“Many who disagreed with my views attacked me with vulgar, gendered language, depredation, and physical threats,” Garver, now 61, writes in the book. She also labels the pledge to land the first woman on the moon - first by the Trump administration and now the Biden White House - as little more than a “marketing gimmick.”Īnd despite her own success moving up the chain, women have also been openly denigrated, she writes.
She notes in the book that all 14 NASA administrators have been men and only two of the 134 Space Shuttle missions were helmed by women. Garver, who after she left NASA ran the Air Line Pilots Association, also takes direct aim at what she calls NASA’s “male-dominated” and “military culture.” Bolden and the prime contractors for the SLS program also did not respond to requests to comment. NASA and Nelson, through a spokesperson, declined to respond to the charges and criticisms that Garver levels in her book. “I was nearly done with this book when he was appointed,” she said. Garver admitted she had not anticipated that Nelson would be running the space program when her memoir came out. I think they very clearly are not going to like it.” “I’m not passive-aggressive,” Garver told POLITICO. We are still at a point where it is not exactly clear we’ve developed something that is sustainable for deep space.”īut is she concerned about how her book will be received by Nelson, Bolden or others she worked so closely with? “And Senator Nelson is now Administrator Nelson. “People don’t want to be critical of our current leadership,” Garver said in an interview. NASA on Monday again had to prematurely halt the practice countdown for SLS, including fueling the rocket, in what was its fourth attempt. Kay Bailey Hutchison “forced on us” the SLS, the taxpayer-funded mega-moon rocket that is years behind schedule, billions over cost and slated to finally make its first uncrewed flight this summer. Garver contends that if Nelson and Bolden had their way a decade ago, the United States would still be dependent on Russia to send astronauts to the space station.Īnd Nelson, she says, who along with then-Sen. It was Nelson, she writes, who “led the opposition” to the Commercial Crew Program - the novel public-private partnership she championed that culminated in 2020 with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon returning American astronauts to the International Space Station from U.S. senator from Florida who represented Kennedy Space Center and now runs NASA. She says one of the biggest impediments to reform was Bill Nelson, the former U.S. Garver accuses lawmakers in both parties of continuing to put their own political interests above NASA’s. She calls out aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin and their suppliers for greedily pushing NASA leaders and Congress to initiate the $23 billion-and-counting Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule that she fears will bankrupt the space program before it ever returns astronauts to the moon.
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Garver, who joined NASA in 1996 and held a series of increasingly senior posts, accuses her former boss, Charles Bolden, the first Black NASA administrator, of multiple leadership failures - from presiding over declining diversity in the astronaut corps to doing the bidding of entrenched interests and their backers in Congress.
“I was attacked by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, by the aerospace industry, and by hero astronauts for proposing an agenda that didn’t suit their parochial interests,” she writes in Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, which she shared with POLITICO ahead of publication. Garver said her efforts to reform NASA as deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013 - in particular, canceling the Constellation space vehicle program that fizzled after four years and billions of dollars - ran headlong into “the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex.”
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