Lori Garver was NASA’s deputy administrator from 2009-2013. Her New Memoirs Escape from gravityabout the struggle to get her colleagues to embrace space entrepreneurs like SpaceX and Blue Origin paints a very unflattering picture of NASA’s inner workings.
“I told an honest – some would say brutally honest – story about an agency I really love,” Garver says in episode 522 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcasting. “NASA has a club-like atmosphere. It’s a bit of a ‘Fight Club first rule is don’t talk about Fight Club’. I am definitely breaking the rules by speaking out – the unwritten rules.”
For the past few decades, NASA has been plagued by missed deadlines and cost overruns. Garver says that in many cases, the people promoting these programs knew their budget was not realistic. “I just don’t believe the people who designed those programs believed they could do them within those amounts,” she says. “I think they sold something that they thought someone else would buy, and their contracts flowed, and then nobody wants to cancel contracts, because these are jobs in your district. It is all a very pleasant operation.”
Garver also describes a legitimate stance at NASA, with many in the organization unwilling to ask hard questions about whether their precious programs serve the public interest. “People come to NASA who are engineers and scientists,” she says. “They don’t have any background in government policy or economics, and they don’t really see why that matters. They say, ‘We want to walk on the moon. I grew up wanting to walk on the moon.’ Okay, but does the public owe you that? Not questions they were used to hearing, and they didn’t like to hear them.”
Garver’s proposal to partner with SpaceX was eventually passed, saving taxpayers billions of dollars, but she says there’s still a lot of hard work to be done. “We did this at NASA, they were able to embrace change, which is very difficult in a government system,” she says. “Not everything about NASA has changed yet, and there are many programs in government that could benefit from some of this hard love.”
Listen to the full interview with Lori Garver on episode 522 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Lori Garver on publishing:
I actually got an agent right away, and after a month or so with that agent, I realized they were trying to push a book that was different from what I was writing. They wanted me to talk about UFOs and what I knew about aliens, and I said, “Oh no. Nothing. That’s not going to be the book.” Fortunately, they let me out of their contract, and meanwhile, another agent I contacted had gone into publishing. Diversion Publishing is led by Scott Waxman. He’s a former cop so I went straight to him and didn’t use a cop. So that meant that I could not only tell the story I wanted to tell, but also get it out in less than a few years, which is typical of publishing. So I got really lucky.
Lori Garver on science fiction:
Science fiction inspired so many space leaders in the 50’s and 60’s, so it’s a really important element of science that’s been happening in space since then, and I think it continues to inspire people. As I say in the book, especially in the early days, those are mostly boys. I wasn’t one of those people – at least initially – who went to Star Trek when I was a kid, or read a lot of science fiction. We’re focusing on, I think, a lot of the more male-driven science fiction, some of it misogynistic. I recently got the Robert Heinlein Award. It started 34 years ago and I am the first woman to have it. So these are early days, I think, for a more diverse interest and achievement in our space program, and some of it has to do with science fiction.
Lori Garver on colonizing Mars:
I don’t see us being able to do the kind of things we need to have a self-sustaining colony as soon as Elon Musk predicts. I think in the longer term that’s a very hopeful future, so it’s not something negative, it’s just a matter of timing. Any transit time to Mars – if you stay on Mars, how are you going to manage the radiation is still a big question. There’s no air to breathe, so what kind of buildings are you going to live in? We don’t know how people can survive for that long duration outside of the protection of our Van Allen radiation belt. We don’t know how to transport it in such a way that people are not irradiated on the way. There are many big challenges there.
Lori Garver on book titles:
When I pitched the book, I called it Billionaires and Bureaucrats: The Race to Save NASA. When the publisher bought it, they immediately said they wouldn’t call it that, and reserved the right to call it whatever they wanted – publishing is such a crazy business, you can’t title your own memoirs – but they promised we would talk about it. Their working title was space pirates—”space pirates” are what I call the really old, probably mostly science fiction-inspired people who care about going into space in the long run and sustaining civilization. I kept pushing for a different title, especially when they came up with a cover that looked like teen science fiction to me, and they did get a response from their sales teams that the book was great, but they thought the title and cover didn’t bring the serious message of the book about. They came back and said “So we want to call it” Breaking Barriers.” I said, “Um, okay. Can I work on that?” I came with Escape from gravityand by then it was late in the game and they said, “Fine.”