me of orchestrating the cancellation of Constellation, and suggested I “was running the Agency, and not the Administrator.” Homer Hickam, author of October Sky and the subject of the motion picture Rocket Boys, called me a “gadfly who should resign.” Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the appropriations subcommittee handling NASA funding, said that the President’s proposed NASA budget “begins the death march for the future of US human spaceflight” and that “Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human spaceflight program.” In reference to the budget request for Commercial Crew, he said, “Today the commercial providers that NASA has contracted with cannot even carry the trash back from the Space Station much less carry humans to and from space safely.”

As Chair of the Senate subcommittee that authorized NASA, Senator Nelson criticized the President for slashing the Moon program and said the move could cause the United States to fall behind other countries in space exploration—most notably Russia and China. He highlighted several positives in the budget request, such as extending the Space Station, but said the budget was not well received because it gave the perception of killing the manned space program for the United States. He admonished the administration for a lack of leadership and suggested the President had somehow allowed budget examiners to dictate his NASA agenda.

During a March subcom...