Sky & Telescope - April 2023 - 72

BOOK REVIEW by David Dickinson
Going Commercial
ESCAPING GRAVITY: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age
Lori Garver
Diversion Books, 2022
304 pages, ISBN 978-1635767704
US$28.99, hardcover
FOR THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM during
the past decade, crisis and opportunity
have gone hand in hand. We've
seen the end of the Space Shuttle era,
which had its last flight in 2011, and
the rise of companies such as SpaceX
taking astronauts to the International
Space Station (ISS). These evolutionary
changes have occurred alongside the
promise (and controversy) surrounding
the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket
and the Artemis initiative to return to
the Moon.
Lori Garver's book grew out of this
uncertain yet propitious period. Deputy
administrator at NASA from 2009 to
2013, Garver chronicles her unrelenting
push during this time to convince
agency bureaucrats to begin working
with commercial rockets. Her fierce
advocacy often put her at odds with the
space agency's male-dominated, corporate
culture. She found herself fighting
that virtually eliminated
the one method that has
long proven itself effective
in driving innovation,
efficiency, and costcutting:
competition. She
also details the indecisive
path through several
presidential administrations
to settle on an
objective for SLS and
Artemis - from going to
the Moon, to an asteroid,
to Mars, then back to the
Moon again. Garver was
also on hand for the James Webb Space
Telescope's rocky path through Congress
(it was almost canceled in 2011), which
ultimately led to its successful launch
on Christmas Day, 2021.
But Garver's greatest achievement
as NASA's second-in-command was
undoubtedly her success - with the
support of what she calls " space pirates "
seeking to transform modern spaceflight
- to get NASA to tap the private
sector to deliver cargo and eventually
crew to the ISS. This took place after
the end of the Shuttle era, when NASA
We're in for a fascinating stretch, with the recent successful
Artemis I mission heralding the return of humans to the Moon.
against entrenched political interests
and the agency's old-school status quo.
It was a tough row to hoe, but Garver
and her like-minded colleagues persevered,
ultimately transforming the way
NASA does business.
The book offers a ruthlessly honest
insider's view of the discussions and
debates that raged behind the scenes.
Garver describes the cycle of government
contracts and cost overruns as a
giant " self-licking ice cream cone, " one
72 APRIL 2023 * SKY & TELESCOPE
found itself paying for seats on the Russian
Soyuz spacecraft, a situation that
became more precarious after Russia's
annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Garver recounts how NASA finally
brought startup SpaceX into the fold,
albeit with caution. Originally, she
notes, the agency didn't want its iconic
logo on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Fastforward
to today, and a new version
of NASA's familiar worm logo adorns
SpaceX rockets carrying astronauts to
the ISS (along with Tesla
roadsters delivering them
to the launch pad).
" The space pirates
saw early that the biggest
obstacle to space development
was the lack of
affordable, reliable access
to space, " Garver writes
in Escaping Gravity. " They
believed the Space Shuttle
was impeding progress
and to some this made
the space pirates heroes
and to others villains. "
In the end, the savings to taxpayers
has been huge. Today, as Walter
Isaacson notes in the book's Foreword,
SpaceX transports astronauts to the ISS
" at a cost an order of magnitude lower
than all previous human spaceflight
missions. "
While Garver's indictments of NASA
culture during her time as the agency's
deputy administrator can be scathing,
she also optimistically chronicles the
push to get NASA out of the role of taxi
service to low-Earth orbit and back to
deep-space exploration with robots.
Such missions have blossomed over the
past decade - we've seen two rovers
land on Mars, New Horizons fly past
Pluto, and Juno arrive at Jupiter.
Read Escaping Gravity for a unique,
brutally honest perspective on NASA in
a time of transition, and for a glimpse
of the decade of space exploration to
come. One thing is certain: We're in for
a fascinating stretch, with the recent
successful Artemis I mission heralding
the return of humans to the Moon
sometime in the coming years.
¢ DAVE DICKINSON posts biweekly
on skyandtelescope.org, focusing on
spaceflight with an astronomy angle.
http://www.skyandtelescope.org
Sky & Telescope - April 2023

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