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They have controlled that business, and they have been charging the government large amounts of money.

They create exquisite programs that are very expensive.

And so when I went to open up the competition to others, of course they're going to be opposed to that, they're going to say, no one else can do this for us.

♪♪ Hello, I'm Cari Stein, Executive Producer of To the Contrary, sitting in for Bonnie Erbe'.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, we continue our Women Thought Leader series with former Deputy Administrator for NASA, Lori Garver.

Lori published her book, Escaping Gravity: My Quest to transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, where she discusses her career with NASA, the ups and downs and the challenges she faced being a woman in aerospace.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

It's great to be with you.

Same same here.

Let's let's just start a little bit for about today.

What drove you to work or how you got where you are?

What drove you to work in the aerospace industry?

Well, my background is not very typical for someone who became the deputy at NASA.

I do not have an engineering or science background.

When I grew up, women were not flying in space yet.

That didn't happen till after I graduated from college.

But I have a background in political science and economics, and I came out of school looking to help have really like I think almost everyone on leave the world better than you found it.

And early on I began working for John Glenn, who at that time was a Senator.

I didn't go to work for him because he was an astronaut, but I got to know people through him that were supportive of NASA and began an entry level position at an organization called the National Space Institute.

When I was right out of college, I ended up getting a master's in space policy because I believed that from that vantage of space, we can and do make the world a better place.

So I come at this from a different perspective, which is what drove the policy agenda that I had while I was at NASA at two different times.

I've been at NASA and that was not always very popular, which is, I think, the sort of narrative of the book.

How was your your view of policy agenda?

What was different about what you were looking for out of it and what you thought was best, I guess, for the country and what was going on actually at NASA with an all male top tier, right?

The goal of our space program, that part of it that is funded by the taxpayer, in my view, as directed in 1958, was to utilize the vantage of the atmosphere and space to drive technologies and science that can help humanity.

And I think because of the success of Apollo, the human spaceflight program.

The manned program had become very focused on sending a few individuals into space for a lot of money.

We've spent roughly a billion dollars an astronaut since Apollo just going to low-Earth orbit.

And while that has been inspirational to many and there have been certainly benefits to the U.S., I think there are many more benefits that we could have if we reduced the cost of just taking people to space and focus on the new developments and technology and science such as the things we've learned about our home planet from space that should have been prioritized.

And that was something that initially when I came to the agency to do was controversial.

Why was that controversial?

Because people are making billions of dollars doing what they were already doing.

Change is hard.

And these aerospace defense companies who from the early days of the space program, when our human spaceflight program was sort of a soft power tool for the government against Russia in the Cold War, they wanted to keep doing that same thing and they gained expertize and they have controlled that business and they have been charging the government large amounts of money.

They create exquisite programs that are very expensive.

And so when I want to open up a competition to others, of course they're going to be opposed to that.

They're going to say, no one else can do this but us and the NASA people who are very comfortable with those companies.

And many of them go to work for them after their government jobs and so forth.

That was a cycle that needed to break and that competition is what allowed Space X as one of two competitors.

Boeing also won, but they haven't delivered yet, who are now carrying astronauts to the space station and back.

And that's at around $55 million a seat.

Still a lot, but well below what we were paying when we had programs like the space shuttle.

So when you talk about that Space X going to the, going up into space and going to the space station, you're not talking about really the space tourism stuff.

Correct.

That's an important distinction because I know the billionaire space race, you know, gets a lot of attention.

And Jeff Bezos, his companies Blue Origin, is taking people to suborbital space and that is not using taxpayer dollars.

Those people are going because either they paid or because Bezos and his company have decided to include them on those flights.

Same with Virgin Galactic.

Richard Branson's company is a private company and tax dollars aren't going into those flights.

Space X has private missions and they've taken people to space in the very same capsule The Dragon, privately, as they have those seats that are paid for by the government.

But the unique thing is, whereas the government typically spends tens of billions of dollars developing a spacecraft and then operating it at a few billion a year, we are now not having to carry those ongoing costs because we are just paying per seat because there are markets beyond just the government.

And this is even more important in launching satellites and spacecraft because NASA has been out of that business for a while.

But we had a monopoly provider and launches were costing a few hundred million dollars each.

Those are now because of Space X's capability, well under $100 million.

And we have won back commercial contracts from around the world.

We had lost that entire business to the Chinese, the Russians and the French 20 years ago.

And in building this back in 2020, the U.S. was again in the lead.

I hear people talk about the space race and just, you know, going up into space and how much it costs.

And it's admirable that the costs have come down, but they say we have problems here on Earth.

Why are we spending so much money exploring outer space?

That is a view that in my book I give a lot of credence to.

I believe the prioritization of NASA should be more focused on returning real benefits to taxpayers.

Out of $25 billion, which is NASA's annual budget today, just over 2 billion of that is spent, for instance, on Earth Sciences.

But from space is where we can really measure and model the interaction between what the climate, the atmosphere, the ice, the sea and the land, and how those interact and how people are, of course, suffering over things like famine and drought and that long term change where we can help mitigate some of these problems.

To me, that should be a greater prioritization.

Perhaps NASA is building a large rocket that is costing $3 billion a year just itself.

And it's been more than 12 years in development and hasn't launched yet.

The goal of that rocket is to put a couple of people back on the moon, which again, I think the people you are talking about, that's a good question.

What is what are we going to get out of that?

Because as I said, in the Cold War, we really did believe that we were in a fight for our lives against the Soviet Union.

And now I think NASA's trying to gin up this.

Well, we got a race to get someone on the moon before China.

But let's remember, we've won that race.

We've had 12 people walk on the moon.

So we're racing for that 13 person.

I mean, I truly do believe that we will be back on the moon before the Chinese are there.

And there are probably good reasons for our our global leadership that we do that.

But we should be doing it in a way that is lower cost so that we can prioritize the things that really uniquely benefit from the vantage we have in space and from NASA's unbelievable capability for people here on Earth.

You know, I find the moon fascinating, as do a lot of people, the phases of the moon.

So I completely understand when we talk about getting someone to the moon.

But clearly there are other things that are very important out in space that can affect us that that have different effects.

What was it like being one of only a few women at NASA?

You know, as as I said, I've been there twice.

I was there in the 1990s and then again from 08 to 2013.

And I don't think NASA's changed very much In its gender makeup of the leadership over that period of time.

When I came in as the deputy, we had out of 20 of the main leaders of three or four women and mostly things like, you know, head of HR And those things, a typical organization and it's hard to separate your gender identity from how you're viewed.

And of course, people always have a view that, oh, it's, it's not that you're a woman, that I'm not taking you seriously.

You know, and I quote in the book, a line from Hidden Figures, the movie about the women, early black women who worked at NASA and they say, oh, I'm aware you're you don't recognize that's why you're you're you have a different view of me.

It's an unintended bias.

I was not taken seriously in some of these views specifically, probably because I was second in command and not the first, you know, never mind that they were taking the men seriously who had positions well below me.

I was arguing for things that they didn't want to do.

And so they they could dismiss me and go elsewhere for it, for their views.

I was carrying out the desires of the administration because NASA is part of the administration, but the head of NASA was not really on board with this change.

He's an astronaut himself and much more wedded to the status quo and so for a lot of reasons, I was easier to dismiss.

But as a woman, I was, of course, treated with some very specific negativity, with people's language and so forth, called many names, asked if, you know, I'm on my period or going through menopause.

Those those things that you would hope to not happen anymore today.

Oh, my gosh.

I couldn't even imagine that at at this point.

Did other women who worked at NASA have similar experiences as you Yes Or was it that you were high up and you had ideas and you wanted to do something?

Yes, of course.

There is a great team of people there who want to change who were not part of this behavior at all.

And a great and growing cadre of senior women, many of whom, you know, it really depends on your background sometimes how you experience these organizations.

And because I was not an engineer or scientist, I think it was easier to dismiss my ideas.

But it is really changing.

And and a lot of people at NASA like to focus on that.

And, of course, my my message was typically we have come so far, but we are not yet done.

You know, the path ahead, the brush is not yet cleared fully.

Why didn't you walk away?

Why didn't you say, I'm not really having an impact here and I don't want to be here then?

Well, I was having an impact.

And in fact, that was what was not very popular, mainly because I was not alone.

There were lots of people over the years who recognized this transition needed to take place.

We got congressional pushback, so we had to go up against that and again, the national leadership.

But we were making progress.

And as long as we were, I really felt it's a very unique thing because these are positions I really was appointed by President Obama.

I ran the transition team for NASA, for incoming President elect Obama.

And even though I didn't meet with him regularly, I took that responsibility very seriously on behalf of the American people.

I was supposed to be delivering, doing everything I could to have the very best aeronautics and space program.

So,I knew I would probably never have a job with that much responsibility again.

And I. I took it very seriously.

That said, by 2014, when I had 2013, second term of the Obama administration, I had been told that they would be replacing the person at the top of NASA, largely because he hadn't supported their agenda but six months.

It was clear they weren't going to do that.

And I was, I think, having a diminishing impact because people a I'd gotten the main big things done put in place that I wanted to, but also because those people I'd gone up against had sort of, you know, lawyered up, gotten their own reinforcements.

And so I did leave before the end of the Obama administration to allow them to appoint another deputy, which they ultimately did.

But it took them over a year or so.

It was those jobs are always intense.

And I on balance, just, you know, I had a great experience.

You know, you you talk about a military culture in your book, and somehow it hits me that now the Space Corps is part of the military.

Explain that to me.

So after the Obama administration and the Trump administration did start, I assume, referring to the Space Force, and that is something that President Biden decided to continue NASA is not involved and by law as a civilian organization.

But of course, because a lot of the same people are involved, a lot of the people go back and forth between those services.

That is something that we all at the leadership positions of NASA had clearances and were aware of their activities.

We benefit from their technology investment.

They benefit from ours.

But we we are very separate.

We had to coordinate.

We had quarterly high level coordination meetings.

But the Space Force activities when I was at NASA was primarily done by the Air Force.

It's just now separated out and called that specific way.

You mentioned that both former President Trump and now President Biden have promised to put the first woman on the moon.

Do you think that that's going to happen in the next few years?

Oh, I do.

I think that for me, it's a little funny that the Trump administration really leaned in to say it'll be the first woman and they named the mission Artemis.

Artemis is the sister of Apollo and Greek mythology.

I had been arguing to name the missions Artemis and not been successful.

So, you know, it's like Nixon had to go to China.

Trump had to name a mission Artemis, but and say a woman would be on it.

President Biden added The first woman and the first person of color.

The question about timing is really just I mean, the Trump administration said it will be done by 2024.

That is not going to happen.

Just saying things doesn't make them so.

And now the Biden administration says 2025.

I do not believe that will happen either, but I do believe it will happen within this decade.

So you don't have a background in science, technology, engineering or math, the STEM area, but you suggest that young women, if they want to go into this field, that that would be something good for them to be thinking about.

Well, I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to say I don't have a background in science technology and a master's in science technology, in public policy.

I come at this with how do we utilize science and technology within our government system to advance humanity?

I am not an engineer and I do believe that there are absolutely requirements for more engineers that we typically, I think in most universities today, only have about 20 to 25% females in engineering schools.

There may be some some reasons for that.

I think mainly being that we haven't really been clear the value that engineers provide society and as women we tend to really like to go into fields where we can see how we're making a contribution.

In addition, the number one thing still that determines if you're an engineer is if you had engineers in your family.

I started a fellowship seven years ago and we've had six classes now of Brooke Owens fellows named after a dear friend and mentee who died in her thirties of cancer and these now 50 a year classes of women and gender minorities are making contributions to industry and finding ways to use aerospace engineering in new ways and that's that's the reason I really think we need them, because we all know diversity breeds invention and strength in science and it does the same on teams or in any organization.

Now, Elon Musk is quite the character everyone wants to know more and more about.

You've worked with him.

Tell us a little bit about it.

What was it like?

I have worked with Elon.

I met him 20 years ago.

He wasn't a billionaire.

I think he might have been interviewing me, but we we shared a meal that he'd invited me to because I think I had just recently left my first tour of NASA.

He has as expected, he's very intense.

He's inquisitive.

He I've I've had several just, you know, very productive meetings and conversations where it's clear he is focused.

He's not one for small talk.

I think you all before he said on Saturday Night Live, you know that you was on the spectrum.

We could have easily thought that.

But he's a genius.

The value that he has contributed to the space program has is is really unmatched.

Some of the things that we're paying tens of billions of dollars for Space X is now providing because they won the competition at a 10th of the cost, I think at least NASA itself, in its initial evaluation of what they're offering to launch SpaceX astronauts to the station, saved NASA about $20 billion in those early years, and I'm not sure what his profit is on those.

But as a taxpayer, we are spending a fraction of what we did for the same service, and that as a government employee was my objective.

Very interesting.

I don't think many people know that that side of him.

Do you think that space travel will become more accessible for civilians and what might it look like a decade from now?

I do.

That is obviously happening in suborbital space as we were talking about with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, Space X themselves are selling seats but these are seats that are in the millions to buy.

So if you think that's accessible, you're in a different demographic than most of us.

Over time, the next ten years, there's a couple of developments that might open that up even further.

One of them is what Space X is working on a massive rocket that's fully reusable.

If it becomes operational and it's called Starship, and that may get the price down.

It also may allow us to go what is referred to as point to point travel on Earth.

So if you launch suborbital rockets, you could within 90 minutes go from one point on the planet to any other point within 90 minutes.

So say the New York to Sydney route.

There's a lot to get from here to there.

Logistics, the environment alone is something we know that aviation has contributed to climate change and global warming and rockets do as well.

There isn't much rockets have done so far, but that's because they haven't been launching very often.

So if we are launching more, these are all things we need to design and develop more efficient and environmentally safe fuels.

So what's next for Lori Garver?

Are you hoping to go back to NASA as deputy?

Are you going to work more with Elon or start your own thing?

What's next for you?

Well, that is a great question, which I do not have an answer to.

I have joined a couple of very interesting boards, one called High Growth, that we're launching a constellation of satellites that looks at the hydrology of plants to better be able to evaluate stress of our agriculture so we can manage our water more efficiently.

I have I'm a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School where I get to help students.

And I still have, of course, great involvement in these fellowships that I began.

But, you just never know, as I have said, primarily, probably just to maybe give people a little concern who wouldn't like to see me back at NASA.

The current head of NASA is 20 years older than me, so don't don't give up.

I hear you.

Well, thank you so much.

And good luck with whatever you choose to do and good luck with your book.

We appreciate it.

And we appreciate your time today.

Thank you for having me.

It was a pleasure.

Same here.

That's it for this edition of To the Contrary.

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Funding for To the Contrary provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

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