Former NASA official Lori Garver said in a new memoir that she faced criticism for supporting SpaceX.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told her to get your boy Elon in line in one exchange she said.
Garvers book follows the commercialization of space and her history with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said government and NASA officials ridiculed her for supporting SpaceX. Senior industry and government officials took pleasure in deriding the company and Elon in the early years Garver said in her new book Escaping Gravity My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age published June 21.
The memoir follows the commercialization of the US space industry during Garvers time as NASAs Deputy Administrator during Obama Administration highlighting the agencys early interactions with SpaceX and Garvers efforts to make space launches more affordable — despite pressure from NASA to keep production in-house. In recent years NASA has appeared to embrace the commercial space industry as billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos vie for multi-billion dollar contracts with the agency but Garver says it was not always this way.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
The book takes aim at current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson who Garver accuses of attempting to rewrite history and wrap himself in the Commercial Crew flag after years of fighting against it. She said that if it were up to Nelson NASA would still be entirely dependent on Russias Soyuz rocket to send astronauts to the International Space Station.She recalled an incident where Nelson then a Florida senator took her to task for allowing private companies a chance to propose alternatives to NASA programs.
In one particularly uncomfortable one-on-one meeting in his Senate hideaway the intensity of his ire felt personally threatening Garver wrote. In response to public comments Elon Musk had made about SpaceXs ability to improve on NASA existing programs Bill Nelson shouted at me to get your boy Elon in line.
A spokesperson for NASA and Nelson did not respond to a request for comment from Insider. A Target In her book Garver describes an environment where senators and NASA workers were motivated more by self-interest than the greater good of the program. NASAs leaders were typically astronauts and engineers who didnt question the public value or relevance of their activities indeed many considered flying themselves and their friends in space to be an entitlement Garver said. They had little interest in transitioning what they enjoyed and got paid to do over to the private sector and they assumed that was their decision.
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