🚀 Faster, Please! — The Podcast #5

Almost 50 years ago, in December 1972, the Apollo 17 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, marking the end of the Apollo program. In the half-century since, no crewed mission — not Americans nor anyone else — has ventured beyond low Earth orbit. Despite a series of presidential promises, NASA has yet to return to the Moon, let alone venture to Mars. And despite recent declines in launch costs, thanks in large part to SpaceX, NASA remains in many ways committed to the old, Apollo-style way of doing things. To learn more about why NASA's manned missions always seem to run over budget and behind schedule — and to get a sense of the way forward with commercial space companies — I'm speaking with Lori Garver. Garver was previously Deputy Administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, from 2009 to 2013. Previously, she worked at NASA from 1996 to 2001 as a senior policy analyst. Garver is the founder of Earthrise Alliance, an initiative to better use space data to address climate change. She also appears in the 2022 Netflix documentary Return to Space. Her fascinating memoir, published in June, is Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. James Pethokoukis: In December of this year, it will mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 17 splashdown and the end of the Apollo program. Humanity has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since. And for a while, the United States couldn't even get to low Earth orbit on its own. What happened to all the dreams that people had in the ‘60s that just sort of disappeared in 1972? Lori Garver: I think the dreamers are still out there. Many of them work on the space program. Many of them have contributed to the programs that we had post-Apollo. The human space flight program ended and took that hiatus. [But] we’ve been having, in the United States a very robust and leading space program ever since Apollo. For human space flight, I think we got off track, as I outline in my book, by really trying to relive Apollo. And trying to fulfill the institutions and congressional mandates that were created for Apollo, which were too expensive to continue with more limited goals. The Nixon administration actually had the right idea with the Space Shuttle. They said the goal was to reduce the cost of getting to and from space. Money was no object for a while. When you have your program tied to a national goal, like we did in Apollo of beating the Russians and showing that a democratic system was a better way to advance society and technology and science, we built to a standard that tripled the budget every couple years in the early days. We [NASA] then had to survive on a budget about half the size of the peak during Apollo and have never been able to really readjust the infrastructure and the cost to sustain it. So I'd say our buying power was greatly reduced. We'll talk about government later in the interview, but to some degree, isn't this a failure of society? If politicians had sensed a yearning desire from the American public to continue moving out further in space, would we have done it? It's hard to know how we measure public support for something like that because there's no voting on it per se. And there are so few congressional districts whose members are really focused on it. So the bills that come up in Congress are funding bills. NASA is buried among many other agencies. And so I think the yearning on the part of the public is a little more diffuse. What we want to see is the United States being a leader. We want to see us doing things that return to our economy, and we want to see things that help our national security. Those are the ways space contributes to society. And I think what we got off track in doing is delivering hardware that was built in certain people's districts instead of being a purpose-driven program as it was in Apollo. Even though the Space Shuttle wasn't going to fly to the Moon, people were really pretty excited by it. I'm not sure polls always capture how interested people are in space. We don't really gauge based on people who are attending launches. As someone who's been to a lot of launches, there are lots of people enthused. But that's not 300 million people in the country. I think that polls tend to show, as compared to what? And NASA tends to be at the bottom of a list of national priorities. But, of course, its budget isn't very large. So these are all things that we try to evaluate. I think if you believe that network news was able to track public interest, by the time of the Challenger accident — which was only the 25th shuttle launch — they weren't showing them live anymore. So that's the kind of thing that you can look into. We really like things the first time. And those first couple missions were very exciting. Or if we did something unique, like fix the Hubble Space Telescope, that was interesting. But we had 134 missions, and not every one of those got a lot of publicity. I saw you in the fantastic Return to Space documentary, and you had a great statistic saying that basically it cost about a billion dollars for every astronaut that we sent to space. Was there just fundamentally not an interest in reducing that cost? Did we not know how to do it? Was it just how government contracts [worked]? Why did it stay so expensive for so long? A combination of all those things plays into it. It's about the incentives. These were government cost-plus contracts that incentivize you to take longer and spend more, because you get more money the longer it takes. If you’ve worked in any private sector, they want to expand their own profits. And that's understandable. The government wasn't a smart buyer. And we also really like to focus on maybe doing something exquisite or a new technology instead of reducing the cost. [It’s a] really interesting comparison to the Russian program where they just kept doing the same thing and it costs a little less. The Space Shuttle, we wanted it to be reusable. But it cost as much to refurbish it as it would have to rebuild. It wasn't until recently that we've had these incentives reversed and said, “We will buy launches from the private sector, and therefore they have the incentive to go and reduce the cost.” That's really what's working. If you look at what presidents were saying, they certainly still seem to be interested. We had the George H.W. Bush administration: He announced a big plan to return us to the Moon and Mars. I think it was like about a $500 billion plan. What happened to that? That was the Space Exploration Initiative? SEI, yes. I go into this in the book because, to me, it is really important that we not forget how many times presidents have given us similar goals. Because you come in, and I was the lead on the Obama transition for NASA. I was outgoing in the Clinton administration for NASA, leading the policy office, and supported lots of those Republican presidents in between in their space proposals. Never met a president who didn't love NASA and the human space flight program. They have various levels of success in getting what they want achieved. I think the first President Bush tried very hard to reduce the cost and to be more innovative. But the NASA bureaucracy fought him on that quite vociferously. Why would they? Wouldn’t they see that it would be in NASA's long-term interest for these missions to be cheaper, more affordable? It was not dissimilar to my time at NASA in that the administrator was a former astronaut. And they didn't really come there with a mandate to do much other than support the existing program and people at the agency. When you're at NASA and you just want to do the same thing, you don't want to take a risk to change what you're doing. You want to keep flying your friends, and you have really come to this position because other people did the same thing as well. I call it, in the book, the “giant, self-licking ice-cream cone,” becaus… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe