Book review: "Escaping Gravity" by Lori Garver

I looked at a few book reviews for this book, but none seem ideal. Sounds like a good book, though?

From the article:

One of the strange things Lori and other commercial space proponents had to navigate had to do with political re-polarization on the whole topic of space commerce. Whereas congressional Republicans had always held to their party’s core notion of the private sector being the best way to do things and that Big Government was ill-equipped to do so – and the opposite notion traditionally held by Democrats, that whole symmetry was upset.

Since the (Democratic) Obama Administration was pushing commercial space congressional Republicans opposed commercial efforts. As such, funding for commercial crew and cargo being diverted to the congressionally mandated, big government SLS program year after year. Democrats were new to the whole notion of pushing for a more enlightened and efficient private sector and Republicans found themselves defending big, bloated government mandated programs – because the Dems were for the opposite approach. What a fine mess.

To make things worse, Garver (and many others) were constantly confronted with Charlie Bolden’s refusal to either adhere to direction from the White House – or even bother to seek it out in the first place. As such when it came time to stand up for the Obama Administration’s push for commercial budget items in Congress, Bolden never devoted 100% to the defense – leaving Garver alone as the senior most proponent for commercial space at NASA. And she was Number Two – not Number One – at NASA.

Among the biggest supporters of the SLS – the “Senate Launch System” as Garver and others referred to it – was Senator Bill Nelson. To Nelson and his Big Aerospace backers the SLS was the only way to keep the folks back home in Florida happily employed as the Shuttle program wound down. Nelson saw the nascent commercial space efforts NASA had been pushing – with the most prominent contractor being SpaceX – to be a direct threat to the status quo. Garver saw the commercial sector as the only way to inject fresh thinking and cost consciousness into the whole process of putting people and things into space.

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Alas, if you listen to them now, both Charlie Bolden and Bill Nelson enthusiastically crow about the value of commercial space you’d be excused for not knowing that they were against it – before they were for it – as we say here in Washington.

Lori Garver regularly locked horns with Bill Nelson. Bill Nelson has always wanted NASA to do what Bill Nelson wanted NASA to do. This started in the 1980s when he was a Congressman and used his influence to worm his way into a seat on a shuttle mission – with crew mates Bob Cabana and Charlie Bolden. Years later when the Obama Administration had settled on Steve Isakowitz as their choice to be NASA Administrator, with Lori as Deputy, Nelson exerted his influence and got the top job for Charlie Bolden instead. Few people were surprised to see Nelson pull this trick again to get the Administrator’s job at NASA when Joe Biden had other people in mind.