Lori Garver and Eric Berger for Ars Frontiers 2022 retail space. Click here for a transcript.
At an Ars Frontiers conference earlier this month, former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver spoke of her efforts to change the space agency when President Obama took office.
Big bureaucracies are resilient to change, of course, and NASA has been around for five decades in 2009. In particular, Garver and others appointed by the Obama administration are working to help NASA take advantage of the country’s emerging commercial space industry.
“The relentless momentum of the status quo exists for most government contracts because people who are paid to do something are not interested in someone cutting costs,” Garver said. She explained that this is because a change in the funding mechanism could mean that a certain part of NASA receives less funding.
The commercial space initiative was led by Mike Griffin in 2005, and by the end of that decade, NASA and the wider space community were reluctant to accept that private companies should be tasked with transporting cargo to the International Space Station. Garver’s struggle involved extending this initiative to include crew flights, and there was more resistance to the idea. The astronauts’ office was largely opposed, as was the majority of the established traditional space industry.
“Dan Goldin, who was head of NASA in the 1990s, called it the giant self-licking ice cream cone,” Garver said. “Why would anyone want to get rid of this sugar if they can keep sprinkling it?” So it wasn’t popular. I was not popular. And members of Congress with jobs in their neighborhoods from traditional performers have fought the change and never really funded it completely and really tried to undo it. “
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This decision, of course, proved to be the right one when SpaceX took off its first astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020. And on Friday, a second vendor of a commercial crew, Boeing, demonstrated its ability to dock with the space station. The company should start the flight crew in 2023.
The main goal of the sales crew, Garver said, is to reduce the cost of launching humans into orbit. Safety remains paramount, of course, but she and others felt that private companies were ready to take over from the government, which sent people into orbit from Mercury’s program in the early 1960s.
“Historically, if you look at NASA’s budget and the number of astronauts we flew with, we’ve spent about a billion dollars on an astronaut,” she said. “We flew about 350 people into space after Apollo and spent about $ 350 billion. SpaceX now charges $ 55 million for space. As a public policy initiative, it was all about reducing the cost of entering orbit, getting the best value for taxpayers, and allowing NASA to spend billions on things that are unique to its mission. “
More than a decade after launching these cargo and crew programs, the commercial space industry, which launched NASA, has helped the United States remain at the forefront of spaceflight. Investors spend billions of dollars a year to start new companies or support new ones. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the capabilities of these new companies, such as providing radar tracking of synthetic aperture troops or Starlink Internet communications to war-torn communities, demonstrated the potential of this new sector.
But as Garver explained during his conversation, none of this was easy.
“It was so startling when we sent our first budget request to the Obama administration, and it demanded this change – the private sector to do it, not the government,” she said. “Congress was furious. And yet, when I went abroad, what was the answer? I would say envy. And then you realized you were on the right track.”
Image of the list from NASA
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