Garver was the deputy administrator of NASA from 2009 to 2013). The inner workings of NASA are portrayed in a deeply unflattering way in her new memoir.
Garver says that he told an honest story about an agency that he loves. NASA has an atmosphere similar to a club. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club. I broke the rules by speaking out.
Missed deadlines and cost overruns have been a problem for NASA. The people who promoted those programs were aware of the unrealistic budgets. She doesn't believe that the people who designed those programs believed they could do them within the allotted amount. They sold something that they thought someone else would buy, and that got their contracts flowing, and no one wants to cancel them because these are jobs in your district. It's all a very nice place.
Many in NASA are unwilling to ask hard questions about whether or not their expensive programs serve the public interest. She says that people come to NASA to be engineers. They don't have a lot of background in economics or public policy. They want to go to the moon. Growing up, I wanted to walk on the moon. The public owes you that. They didn't like to hear questions like that.
She says that a lot of hard work still needs to be done despite the fact that Garver's proposal was eventually adopted. She says that NASA embraced change, which is very hard in a government system. There are many programs in the government that could be helped by this tough love.
You can listen to the entire interview with Garver in Episode 522 of Geek's Guide to the GALAXY. Some highlights from the discussion can be found below.
The author on getting published.
After a few months with that agent, I realized they were trying to push a book that was different than what I was writing. They wanted me to talk about aliens and what I knew about them, but I didn't want to. That won't be the book. They let me go out of their contract and another agent went into publishing. Scott Waxman is the head of diversion publishing. I went directly to him because he was an agent. I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell, but also get it out in a shorter period of time than before, which is normal for publishing. I was really fortunate.
There is a science fiction author namedLori Garver.
It was science fiction that inspired so many of the space leaders in the 1950s and 1960s, and it continues to inspire people today. In the early days, that ends up being a boy. I didn't watch Star Trek or read a lot of science fiction when I was younger. Some of the science fiction is misogynistic. The Robert Heinlein award was given to me recently. I was the first woman to receive it. Some of that has to do with science fiction as we have a more diverse interest in our space program.
Garver talked about colonizing Mars.
I don't think we'll be able to mass produce the kind of things we need to have a colony. Over the long term, that is a very hopeful future, so it is not a negative thing. It's still a big question about how you're going to manage the radiation if you stay on Mars. What kind of buildings are you going to live in? We don't know how people can survive outside of the Van Allen radiation belt. We don't know how to move it in a way that doesn't expose people to radiation. There are many challenges there.
The author on book titles.
The book was called Billionaires and Bureaucrats: The Race to Save NASA. When the publisher bought it, they immediately said they wouldn't call it that, and reserved the right to call it what they wanted, but they promised we'd discuss it. Space Pirates are people who want to go out into space over the long term and sustain civilization. I kept pushing for a different title, especially when they came up with a cover that looked to me like teenage science fiction, and they did get a response from their sales teams that the book was terrific, but they thought the title and cover didn't convey the seriousness of the book. They wanted to call it breaking barriers. I said okay. Is it possible to work on that? They said "Fine" after I came up with EscapingGravity.
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