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Policy

Aviation Week Picks Garver as #2 Person of the Year

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 23, 2014
Filed under

Garver Drove Shift In Space Policy, Aviation Week Person of the Year (#2)
“Lori Garver does not inspire ambivalence. Few who worked with her when she was deputy NASA administrator came away from the experience with a neutral opinion. To some, she is a ruthless powerhouse whose abrasive ego has run roughshod over opponents, leaving in her wake lost careers and hurt feelings as she trashed policy adversaries among the U.S. space agency’s civil servants and congressional backers. To others, she labored tirelessly to put the U.S. space program on a more realistic footing, redirecting it from its role as an overtasked, underfunded government pork barrel. In this view, Garver has been key in moving NASA toward a true public-private partnership where the government will only take on pre-commercial projects before they generate any profit.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

16 responses to “Aviation Week Picks Garver as #2 Person of the Year”

  1. Vladislaw says:
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    Man this will drive some of the SLS monster rocket crowd right up the flue …

    • Jonna31 says:
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      Not really. It’s happening like it or not. I mean, let’s be real: if you wanna cancel it, you know exactly what you have to do. You need to get Congress on your side. Which it isn’t. You need to win political victories. Which you aren’t.

      I mean really… is SLS any less likely to happen now than last month? Six months ago? A year ago? Nope. It’s actually probably more likely.

      So it really doesn’t matter who says what about the Senate Launch System, a name I’ve happily embraced, so long as it flies.

      I will say though, I truly appreciated her critique on the necessity of the Keep-JPL-Robotics-Alive rover, a.k.a Mars 2020. I wonder if that’ll get a fraction of the attention her SLS comments do. Because while the SLS can easily be argued as a waste of money depending on your perspective, science firsts only happen once. I hope we’re okay with the ESA doing Europa science years before we do, because we need to send another rover to Mars for some reason. And that rover? Just the prequel to the JWST sized meta-flagship Sample Return mission, that will be asked for after it, a mission that will be superfluous, when we sent astronauts there and back (who will bring rocks back)… what, within 10-15 years of it?

      And people call the SLS pork.

      • dogstar29 says:
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        I agree Mars Sample Return doesn’t seem that useful when in situ analysis is already pretty comprehensive.

  2. Gary Warburton says:
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    Good for her. At least she has the guts to say what she means.

  3. Rocky J says:
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    The Aviation Week article is more interesting than the simple fact that she is the Number 2 AW Person of the Year. Garver had a lot of interest in the Asteroid Initiative (ARM). I recall an interview where she spoke of the Initiative’s RFI, the great response to it and that it was to be followed by an RFP. The latter never materialized. The Asteroid Initiative is dead in the water. So most prominently, Commercial Crew is linked to her tenure but legislators in Washington have repeatedly underfunded CCP every year.

    Despite underfunding CCP, private industry is making progress and at the same time the (Senate | Space) Launch System (SLS) and Orion are not progressing any faster than one would expect. An unmanned SLS first launch in December 2017 is likely to slip to 2018. So the new President, Senate and House of January 2017 will, realistically, be the best opportunity to terminate SLS and Orion in favor of commercial launch of all NASA astronauts and payloads. Who will be advising the new president-elect in 2016 and 2017 to set the new path for NASA and select our next NASA administrator?

    The Aviation Week suggests the possibility that Garver will be a key person advising candidate Hillary in 2016. Having her as one science adviser, could make Commercial Crew and COTS and an end to the waste in SLS and Orion a part of Hillary’s platform – a means of cutting government costs. Her democratic opponents are unlikely to counter by supporting SLS/Orion nor is a Republican candidate faced with a party hell bent on reducing the cost of government.

    There were many Clinton supporters that jumped ship and joined Obama. The Democratic party seems to be filled with Clinton loyalists. Bill remains active and popular. But Hillary will have to face questions regarding Benghazi. Yet for those that are hoping to an end of the Senate Launch System and Orion, Hillary with Garver as an adviser, is probably the best chance of ending the waste and turning around NASA human spaceflight and channeling freed up NASA funds to real cutting edge technology and more Science.

    • Paul451 says:
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      But Hillary will have to face questions regarding Benghazi.

      Not within the Dem party, hence not during the primaries.

      Even in the general, it’s only an issue amongst the deepest of the deep-red. The only danger it poses is that it helps motivate the R base. But even there, if it motivates them too much during the primaries, you merely get a repeat of 2008; a field flooded with candidates trying to appeal to the Tea Party types, the popular candidates imploding, leaving the favourite of the deep-pockets as the nominee. Either way, it keeps any electable R out of the race. Unable to appeal to either the Tea Party or the big-money.

      [IMO, her biggest issue is her surgery.]

  4. Lowell James says:
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    “The most dismal NASA years there have been on her watch”

    I am a 40 year NASA veteran who is also a life long human space flight space cadet, supporter and cheerleader-emphasis on leader. I was left behind by my space agency and its non-leadership by Dr. Griffin and his contingent as they changed direction and moved to Constellation nine years ago. Talk about a misguided mistake. It was not the Space Shuttle as Griffin said.

    You are correct, the last 9 years have been dismal. However, it was not a result of Garver. The high points have been the cancellation of the misguided effort that was Constellation and the first flights of Dragon and Cygnus. If Garver was the motive force behind the commercial effort then I applaud her efforts. It is the one bright spot in HSF.

    Orion is no longer needed and it is a waste of my tax-paid dollars. If they had decided on a deep space vehicle several years ago then SLS might still have been useful, but the current direction is useless and will not be supportable.

    Its time for some serious housecleaning and a new plan at NASA.

    Garver was a start.

  5. muomega0 says:
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    First, thank you for this post.

    If one reads the article, Augustine stated the program was unsustainable even with $3B more per year–find the right program for the right budget.

    NASA internal studies indicate that for 15 missions over 20 years, the alternatives are at least $57B cheaper, so even with the plus up, why keep HLV around? http://nasawatch.com/archiv

    Apollo 13 is an example of how the capsule was abandoned during an emergency, so why take a 6+mT capsule with a 20 day capacity designed for LEO ascent and return on a one year round trip to Mars, when it or a reuseable, should be parked and powered down at L2? The 1.5 LV architecture separated cargo and crew and assembled in LEO. Now the crew is sent directly to BEO–where are the studies justifying this change and why do they exclude COTS?

    ESAS used flawed assumptions–the result: eliminate all 3 or more launch solutions due to AR&D risk, even though five, no six flights were needed by Ares V due to boiloff of high ISP propellant. NASA Admin did the dirty work in 2005.

    The SLS supporters keep pushing the one legged stool to the moon, but twice a year, 6 day lunar sorties is 240 mT (2x120mt). So if one simply flew a *SINGLE* LV 10 times, that’s a 24mT LV! However, the US and the world has excess capacity, so this makes the sizing solely based on the hardware, none of which exceeds 20 mT.
    http://hopsblog-hop.blogspo

    Even Boeing knows that the LEO gas n go architecture is the logical next step which provides a cheap increase in payload to the science missions, GEO comm satellites, and HSF missions. The LEO depot would progress to a hybrid chemical/EP, flexible path architecture based on a L2 Gateway, that serve as a staging point to Mars, telescope servicing, and lunar science and communications.
    http://nextbigfuture.com/20
    http://www.sciencedirect.co

    Now if you have any studies indicating HLV is required to explore and it must be retained, my guess is that Garver and the majority of the NASA community would welcome the discussion, and would publicly change their opinion. Note the original Shuttle designers have on public record that they never considered $/kg as a metric. Up for the challenge? Or will the public ‘never know the difference’? –a reflection of the current culture.

    Hence, your post reflects Garver’s observation: folks do not like change, even when presented with data clearly showing other directions offer a truly exciting and more economical path forward. Or they have other motives, killing ‘SLS’ for political reasons. Seriously…can you site the specific actions? another Bridgegate?

    So Garver was “not allowed to have the program fail”–she had to keep SLS/Orion around with the 70/130mT clause–Congress did the dirty work or tricks in 2010. She was handed a “D” or “F” program, capped at *only* 2.5+B/yr, to be continued at this funding level for decades with sole source contracts, and could not even include a non gravity well mission (no DSH or lander required) to increase the mission set by one for the rocket to nowhere. Quite honestly, most have no idea of the kludged versions of SLS that are planned to fly yet ‘SLS is on time and on budget’.

    Garver was held to an impossible standard, with the SLS supporters unaccountable for any part of their role to offer a solution to the budget limitation. It was easier to not present any challenge forward (redo Apollo), its okay to underperform; its okay not to ask more of the ‘kids’-its all the teachers/admin fault-not the requirement generating ‘parents’. An example of the fiscally conscious Congress, working and spending billions on all the wrong things, from the fiscally conscious Congress. Even more sad is that management today will not make that change.

    SLS/Orion are the gifts that keep on giving. It must be quite a difficult challenge negotiating a ‘compromise’, when all that remains is design knowledge capture and wondering why it took this long for program decades in duration.

    The path forward is quite clear. The FY15 budget will simply delete the words allocating funding to SLS/Orion. By the law setup in its original charter, NASA will release the numerous studies that HLV and Orion are not required, laying the blame on the admin and NASA rather than Congress. Oh well. So Long Shuttle. Otherwise, if retained, how about Dream Killer and the gift that keeps on giving, but not to NASA. Think about it.

    NASA has a plan, a flexible path forward, serving all legs of the stool, with the long term benefits studied per its original charter, while at the same time guaranteeing economic spinoffs and stepping up the NASA Grand Space Challenges. While Griffin noted that is quite difficult to steer a large ship to new path, Garver deserves credit of steering the Titanic on a different path to hopefully quite the exciting future. So who was No. 1?

    • Vladislaw says:
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      Great post. Congress told this President no on every NASA budget increase proposal, no to 6 billion over 5 years to fully fund mulitple teams in commercial crew. Said no to his direction he wanted to move NASA by actually funding the technology we need going foreward. But the people in the clown cars keep hammering that it was this president.

  6. LPHartswick says:
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    Gosh! Wouldn’t it be just terrible if we built a HLV. Oh my the sky is falling! Whatever would we do with it…Hmmm…maybe we could try spending an appropriate amount of money on this and other large worthy projects…so they don’t take forever to build, and double and triple their cost. Then you fine gentlemen wouldn’t get a case of the vapors. Then again maybe you would.

    • voronwae says:
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      5 Delta IV Heavies…..137.5mT…$2.175B…..2014
      3 Falcon Heavies…….159mT……$0.4B………2015
      1 SLS…………………….130mT……$5B…………2021

      Well, let’s say we built an HLV, with 130mT capacity given that Congress seems about to make this number the new goal. NASA’s last cost estimate through the second test (and the first manned flight) was $38B, before the capacity was raised. If we can bring an SLS launch in at the price of a Shuttle launch, we’re at $1.1B, unadjusted for inflation.

      Payloads will run $3-5B for our monster rocket, so we’re approaching approximately 1/3 of the NASA budget every time we launch it. Those costs will need to be spread out over multiple years in order to not break the agency, which means the SLS will require at least 20 years to accumulate 10 launches, enough that we’re making it out of the “prototype” phase. If we fly it 10 times, we’re at approximately $5B per launch. But that’s a little optimistic.

      Or, we could fly the same capacity to orbit on 3 Falcon Heavies, which will fly this year or early next, at $135M apiece plus payload/integration costs. We could begin those flights as soon as we had a program ready for it, let’s say 3 years between now and the first payload. If you’d like a lunar sortie, it could happen before the end of the decade.

      Which would you rather have, a rocket that will cost, at best, $5B per launch, 7 years from now, or 3 rockets that will lift 20mT more, for $0.4B, right now?

      I’ll just add that if you think we can get an SLS at the same price as a Shuttle launch, you’re awfully optimistic.

      • Jonna31 says:
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        Your numbers are all sorts of wrong, purposefully so I think.

        On an annualized basis, the SLS will be less expensive to operate than the shuttle… which flew for 30 years. Affordability complaints about the SLS ring incredibly hollow.

        http://www.space.com/17556-

        $500 million a launch, compared to $1.5 billion for the shuttle.

        As for payloads… I mean, that doesn’t really count does it? That depends on the mission. Sometimes (often times) it will be Human Space Flight related. A Uranus orbiter would conceivably use it. The NRO might use it. The DoD might use it for all we know. That’s tacking a mission cost on a general purpose tool for the purposes of inflating the bottom line. That’s as fair as saying the Ariane 5 is a ruinously expensive rocket because one of it’s payloads (out of dozens) is the $8.9 billion JWST. Ridiculous statement, right? Same in this case. The purpose of the 130mt SLS is to be essentially a big dumb rocket. If you have an issue with what the big dumb rocket is lifting, then that’s a whole other discussion. But the big dumb rocket isn’t at fault.

        And for the record, it was also immensely popular here when it was called DIRECT, but that’s a tangent.

        And moreover, whatever those “payloads” cost, we can afford it, because the ISS will smash into the Pacific Ocean in 2024 or 2028 and billions of dollars will be freed up to pay for things. That is unless, a good portion of SLS objection really is running interference to protect the ISS and it’s small time science, which my gut tells me it is.

        My gut also tells me that folks are going to learn to love it when one of it’s “$5 billion payloads” is Mars Sample Return, and then shortly after that is ATLAST… you know, which will be needed at pretty much the exact time the SLS starts flying more often, which coincidentally is around the year both the JWST and the immortal Hubble are expected to finally fail / run out of fuel.

      • LPHartswick says:
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        When are these Falcon Heavies going to fly 18 months!? What a fantasy! How many Falcon 9’s have flown in the last 5 years? Snap out of it that is 18 months away.

  7. dogstar29 says:
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    According to AW Garver might come back if Hillary wins – and you can bet if she does it won’t be as Number 2.

  8. Robert Clark says:
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    Where does the article say she was the #2 person of the year?

    Bob Clark