In 2009, the state of NASA’s human spaceflight programs looked dire. The space shuttle fleet would soon be grounded, leaving Russian Soyuz spacecraft as the only means of reaching orbit. NASA’s now-defunct plans for a shuttle replacement, dubbed Constellation, had veered off course, behind schedule and over budget. The glory of the Apollo era and the moon landings of the 1960s seemed far away, and the time for big changes had come.
That was Lori Garver’s view, as she and Charlie Bolden took the helm of the agency under President Obama. As deputy administrator, she helped push NASA in a new direction, investing in the growing commercial space industry, contracting with private companies with the aim of reducing the cost of space travel. She played a leading role in bringing about NASA’s commercial crew program in 2011, through which the agency has partnered with private companies to launch astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, most notably leading to SpaceX’s development of the reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule. She opposed the development of NASA’s own bigger rocket, the Space Launch System, and Orion capsule, which will have their first flight this summer—both of them years later and costing billions more than planned.
In a new memoir, Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, Garver chronicles her experiences at NASA and the private sector during this tumultuous time. Throughout the book, she’s not afraid to name names, showing how she frequently tried to overcome resistance from many in NASA’s bureaucracy—including, at times, Bolden himself, as well as from the aerospace industry and members of Congress with established space companies in their district that stood to gain from continuing the old way of doing things.
Garver, a self-proclaimed “space pirate,” sought to change the status quo and aided the rise of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and other new space companies. (Musk and Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic’s cofounder, both praise Garver in book blurbs.) Nine years after her departure, the space agency still bears the marks of her efforts. The commercial crew and cargo programs continue to flourish, and NASA will never be the same again.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: When you joined NASA as deputy administrator, what were your main goals?
Garver: I think my main goal was to set the agency on a course for the 21st century. We had a space program that, when I grew up, seemed like it would have—in human spaceflight at least—gone farther. (I’m 61 now.) If you ask me what my number-one goal would’ve been, I think lowering the cost of space transportation would’ve been it.
What was it like at NASA while the shuttle program wound down and while trying to prepare for the programs that came next?
It was a hard time to be at NASA for the end of the shuttle program because there were so many people involved that were transitioning their jobs, losing their jobs. I also had the stress of flying the program out safely. There was an intensity, and at the same time, a sadness. And I was in the middle of that, trying to create something that would keep the US in a leadership position in space.
From the start, were you trying to support commercial partnerships with the space industry, or did that develop out of necessity?
I would describe the goal as being to increase the efficiency of the tax dollar and to reduce the cost of getting to orbit. Because then at that point NASA can be doing more cutting-edge, unique, interesting, important things in space.
Partnering with industry wasn’t a goal. It was an outcome, a path to reach a goal that we all shared in space policy—since the Nixon administration—to reduce the cost of space transportation. Doing it with the private sector was something that started in the ’90s, and continuing those efforts was the obvious way to go. We had lost nearly the entire launch market to the French, Chinese, and Russians in the late ’90s, and winning back that market share by paying [private US companies] to take cargo and astronauts to the space station was a big economic boom for the nation.
A few years ago, you said that NASA needs to abandon its “socialist” approach to space exploration. What did you mean by that, and do you still believe that?
That was in direct response to the Space Launch System and Orion, which were started by Congress after our proposal [to defund them] had not been accepted. Really, the shuttle, the Constellation program, which the Bush administration established to follow the shuttle, and then SLS/Orion, were all done in a government-directed way that mimics a Soviet approach.
NASA collaborated on a commercial crew program with SpaceX, and now Boeing, to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. Would you say that was a prescient approach, following subsequent troubles with Russia and how it’s harder to get flights on Soyuz spacecraft?
I guess I feel less “prescient” than it was just so obvious to me, and to a lot of people, that we didn’t want to count on the Russians forever. For one, they were a monopoly provider. They kept increasing their prices, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We needed our own systems, and ideally more than one.
Look, we had the experience with the shuttle: The government developed one. We had two accidents. After each of the accidents, it stood down for more than two years. So it was a bit surprising that the concept seemed so controversial.
What kinds of resistance did you face, and from whom, as you tried to expand NASA’s support or partnerships for the private space industry?
At the time, it seemed like everyone. In NASA, there wasn’t support in the leadership. As I say in the book, the head of NASA—I was the deputy—was not supportive and did not request money for the [commercial crew] program in the budget. But I had led the transition team and had talked to the president about it and was working closely with the chief science adviser of the White House and the Office of Science Technology and Policy, the National Economic Council, Office of Management and Budget. They were all very much in favor of this policy. So it got into our budget without the NASA administrator or the senior leaders responsible for human spaceflight at NASA really being involved.
But when the budget was released, [Capitol] Hill and the aerospace industry, together with the NASA leadership—the community that has been involved in human spaceflight over the years—didn’t want to loosen their grip. They didn’t want to have someone having the ability to come in and compete for this, who wouldn’t be directed by the government, and those jobs might therefore be outside the districts where they currently were. They liked the traditional way of contracting, even though that had not gotten us very far in the last 50 years.
Private companies don’t have the same kinds of transparency and oversight space agencies do, and CEOs aren’t vetted by the Senate like NASA administrators are. At NASA, how did you try to make sure companies deliver on their contracts and develop reliable spacecraft?
That’s been a huge challenge. With human spaceflight, NASA had been doing it by putting one or two government people for each contractor, and having them work onsite together, directing them, and making sure there was paperwork on everything. And because it was taxpayer money, that was supposed to be in the public domain.
When you are trying to develop capability that can be used by other markets, and the companies are putting their own funding at risk, that is no longer public domain. There has to be an ability for the industrial partner to capitalize on that and bring in other customers. So that really gave people at NASA pause for how to work with companies they weren’t that familiar with. They were OK sort of doing that with the Boeings of the world, but with new folks, less so.
Unfortunately, two out of the 135 space shuttle trips ended in tragedy. Some day a SpaceX or Boeing spacecraft with NASA astronauts or somebody on board might fail. What should or could NASA do in that situation?
In the book, I acknowledge that this is not something that you’re likely to do perfectly every time. With the shuttle, I think those of us following it really closely, we knew there would be an accident. And I thought, “Well, let’s just hope we’ve done enough of them, and when there is one, we can find the culprit and fix it.”
With the private sector, I make this comparison with the airlines, because I was a general manager at the Air Line Pilots Association union for five years after NASA. And my contention is that those are regulated, as are commercial spaceflights, and they are the safest mode of transportation that we have. And the private sector has that motivation not to fail. Back when we used to lose more airplanes, we have seen airlines fail after one fatal accident. The US has had more than a 10-year run without a US airline losing a plane. The private sector manages very challenging safety programs with public safety involved. And I would expect that that’s the same kind of regime that will eventually be in place when they’re doing this for space travel.
In the book, I talk about how the government’s aviation non-combat-related deaths are much higher than the private sector’s. But if the airlines had the same level of safety, and casualty numbers were similar to the military, we would lose thousands of planes, and people would never stand for it. The argument that the government is inherently safe is difficult to make.
NASA has funded quite a few new contracts with SpaceX and Blue Origin. On the one hand, it’s all business, and you want the contracts to be successful and keep costs down. But on the other hand, how do you feel about the baggage that comes with Musk and Bezos, considering the labor issues and allegations of sexual harassment at their companies or their problematic political statements, for example?
It’s an unexpected challenge, because in the ’90s we didn’t foresee this privatization being led by anyone other than the traditional aerospace companies. These two companies have been willing to risk billions that a publicly traded company isn’t likely to because of the timeframes involved with the return. Their personal visions have aligned with what NASA is doing, and therefore they have been able to win these contracts.
Some in the public feel, “Oh, we’re turning our program over to billionaires,” which I know we’re not doing. And aerospace company CEOs have had misbehavior as well, but they are not as personally tied to that company, and oftentimes those people are just let go. So it’s not the same thing. I have been thinking a lot more about the disappointment that I have had with the charges and experiences of people who worked at both Blue and SpaceX, which were not holding up equity and inclusion as a really important goal.
I started an internship program for women and gender minorities in aerospace, and these companies have overwhelmingly welcomed them for internships across the board. So there is progress. But at the same time I’m also very disappointed that we aren’t moving faster with these goals.
In May, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized “cost-plus” contracts as a “plague” on the agency. Such awards, which pay contractors for their costs along with a fee, can realize ambitious projects like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System but can also result in ballooning budgets and cost overruns. What are your thoughts on that?
I don’t think it’s as simple as them being a “plague” on all programs. It’s ironic, because I think it’s a plague on the program he forced on us, the Space Launch System and Orion. When he was in the Senate, he structured those programs, the way that they were focused, and forced us to do them. I think all of us agree, and maybe even him now, that was a mistake. We don’t have that vehicle flying yet. We’ve spent $40 billion, and the private sector is developing similar capabilities on their own dime. We could’ve incentivized a larger rocket being developed in a similar way to what we did with commercial cargo and crew and gotten that, certainly by now, for much less.
The reason to use cost-plus contracting is when you have something you’ve never done before and have no way for a company to estimate with any kind of reliability what it would cost. The Webb telescope, it seems to me, would meet that.
So why did it balloon to something like $11 billion when it started at $500 million? There’s a lot to unpack there. The government still works to set the contract and set incentives, and we clearly can do that better. We need to be able to break these things into steps where you aren’t setting a program’s technology and the way they are going about their program 15 to 20 years before it’s going to get there. Because at the rate that technology changes, you’re missing all of that. I think it’s positive that the head of NASA, who used to strongly believe in cost-plus contracting, sees it has flaws.
What motivated you to write this book, Escaping Gravity?
I have been asked a lot by journalists for my notes, to try to explain how this happened and why. Because it is a pretty big transition of our human spaceflight program. And I felt like my insider experience at NASA and in the private sector meant that I had an up-close experience that should be shared. I really feel like the experiment worked so well that the government can learn from it for other programs, not just NASA. Human spaceflight is still such a compelling aspect of the US. We’re one of only a couple nations that do it. Finding a way to do that keeps driving the human spirit as well as innovation, and was worth talking about.
