'Escaping Gravity' Takes a Brutally Honest Look at NASA

Lori Garver served arsenic lawman head of NASA from 2009-2013. Her caller memoir Escaping Gravity, astir the conflict to get her colleagues to clasp abstraction entrepreneurs similar SpaceX and Blue Origin, paints a profoundly unflattering representation of the interior workings of NASA.

“I did archer an honest—some would accidental brutally honest—story astir an bureau that I bash love,” Garver says successful Episode 522 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “NASA has a clubby atmosphere. It’s a spot of a ‘the archetypal regularisation of Fight Club is you don’t speech astir Fight Club.’ I’m breaking the rules, for sure, by speaking out—the unwritten rules.”

In caller decades NASA has been plagued by missed deadlines and outgo overruns. Garver says that successful galore cases the radical who promoted those programs knew that their budgets were unrealistic. “I conscionable don’t judge that the radical who designed those programs believed that they could bash them wrong those amounts,” she says. “I deliberation they sold thing that they thought idiosyncratic other would buy, and that got their contracts flowing, and past nary 1 wants to cancel contracts, due to the fact that these are jobs successful your district. It’s each a precise cozy operation.”

Garver besides describes an cognition of entitlement astatine NASA, with galore successful the enactment being unwilling to inquire hard questions astir whether oregon not their costly programs service the nationalist interest. “People travel to NASA who are engineers and scientists,” she says. “They don’t person immoderate benignant of inheritance successful nationalist argumentation oregon economics, and they don’t truly spot wherefore that matters. They’re like, ‘We privation to locomotion connected the moon. I grew up wanting to locomotion connected the moon.’ OK, but does the nationalist beryllium you that? Not questions they were utilized to hearing, nor did they similar to perceive them.”

Garver’s connection to spouse with SpaceX was yet adopted, redeeming taxpayers billions of dollars, but she says that a batch of hard enactment inactive needs to beryllium done. “We person done this happening astatine NASA, they were capable to clasp change, which is precise hard successful a authorities system,” she says. “Not each of NASA is yet changed, and determination are galore programs successful the authorities that could payment from immoderate of this pugnacious love.”

Listen to the implicit interrogation with Lori Garver successful Episode 522 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy. And cheque retired immoderate highlights from the treatment below.