From the Vaults: Lori Garver

 

     Sometimes an unfamiliar name used as a title for an FTV article doesn’t have enough information to be a real ‘grabber’.  On the other hand, filling out the title of this installment with more details would be a little overwhelming.  With that said, let me add this to go with the * above to serve as an ‘explainer’ authors often use to peak reader interest:  Lori Garver – and why she became a pariah to the NASA old guard but continued to push the Sisyphean Ball of the space agency’s future up the hill even though she knew it would keep rolling back to the bottom.  Now that would be a mouthful of a title.  It would also take up most of the cover as a subtitle.

     In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the founder and king of Ephyra (now known as Corinth). He was also the Greek version of Loki the Trickster of the Norse sagas.  Sisyphus tried to cheat Death and was in turn sentenced to eternally roll a large stone ball up a hill only to watch it roll back down again.  It sounds kind of like the time loop in Groundhog’s Day where Bill Murray’s character is trapped and has to relive the same day over and over again.  Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) uses a similar time loop to hold the villain Dormammu at bay in Marvel Comics movie franchise flick Dr. Strange.  Sisyphus was doomed to repeat this act of futility forever, but I am happy to report, Lori Garver was not (nor were Murray’s or Cumberbatch’s characters).  

     Lori Garver is the former Deputy Administrator of NASA, a post she held during the Presidency of Barack Obama.  Garver wasn’t the first woman to hold the office.  She was, however,  considered an outsider from the get-go because she did not ascend to the position through the normal NASA channels.  Lori did not have a background in engineering, aviation, or space flight so she was already swimming upstream against the status quo when she accepted the position.  Garver wrote a book about her experiences (Escaping Gravity – My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age – Diversion Books 2022).   Her time at NASA, she said, reminded her of the old quote about Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astair:  “After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did.  She just did it backwards and in high heels.”  Before we get too far into her time at NASA, perhaps we should look at how she got there in the first place.

     Born in Lansing, Michigan on May 22, 1961 to a stockbroker father and homemaker mother, she watched the first manned lunar landing on TV as a nine year old.  Her mother saved a picture she drew of Neil Armstrong and an American flag on the Moon with no inkling she would meet the man himself years later.  She majored in political science and economics in college.  While working on John Glenn’s failed presidential bid in 1983-84, she became interested in science.  She went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University in 1989.  Her interest in space exploration landed her a job as the second Executive Director of the National Space Society (NSS), a non-profit space organization based in Washington, D.C., a position she held for nine years.  

     Many wrongly assume Garver went to work for John Glenn because he was an astronaut.  She says, “The reality of my first post-college job was more pragmatic.  I was disillusioned with the current national political leadership and wanted to help someone get elected who I thought would be better.”  With a grandfather and uncle who both served in the Michigan state legislature, Lori says, “Not only is politics in my blood, but I’ve been campaigning since before I could walk.  My sister and I were featured on campaign brochures, and when I was a baby, my grandpa carried me while shaking hands in local parades.  My formative type role models were public servants dedicated to helping their neighbors.  Doing something similar became my aspirational goal.”  She would later get a lot of blowback in her NASA position from those who would characterize her as some sort of political hack and not a ‘true NASA type’.

     When Glenn’s presidential bid came to an abrupt end, senior campaign staffers helped Garver get an entry-level job with the National Space Institute, a group founded by the architect of NASA’s manned rocket program, Werner von Braun.  When that group merged with the L5 Society (a group that came together to advocate for Princeton physics professor Gerard O’Neill’s concept of establishing free-floating, self-sustaining space colonies), she found herself working with ‘space pirates’ (her term) at the newly named National Space Society.  According to Garver, “Similar to pirates on the high seas, space pirates have been depicted as both heroes and villains.

As with any group, the space pirates are unique individuals who share some common characteristics and views.  Many of them have spent decades working to create a spacefaring civilization at great personal cost.  These are the people [in the NSS] who raised me – my original space family.”  In other words, Elon Musk, Jeff Besos, and Richard Branson are not the first earthlings to envision a future for mankind in space or on Mars.

     The space pirates realized early on that one of the big impediments to making progress toward the goal of a permanent human presence in space was the cost of launching materials and crews into orbit.  President Nixon okayed the Space Shuttle program in 1972 by calling it, “An entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and 1990s.  It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.  It will take the astronomical cost out of astronomics.”  When the original $6 billion budgeted for the shuttle quadrupled by the 1980s, it was clear the so called ‘space truck’ was not going to lower the cost of getting into space.  The space pirates, and thus Lori Garver, knew NASA’s penchant for using the same contractors and infrastructure would have to change to make space travel cheaper and more routine.  The space pirates were, in some quarters, visionary heroes while in others (see:  NASA’s old guard and the contractors doing business with NASA) saw them as villains. 

    The space pirates recognized innovation to lower the cost of going into space could be found only if the private sector got involved in building the next generation of spacecraft.   NASA compounded the problem in the wake of the Challenger and Columbia disasters.  The loss of the shuttles and their crews led to the formation of two boards of inquiry that made extensive examinations of the problems that precipitated the accidents.  The final reports laid the blame at NASA’s feet and the agency responded by making more poor decisions about how to proceed.  First off, NASA set a deadline for the end of the shuttle program – it was not cost effective or safe to continue trying to upgrade the aging fleet.  Secondly, the space agency made the decision to end the shuttle program without having a viable way to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.  To fill the gap, the United States began buying rides for American astronauts on Russian spacecraft to the tune of millions of dollars per ride.

     At the time the shuttle fleet was being mothballed, Lori Garver was the Deputy Administrator of NASA.  She was already drawing fire for pushing the agenda toward a concept that would become known as Commercial Crew.  NASA had been the sole purveyor of human space flight since the beginning and Garver, with ample support from the space pirates, knew it was not sustainable.  Politicians from states with companies holding big money NASA contracts wanted the space program to remain in the government’s hands.  The space pirates maintained this cozy arrangement stifled creativity.  In other words, companies granted large contracts were content to collect the paycheck by doing the same things over and over again.  The space pirates manifesto firmly stated (and I am paraphrasing here):  “The only way to bring down the cost of space flight is competition.  Let private enterprise get involved and they will find ways to improve the process and lower costs.”  The administrator of NASA gave lip service to the concept of commercializing space flight while deep-sixing proposals to do just that at every turn.  Congress was fine with passing budgets to cover massive overruns in the projects as long as maintaining the status quo meant big money rolling into aerospace companies in their states.

     Every time Garver tried to advance the Commercial Crew concept, she ended up disappointed.  Advising presidential candidates and eventually President Obama, she made small headway getting the concept on the agenda.  Back when I was in high school, we used to joke that congress had a difficult time getting things done doing what we called ‘The Politician’ – our name for a dance we described as, ‘one step forward, two steps back, and three to the side’.  Lori Garver must have felt she was witnessing a lot of this dance, and not just from Congress.

NASA’s administrator was surrounded by a group of ex-military men she called ‘the cup boys’.  Each of them had a coffee cup on their desk bearing the insignia of the branch of the military they served in.  They resented Garver’s background (non-military) and took great pains to tell anyone who listened (again, I am paraphrasing), “She has no right to try and commercialize the space program.  She is a woman and a political hack who is only in it to make the president look good.”  The ‘cup boys’ were just as good at doing the politician dance as the congressmen who wished to see Commercial Crew go away.

     An interesting thing happened along the way.  When Garver was finally able to steer some of the NASA budget to a few commercial space companies, they began doing just what the space pirates said they would do – lower the cost of launching payloads into space.  Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, for example, was struggling with the development of what is now known as the Falcon 9 booster.  Many scoffed at his plans to land his spent boosters vertically on land or on a barge at sea for reuse.  With a little bit of government support, SpaceX began making rapid improvements in their launch capabilities.  While the ‘new’ rockets NASA was championing experienced cost overruns and slipped launch dates, SpaceX made many successful launch and booster landings with very little tax payer money involved.  Musk’s track record improved to the point where SpaceX became the most reliable and sought after provider to deliver satellites to orbit and supplies to the ISS.

     When it became apparent that SpaceX was on the verge of certifying their Dragon capsule to carry astronauts to the ISS, the old guard at NASA started running out of excuses to keep them out of the game.  The ‘cup boys’ around the administrator were all but apocalyptic.  It is hard to argue with success and SpaceX did indeed earn the right to transport humans into space – the first non-government launches of this kind since the founding of NASA.  Things got serious when Garver began getting threats against her life.  At times, NASA security would assign her an escort just to go from her office to her car.  It takes a special kind of public servant to continue to do their job when the ‘nut job finge’ elements begin to show their disapproval of your work with death threats.  Garver, for her part, held firm;  she was not trying to dismantle NASA.  She just wanted to see them improve their way of doing business by working with, and not against, commercial space companies.  The word ‘transitional’ comes into play here.  Sometimes, change is hard for the old guard, but it takes a person of great resolve to transition from the ‘same old, same old’ ways (read here:  expensive) to something more cost effective and efficient.  Lori Garver is one of those kinds of public servants and we taxpayers owe her a great debt.

     Were Garver’s efforts to ease NASA toward more commercial involvement successful?  She says, “A few weeks before Senator Nelson was confirmed as [the new NASA] administrator, NASA selected SpaceX to build its lunar lander for the Artemis program.  SpaceX is leveraging the $2.9 billion fixed-price contract to accelerate the development of the Starship vehicle that it has been building for many years at their own cost.  SpaceX’s selection opens up the opportunity to eventually transition away from the expensive government-owned systems that are still being developed for Artemis. (my note:  the Artemis program the old guard pushed for is behind schedule and way over budget as of this article).  If successful, Starship alone could perform the entire Artemis mission without the SLS (Space Launch System), Orion, or the Lunar Gateway

(all parts of the Artemis program), at significantly reduced cost and increased capability.  The shift to a more sustainable architecture for human space exploration again feels in reach.”

     Reading Garver’s account of her struggles with the alpha-male NASA culture will come off to those on the ‘it’s a man’s world’ side of the ledger as a bit whiny.  To me, it sounds more like she is simply relating the facts of what her NASA career was like and how she had to pick and choose which battles to fight.  She mentions a 2003 study done at Columbia University known as the ‘Howard and Heidi’ test.  A resume was printed and distributed to students in the school of business.  Some were for a fictional job seeker named ‘Howard’ and the rest (bearing the same information as the male job seeker) were attributed to ‘Heide’.  The final results of the student’s analysis showed a decided slant toward the male’s resume.  ‘Howard’ was seen as a go-getter, in charge candidate while the same characteristics for ‘Heide’ were deemed ‘bossy and driven’.  Anyone who doubts women are held back by workplace bias really should read Gaver’s book.  If the culture at a government agency like NASA can harbor such antiquated ideas in this day and age, then they certainly persist in other non-government businesses and organizations.

     Lori Garver can not take full credit for getting NASA out of the past and into the future, but she did her share to kick the can down the road.  If she can be accused of anything, it should be having the desire to save billions of taxpayer dollars by moving NASA toward a more sustainable future collaborating with private commercial aerospace companies.  Garver should be given a presidential citation and a gold medallion for her efforts, certainly not death threats.

 

Top Piece Video:  Okay – we have done the version of Space Oddity recorded on the International Space Station . . . maybe a version of Rocket Man done by The Bangles would be better here (no, I don’t think they covered it) – so we will give David Bowie his due – R.I.P.