<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes an unfamiliar name used as a title for an FTV article doesn\u2019t have enough information to be a real \u2018grabber\u2019.\u00a0 On the other hand, filling out the title of this installment with more details would be a little overwhelming.\u00a0 With that said, let me add this to go with the * above to serve as an \u2018explainer\u2019 authors often use to peak reader interest:\u00a0 <\/span>Lori Garver – and why she became a pariah to the NASA old guard but continued to push the Sisyphean Ball of the space agency\u2019s future up the hill even though she knew it would keep rolling back to the bottom.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0 Now that would be a mouthful of a title.\u00a0 It would also take up most of the cover as a subtitle.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It sounds kind of like the time loop in <\/span>Groundhog\u2019s Day <\/span><\/i>where Bill Murray\u2019s character is trapped and has to relive the same day over and over again.\u00a0 Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) uses a similar time loop to hold the villain Dormammu at bay in Marvel Comics movie franchise flick <\/span>Dr. Strange<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Sisyphus was doomed to repeat this act of futility forever, but I am happy to report, Lori Garver was not (nor were Murray\u2019s or Cumberbatch\u2019s characters).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Lori Garver is the former Deputy Administrator of NASA, a post she held during the Presidency of Barack Obama.\u00a0 Garver wasn\u2019t the first woman to hold the office.\u00a0 She was, however,\u00a0 considered an outsider from the get-go because she did not ascend to the position through the normal NASA channels.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Garver wrote a book about her experiences (<\/span>Escaping Gravity – My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age <\/span><\/i>– Diversion Books 2022). \u00a0 Her time at NASA, she said, reminded her of the old quote about Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astair:\u00a0 \u201cAfter all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did.\u00a0 She just did it backwards and in high heels.\u201d\u00a0 Before we get too far into her time at NASA, perhaps we should look at how she got there in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Born 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She majored in political science and economics in college.\u00a0 While working on John Glenn\u2019s failed presidential bid in 1983-84, she became interested in science.\u00a0 She went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in science, technology, and public policy from George Washington University in 1989.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many wrongly assume Garver went to work for John Glenn because he was an astronaut.\u00a0 She says, \u201cThe reality of my first post-college job was more pragmatic.\u00a0 I was disillusioned with the current national political leadership and wanted to help someone get elected who I thought would be better.\u201d\u00a0 With a grandfather and uncle who both served in the Michigan state legislature, Lori says, \u201cNot only is politics in my blood, but I\u2019ve been campaigning since before I could walk.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 My formative type role models were public servants dedicated to helping their neighbors.\u00a0 Doing something similar became my aspirational goal.\u201d\u00a0 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 \u2018true NASA type\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When Glenn\u2019s 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.\u00a0 When that group merged with the L5 Society (a group that came together to advocate for Princeton physics professor Gerard O\u2019Neill\u2019s concept of establishing free-floating, self-sustaining space colonies), she found herself working with \u2018space pirates\u2019 (her term) at the newly named National Space Society.\u00a0 According to Garver, \u201cSimilar to pirates on the high seas, space pirates have been depicted as both heroes and villains.<\/span><\/p>\n As with any group, the space pirates are unique individuals who share some common characteristics and views.\u00a0 Many of them have spent decades working to create a spacefaring civilization at great personal cost.\u00a0 These are the people [in the NSS] who raised me – my original space family.\u201d\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The 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.\u00a0 President Nixon okayed the Space Shuttle program in 1972 by calling it, \u201cAn 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.\u00a0 It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it.\u00a0 It will take the astronomical cost out of astronomics.\u201d\u00a0 When the original $6 billion budgeted for the shuttle quadrupled by the 1980s, it was clear the so called \u2018space truck\u2019 was not going to lower the cost of getting into space.\u00a0 The space pirates, and thus Lori Garver, knew NASA\u2019s penchant for using the same contractors and infrastructure would have to change to make space travel cheaper and more routine.\u00a0 The space pirates were, in some quarters, visionary heroes while in others (see:\u00a0 NASA\u2019s old guard and the contractors doing business with NASA) saw them as villains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The 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. \u00a0 NASA compounded the problem in the wake of the Challenger and Columbia disasters.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The final reports laid the blame at NASA\u2019s feet and the agency responded by making more poor decisions about how to proceed.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At the time the shuttle fleet was being mothballed, Lori Garver was the Deputy Administrator of NASA.\u00a0 She was already drawing fire for pushing the agenda toward a concept that would become known as Commercial Crew.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Politicians from states with companies holding big money NASA contracts wanted the space program to remain in the government\u2019s hands.\u00a0 The space pirates maintained this cozy arrangement stifled creativity.\u00a0 In other words, companies granted large contracts were content to collect the paycheck by doing the same things over and over again.\u00a0 The space pirates manifesto firmly stated (and I am paraphrasing here):\u00a0 \u201cThe only way to bring down the cost of space flight is competition.\u00a0 Let private enterprise get involved and they will find ways to improve the process and lower costs.\u201d\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Every time Garver tried to advance the Commercial Crew concept, she ended up disappointed.\u00a0 Advising presidential candidates and eventually President Obama, she made small headway getting the concept on the agenda.\u00a0 Back when I was in high school, we used to joke that congress had a difficult time getting things done doing what we called \u2018The Politician\u2019 – our name for a dance we described as, \u2018one step forward, two steps back, and three to the side\u2019.\u00a0 Lori Garver must have felt she was witnessing a lot of this dance, and not just from Congress.<\/span><\/p>\n NASA\u2019s administrator was surrounded by a group of ex-military men she called \u2018the cup boys\u2019.\u00a0 Each of them had a coffee cup on their desk bearing the insignia of the branch of the military they served in.\u00a0 They resented Garver\u2019s background (non-military) and took great pains to tell anyone who listened (again, I am paraphrasing), \u201cShe has no right to try and commercialize the space program.\u00a0 She is a woman and a political hack who is only in it to make the president look good.\u201d\u00a0 The \u2018cup boys\u2019 were just as good at doing the politician dance as the congressmen who wished to see Commercial Crew go away.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0An interesting thing happened along the way.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX company, for example, was struggling with the development of what is now known as the Falcon 9 booster.\u00a0 Many scoffed at his plans to land his spent boosters vertically on land or on a barge at sea for reuse.\u00a0 With a little bit of government support, SpaceX began making rapid improvements in their launch capabilities.\u00a0 While the \u2018new\u2019 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.\u00a0 Musk\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0When 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.\u00a0 The \u2018cup boys\u2019 around the administrator were all but apocalyptic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Things got serious when Garver began getting threats against her life.\u00a0 At times, NASA security would assign her an escort just to go from her office to her car.\u00a0 It takes a special kind of public servant to continue to do their job when the \u2018nut job finge\u2019 elements begin to show their disapproval of your work with death threats.\u00a0 Garver, for her part, held firm;\u00a0 she was not trying to dismantle NASA.\u00a0 She just wanted to see them improve their way of doing business by working with, and not against, commercial space companies.\u00a0 The word \u2018transitional\u2019 comes into play here.\u00a0 Sometimes, change is hard for the old guard, but it takes a person of great resolve to transition from the \u2018same old, same old\u2019 ways (read here:\u00a0 expensive) to something more cost effective and efficient.\u00a0 Lori Garver is one of those kinds of public servants and we taxpayers owe her a great debt.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Were Garver\u2019s efforts to ease NASA toward more commercial involvement successful?\u00a0 She says, \u201cA few weeks before Senator Nelson was confirmed as [the new NASA] administrator, NASA selected SpaceX to build its lunar lander for the Artemis program.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 SpaceX\u2019s selection opens up the opportunity to eventually transition away from the expensive government-owned systems that are still being developed for Artemis. (my note:\u00a0 the Artemis program the old guard pushed for is behind schedule and way over budget as of this article).\u00a0 If successful, Starship alone could perform the entire Artemis mission without the SLS (Space Launch System), Orion, or the Lunar Gateway<\/span><\/p>\n (all parts of the Artemis program), at significantly reduced cost and increased capability.\u00a0 The shift to a more sustainable architecture for human space exploration again feels in reach.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Reading Garver\u2019s account of her struggles with the alpha-male NASA culture will come off to those on the \u2018it\u2019s a man\u2019s world\u2019 side of the ledger as a bit whiny.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 She mentions a 2003 study done at Columbia University known as the \u2018Howard and Heidi\u2019 test.\u00a0 A resume was printed and distributed to students in the school of business.\u00a0 Some were for a fictional job seeker named \u2018Howard\u2019 and the rest (bearing the same information as the male job seeker) were attributed to \u2018Heide\u2019.\u00a0 The final results of the student\u2019s analysis showed a decided slant toward the male\u2019s resume.\u00a0 \u2018Howard\u2019 was seen as a go-getter, in charge candidate while the same characteristics for \u2018Heide\u2019 were deemed \u2018bossy and driven\u2019.\u00a0 Anyone who doubts women are held back by workplace bias really should read Gaver\u2019s book.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Lori 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Garver should be given a presidential citation and a gold medallion for her efforts, certainly not death threats.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Top Piece Video:\u00a0 Okay – we have done the version of\u00a0Space Oddity\u00a0<\/em>recorded on the International Space Station . . . maybe a version of\u00a0Rocket Man<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes an unfamiliar name used as a title for an FTV article doesn\u2019t have enough information to be a real \u2018grabber\u2019.\u00a0 On the other hand, filling out the title of this installment with more details would be a little overwhelming.\u00a0 With that said, let me add this to go with the * above to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-from-the-vaults","category-woas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2860,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2857\/revisions\/2860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woas-fm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}