| ESCAPING GRAVITY My Quest To Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age Lori Garver Walter Isaacson (Foreword) Diversion Books, June 2022 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-1-63576-770-4 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-63576-770-9 | 280pp. | HC/FCI | $28.99 | |
By the time Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Lori Garver had a wide variety of space experience. In addition to serving for nine years as executive director of the National Space Society, she had competed to fly to the USSR space station Mir on a rocket out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.1 (For various reasons, this flight opportunity never came to pass for her.) She also had political chops, having testified often on Capitol Hill in her NSS role. Dan Goldin became NASA Administrator under George H. W. Bush and was retained by the Clinton administration. Goldin had put her on the NASA Advisory Council in 1994 and two years later offered her a job helping set strategy for NASA.
Twenty years later she was chosen to lead the space policy segment of the Obama transition team. In that position she recommended major changes at NASA: namely that the space agency should give up designing, building and operating launch vehicles itself and instead contract for launch services from the commercial sector. In 2009, President Obama nominated her to be Deputy Administrator of NASA. Marine General Charles Bolden was nominated for the Administrator position. Gen, Bolden was old-school, meaning he sided with the traditional aerospace industry which favored a NASA that paid lucrative contracts rather than one that achieved progress in exploring space. This put him on a collision course with his deputy, and they collided often.
The main opposition to Lori Garver's revolutionary agenda, however, came from both sides of the aisle in Congress, from current and former NASA officials, from the aerospace industry, and from astronauts of the Apollo era. They made up a formidable force, and seldom refrained from fighting dirty. The first skirmish took place following the airing of a new NASA budget in 2010. It proposed phasing out the space shuttle and beginning a program to partner with US industry for transporting astronauts to ISS.2
The epic battle that ensued pitted traditional space loyalists against a new generation of space advocates who believed NASA had been hijacked and needed rescuing. On one side were large stakeholders—aerospace companies, astronauts, trade associations, self-interested congressional delegations, and most of NASA. On the other side—a handful of outspoken space enthusiasts and bureaucrats, a few billionaires, political appointees, and the President of the United States. *
* * My quest to make space more accessible and sustainable wasn't meant to start a war. I wasn't trying to steal the future. I was on a rescue misssion. It isn't just Earth's gravity that we must overcome, it is the gravity of our situation. – Pages 13-14 |
The details of NASA's predicament are complex, but it is easily summarized. Russia's launch of Sputnik in October 1957 galvanized America. President Eisenhower formed NASA the next year, and President Kennedy gave it the goal of reaching the Moon within ten years. That goal was achieved. Then, public interest flagged and other things — the Great Society, the Vietnam War — took priority.
Like many defense programs, human space flight at NASA became a boondoggle: aiming to employ as many contractors in as many congressional districts as possible rather than advancing progress in spaceflight. Lori Garver provides examples of this: the Space Launch System (SLS), successor to Ares, is estimated to cost $96 billion before it sends a crew to the Moon. By mandate, it uses as much leftover space shuttle hardware as possible — but throws it all away, as did Apollo missions.
The New Space companies — led by people she calls "space pirates" — are showing us they can beat NASA on price and performance.
Here are some other books critical of NASA.
There was nothing new in Lori Garver's position. Nor was she unique in holding it. Opening the space frontier was a long-sought goal of America's efforts, and one regularly given lip service by presidents and leaders of the space agency — and one firmly supported by many Americans. But NASA had bogged down, spending vast sums but achieving little, while private companies repeatedly demonstrated the ability to perform similar missions or build similar hardware for costs an order of magnitude lower.3
There was no logic in resisting policies promising better bang for the buck. Nevertheless, Lori Garver met fierce resistance throughout her term as NASA Deputy Administrator — resistance that spanned the gamut from being ignored to receiving death threats and public vitriol. She did have some success, mainly due to persistence. But it was often a crap shoot. At one point the program she advocated, called Commercial Crew, survived in Congress by a single vote.4
Born in 1961 in Lansing, Michigan, Lori Garver graduated from Haslett High School in 1979. She went on to earn a B.A. degree in political science and economics from Colorado College in 1983 and an M.A. degree in science, technology and public policy from the George Washington University in 1989. As well as working on the campaigns of John Glenn and Hillary Clinton, and serving on Barack Obama's transition team, she had nine years as executive director of the National Space Society. The upshot is that Lori Garver's education and experience are more than sufficient to suit her for the role of NASA deputy administrator.5
Lori Garver was a controversial figure throughout her career at NASA, and remained so after that career ended.6 She went on to become general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association. She co-founded the Brooke Owens Fellowship (2016) which provides mentoring and internships for young women pursuing aerospace careers, and is the founder and CEO of Earthrise Alliance (2019), a philanthropic initiative using satellite data to address climate change. She was thrice awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and in 2020 received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Women in Aerospace. She currently serves as an Executive in Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners and is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Lori Garver did a good job overall with this book. She writes well and has a lot to write about. The book does have defects in it. There are numerous grammatical errors, listed as usual on my Errata page. In addition, she gives short shrift to several important people and topics: among them are DC-X, aka Delta Clipper or Clipper Graham, and Max Hunter and SSX (see page 49).7 The list of sources is not linked to the text in a standard way, making it harder to associate references to their text. The Index is good, but also scattershot; for example, try using it to find details of the SLS, or the cost of the spacesuits for Artemis (page 229), or the IG report on the total cost of Artemis. All that said, I recommend the book, and its index and organization are good enough that I consider it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.