Former NASA official on trying to stop SLS: “There was just such visible hostility”

Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver published a book earlier this year, Escaping Gravity, that tells the tale of her nearly three decades in US space policy.

Garver played an important and at times controversial role in the history of NASA over the last 15 years, having served as leader of President Obama's transition team on space issues in late 2008 and early 2009, and later as deputy administrator for the space agency until 2013.

At NASA she had a strained relationship with the agency's administrator, Charlie Bolden. Garver pushed for substantial change at the behest of the Obama administration and more investment in the commercial space industry; whereas, Bolden was more supportive of traditional space and represented the views of many people at NASA at the time resistant to change. Bolden and his allies won the battle, ensuring NASA's development of the Space Launch System rocket.

Her book is especially timely, given the anticipated first launch of the SLS rocket on Monday. This is because a lot of her story focuses on the politics surrounding the creation of the large rocket, and one of the book's main antagonists is Bill Nelson, the former Florida senator who is now NASA's administrator and was the rocket's legislative champion.

I spoke with Garver this week about the upcoming launch of the SLS rocket. Here's an edited version of our conversation:

Ars: It has been a long road for NASA to reach this launch. Given all that you’ve experienced, how do you feel about the upcoming Artemis 1 mission?

Garver: I'm nervous about the launch. I want it to go well because all of these people have worked on it. I want them to feel good about their contribution. NASA is gonna get just a ton of visibility. But I do think that as the public starts paying attention, they're going to have a lot of questions. So far, I don't think people beyond our community really know what's happening.

Ars: One of the questions I think a lot of people might have is why it might be another two or even three years before the next Artemis mission.

Garver: Yeah, there are a lot of questions. The cost to get here. Why is the next one not for a couple of years when Apollo was so much more regular? And then, of course, the big variable will be Starship. There are just bound to be comparisons, even though, as you know, this was not supposed to be the competition in any way.

Ars: What’s a memorable anecdote from your book about the policy discussions leading up to the creation of the SLS rocket?

Garver: It was September of 2011, the day before they had the big press event to reveal the SLS design. We met in Senator (Kay Bailey, of Texas) Hutchison's office. Charlie (Bolden, NASA administrator) and I were there. Jack Lew from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Senators Hutchison and Nelson (Bill, of Florida) and their staffs. And we sat there and were admonished—we in the administration—by Senators Hutchison and Nelson for proposing a human spaceflight plan that was going to lead to great ruin. There was just such visible hostility on the part of the senators towards us. As I describe it in the book, I say we had a full house and they had a pair of twos, and we walked away from the table. They were bullies, and they got us to back down. And the next day, they rolled it out. They had those big posters of artists' depictions of what the SLS vehicle would be like, and that's when I knew this had been done with NASA's buy-in way before the day before. And I literally did have to steady myself against the wall during the news conference. I just couldn't believe we were gonna do it.

Ars: Why were you so shaken? Did you not think the rocket could be built in five years, or for the promised price of $10 billion?

Garver: I felt like the five years, and the $10 billion, was too much to begin with, and we wouldn't even make that. And if I had known it would be more like 12 years, and more than twice that much, I probably couldn't have even stood silently against the wall. But I don't know what else I was supposed to do. I still don't know to this day if my boss, Charlie, was in on the whole deal early or just dragged along. I really think that meeting with the senators was just probably to burn me, because I think Charlie was in on it, too. I thought it was silly because, you know, I didn't have a vote that was going to override the Senate. My issue is that the whole point of the space program is to align with the nation's goals. And so having a handful of senators earmark a rocket program to contractors that have already proven they weren't able to deliver was not right.

Ars: The House and the Senate have remained steadfast in their support of SLS since then. What do you think it will take for Congress to reevaluate this posture?

Garver: I think there are two scenarios, or a mix of them. A big one is SpaceX's Starship operating regularly at lower costs. I mean, NASA is obviously helping that happen. But their line has been, "Oh, but it won't be human-rated for launch." OK, well, if it's flying lots of humans, at what point does that become really an embarrassing statement? And it's all about flight rate. It will become inevitably embarrassing if Starship is launching dozens of times a year like Falcon 9 is, and SLS once every two years. The second scenario is SLS not going well. I think a test flight is just that, it's a test flight. This happy talk of it being completed—just look at the language, the celebration, NASA's planning, and so forth for the launch. There is not another test flight planned if this doesn't go perfectly. So then what? You're going to put people on one in two years if the first one didn't go well? I just have never heard anyone talk about that plan. It could be a combination of those things, not a perfect test flight and Starship flying, I think is what is the scenario that would lead to the demise of SLS.

Ars: Speaking of five years versus 10 years of development time, can you explain why it took so long? It seems like if you’re reusing the space shuttle’s engines, similar solid rocket boosters, and a fuel tank with the same diameter and propellants, that design and development ought to be fairly straightforward.

Garver: To me, it was clearly going to take a long time, because they took finicky, expensive programs that couldn't fly very often, stacked them together differently, and said now, all of a sudden, it's going to be cheap and easy. The shuttle was supposed to fly 40 or 50 times a year. And at its max it never got close. Typically, it was four or five. So yeah, we've flown them before, but they've proven to be problematic and challenging. This is one of the things that boggled my mind. What about it was going to change? I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone.

Ars: So how did we end up in this situation, in which NASA is modernizing the shuttle and flying most of the Moon mission on a single rocket like NASA did during the Apollo program?

Garver: There's a lot of people in the space community that believe you have to do things this way to get the political support. And in many ways that has borne out. I have said many times, (former NASA Administrator) Mike Griffin was very honest and open about the development of Constellation. It was to retain these jobs. It was to do this, in these contracts, where you could get funding. I can see why engineers think that's the way to work the system. But I think it's backwards politically. These are public funds. What we build should align with the national interest, not just a couple of people who will get us near-term funding.

Ars: A decade or so after all of this, how are you feeling about the future of US spaceflight?

Garver: I'm really positive about the future of space. The last decade has exceeded my expectations largely because of SpaceX. I just want to be clear about that. I couldn't have imagined, as I said in the book, that we would have something like a Starship as far along in the testing as it is today. I really hoped they could get Falcon Heavy before SLS, because that had been announced, and they were starting to work on it. And it was all their own money.

Ars: Falcon Heavy won that race, launching four and a half years ago.

Garver: That was pretty special. And I know they aren't 100 percent comparable, but neither is $20 billion (in development costs for SLS) to nothing (for Falcon Heavy) for the government, right? So yeah, the comparison is funny, and Falcon Heavy is the one SLS was originally in a race against, not Starship. Anyway, I'm really excited about the future. Sure, I'd love to have more competitors, but I think they're coming along.

Ars: The reason the senators were so unhappy with you back in 2011 is that President Obama tried to kill Orion and NASA’s efforts to build a big rocket. You wanted to partner more with the commercial space industry to further the agency’s exploration goals. Initially, at least, that would have cost a lot of jobs. But what would have happened had Congress gone along with the president’s budget request in 2011?

Garver: I'm very reticent to do too much with Monday morning quarterbacking, because, of course, there's so many variables. And I am the first one, as I point out in the book, to acknowledge that the specific plan we rolled out had details to be hammered out. This is because it had to be done without much NASA involvement, because NASA and its administrator was just putting forward Constellation. But our plan and that budget, the ideology behind it, would have seen technology demos by now for things like on-orbit fuel depots, we would have been working with industry to advance the technologies for heavy-lift that would have helped contribute to accelerate systems that were reusable and sustainable. I would imagine we would have had a competition, like commercial crew, for a larger rocket. We didn't do that, and we still are getting Starship and New Glenn, potentially. So maybe that wasn't needed. But I think it could have been accelerated. I think we would have been to wherever destinations that, politically, we had decided to go by now if that was the case. And we could have been doing it in a way that when it was happening, the public was excited, and it showed it was something new and different from Apollo. That was our goal.