Lori Garver served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2009-2013. Her new memoir Escaping Gravity, about the struggle to get her colleagues to embrace space entrepreneurs like SpaceX and Blue Origin, paints a deeply unflattering picture of the inner workings of NASA.
“I did tell an honest—some would say brutally honest—story about an agency that I do love,” Garver says in Episode 522 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “NASA has a clubby atmosphere. It’s a bit of a ‘the first rule of Fight Club is you don’t talk about Fight Club.’ I’m breaking the rules, for sure, by speaking out—the unwritten rules.”
In recent decades NASA has been plagued by missed deadlines and cost overruns. Garver says that in many cases the people who promoted those programs knew that their budgets were unrealistic. “I just don’t believe that the people who designed those programs believed that they could do them within those amounts,” she says. “I think they sold something that they thought someone else would buy, and that got their contracts flowing, and then no one wants to cancel contracts, because these are jobs in your district. It’s all a very cozy operation.”
Garver also describes an attitude of entitlement at NASA, with many in the organization being unwilling to ask hard questions about whether or not their costly programs serve the public interest. “People come to NASA who are engineers and scientists,” she says. “They don’t have any kind of background in public policy or economics, and they don’t really see why that matters. They’re like, ‘We want to walk on the moon. I grew up wanting to walk on the moon.’ OK, but does the public owe you that? Not questions they were used to hearing, nor did they like to hear them.”
Garver’s proposal to partner with SpaceX was eventually adopted, saving taxpayers billions of dollars, but she says that a lot of hard work still needs to be done. “We have done this thing at NASA, they were able to embrace change, which is very hard in a government system,” she says. “Not all of NASA is yet changed, and there are many programs in the government that could benefit from some of this tough love.”
Listen to the complete interview with Lori Garver in Episode 522 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
