That wasn’t her only encounter with space biology. Not long after she took the job, planetary scientists discovered life on Mars.
WELL, THAT’S WHAT they thought.
They called it Allan Hills 84001, and it was first found twelve years earlier by a team with the U.S. Antarctic Search for Meteorites program. Every Martian meteorite was considered rara avis because to get a hunk of rock from planets four to three, you would need a Martian impactor of such astounding force that material would be blown to space, and the orbits and timing would have to be such that the rock would fly for millions of miles, find our pale-blue dot, survive entry, and hit the surface rather than an ocean. It took sixteen million years for the meteoroid in question to make the journey.377 In 1996 a team led by scientist David McKay submitted to the journal Science his analysis of Allan Hills 84001, noting that structures within it suggested fossilized bacterial life that could have formed only before departing Mars.378 The paper enumerated and explained discrete characteristics bolstering this admittedly audacious assertion. “Although there are alternative explanations for each of these phenomena taken individually,” the researchers determined, “when they are considered collectively, particularly in view of their spatial association, we conclude that they are evidence for primitive life on early Mars.”379
Well, there you had it! The first direct evidence of extraterrestrial life ever discovered. And this wasn’t guesswork from some crackpot on a NASA grant; McKay was the chief scientist for astrobiology and planetary science and exploration at Johnson Space Center. He was literally the world’s foremost subject matter expert and one of the smartest human beings to ever walk the Earth. His work was rigorous and meticulous, every t crossed, every lowercase-j dotted.
The paper hadn’t yet dropped when Lori arrived at Johnson as part of an unrelated tour of NASA centers to get up to speed on what the agency was doing and what her job would entail. When she walked in, sat down, and was presented suddenly with this rock from Mars with fossilized Martian life in it, she called Dan immediately and said, Um, you weren’t going to mention this? Are you kidding me?380
And Dan seemed to her just bonkers paranoid.
Are you on a secure line? he asked. We’ll talk about it when you get back.
When she got back, they talked about it, gamed it out, strategized how the agency might advance this discovery. The research had been subjected to full peer review. This was the real deal. Dan wanted the full lube-and-wax job for the unveiling. He even brought in a skeptic who would sit on the panel during the rollout.
But before they did the press conference announcing the discovery, Lori told Dan point-blank that there was one more thing he needed to do: he had to tell the president. Life on another planet? It’s a big deal, Dan.
No, no! said Dan. You don’t just go see the president. Maybe someone at the Office of Science and Technology Policy . . .
Mm, said Lori, no, I think this goes a little higher than that. But she saluted and went to the president’s science advisor and explained what had just been discovered, and right away, Dan received a phone call—was summoned to the White House—swept into the vice president’s office—and there he was, Vice President Al Gore, inquisitive as ever, and Dan explained what had been found, and how, and why scientists thought what they thought, and Gore listened, nodded thoughtfully, reflected a moment, stood up, and said, finally, in his distinct southern inflection, all stretched vowels and a mouth wrapped carefully around every syllable: Well, follow me.
Where are we going?
Oval, said Vice President Gore.
Later that day, Goldin returned to NASA headquarters and sat across from Lori, stunned and starry-eyed. He had told the president of the United States about the discovery of alien life.
And so began the dawn of an exceedingly brief new era. On August 7, 1996, President Bill Clinton gave a televised address from the South Lawn of the White House. In the rearview mirror of history, it might have been the most important address of all time. “If this discovery is confirmed,” said the president, “it will surely be one of the most stunning insights into our universe that science has ever uncovered. Its implications are as far reaching and awe inspiring as can be imagined. Even as it promises answers to some of our oldest questions, it poses still others even more fundamental.”381
And it was all a horrific mistake!
In the end, each of the life-affirming features of the meteorite—now subject to the intense scrutiny of just about everyone whose name was suffixed with a P, h, and D—was explained by nonlife processes in such a way to suggest that ALH84001 wasn’t a pristine cemetery of Martian bacteria.382 It was . . . just another rock! Sure, another rock from Mars—and that was exciting, because there were then only a dozen identified Martian meteorites in all the world—but ultimately, went the consensus, just another rock.383
In 2000 George W. Bush was elected president, and a new NASA team transitioned into power. By the end of her time at NASA headquarters, Lori was most proud of her work developing commercial space. The bioreactor demonstration system was completed just before its 2003 launch on the shuttle Columbia. The experiment was destroyed, however, when the space shuttle disintegrated in February of that year.384
When she left the agency, Lori worked as a consultant primarily for the big aerospace companies, did proposal development, competitive analyses, acquisitions, and just taught them in general what good NASA contracts looked like and how to win them, which was exactly the sort of consultant work you did when you left government. And then she became “AstroMom,” which was not.
One of her clients not of the aerospace industry wanted to fly to space and do experiments there, and he retained Lori’s talents to make that happen. So she helped negotiate a great contract with the Russians for the flight, and things moved in Swiss watch fashion. He was soon in Russia doing the necessary medical training for a stint on the space station, but for business reasons, he suddenly found that he could not go up. This did not go over well with the Russians, who absolutely needed the money, and they made it very clear that you (i.e., Lori) needed to find someone else to buy that seat, srochno. We have bills to pay! So Lori called Tom Hanks, James Cameron—everyone she could think of, really, who might want to go to space and had the funds to foot the bill. No dice. So her consultancy came up with an even better idea: Why not send Lori—LORI GARVER OF HASLETT—to space. He was her client, after all. She was the one with the NASA experience. She led the space group at the consultancy. What they would do is get an agent and find sponsors to pay her way, and they would make a big splash of it. And if you’re trying to sell product, well, women made seventy percent of household purchases in the United States. Lori was perfect for the job!
She hesitated. Her kids were four and six, and she would have to leave them for months, and that would be hard. There was the danger, too. It was Mary Ellen Weber, her favorite astronaut friend (as one has), who advised Lori to think of her own mom. What if she’d had this opportunity? And when you were six, she’d turned it down because of you? Would you have wanted her to have done that?
It was—God, Lori wanted her mom to be able to do everything! It was the sort of advice only an astronaut, wise and brave and practically mythological, could have given. And Lori talked to her boys about it, and they were all in, Mom.
And so it was set. Lori flew to Russia to undergo the requisite medical tests and training, and she was staying with a Russian family (her translator’s mom), and she had negotiated a great seat price, variable, depending on the number of sponsors she could get.
And then her office called.
Hey, Lori, this is hilarious, but Lance Bass from the band ’N Sync wants to fly to space.
And, I mean, to a consultant that was great! Which one was Lance? Was he the cute one? she asked. He was! Her favorite! Nice guy, he flew out, and he and Lori were fast friends, did press conferences. Lance had a manager, agents, and apparent backers, and the Russians saw serious coin in the
ir future and good night and thank you, Lori, but we’ve found our real meal ticket.
It was clear to Lori almost immediately, however, that Lance Bass would never leave the Earth planet. Lori had gone after this thing the way a hard-nosed veteran of DC did things: meticulously, strategically, logically. Discovery Channel was her media partner, and it was in for one million dollars. Lance Bass, on the other hand, had MTV, but it wasn’t clear to Lori how much, if anything, MTV was willing to pay.385 She had Visa on board, and it was going to kick in three million dollars, because she was set to fly in November, and here was a mom in space, and she had two boys back home. She had to shop for the holidays! It was going to be the first credit card purchase from orbit. She was set to buy something from another of her sponsors, Radio Shack (promising a disappointing Christmas for one of her kids). She had Sudafed in her portfolio. (Astronauts relied on it while on board the space station but could never say they used it, because NASA didn’t want another Tang—referring to the orange drink mix popularized when word got out that the Mercury and Gemini astronauts had enjoyed it on their flights.) One of her kids played soccer, but Major League Baseball expressed interest, so guess who dropped soccer and took up the bat and ball? It was all set. Disney, when she landed: “Lori Garver, you just returned from the International Space Station—what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to Disney World!”
The story wrote itself.
Lori was on her way—even had her gallbladder removed because the Russians found a gallstone and refused to put her on the centrifuge. Gallbladderless and so close to launch that she could taste the rocket’s dimethylhydrazine, she spent her fortieth birthday doing eight Gs.
But Bass and his entourage of representatives . . . Lance was clueless—a nice guy—but just oblivious to the way things worked. There was no way, she felt, this guy would find the money to cover a twenty-million-dollar seat on Soyuz. The ruble conversion, however, was just too tempting for the Russians to see the obvious: that the singer’s representatives lacked the resourcefulness to get the money. Amazingly, Lori wasn’t bitter about any of this because her motivation in part was to get word out about the space station, which Americans seemed to know nothing about. She had been at the agency at the time of its launch, and the station was important to her. And having embraced its commercialization, she wanted to see the money materialize, and she knew now that the advertising dollars were there, just waiting to be spent.
Anyway, Lori went home. Lance Bass could have her seat because he was going to popularize the station, too. But then his agents, as expected, came up short, and the Russians replaced him with a cargo container.386
Though she never left terra firma, her AstroMom experience made Lori perhaps the most visible face in commercial space, and she returned to consulting with new ideas for how to do business in the void.
LORI WAS WALKING through Dulles International Airport in Virginia, autumn 2008, when her phone rang.
Said the voice on the other end: I don’t know NASA and you don’t know me, but I’m Tom Wheeler.387 I’m supposed to select the head of the NASA transition for the Obama administration. I know exactly one person in the space program, and I called him. He said it should be Lori Garver. The person I called was John Glenn.
Well, of course she said yes.
Barack Obama had not yet been elected president. His transition teams were assembled in advance and briefed so that the day after the election—assuming it went his way—members could parachute into their respective areas of responsibility. In the seventy-seven days between Election Day and the inauguration, the president would need to be fully briefed on the affairs of state so that on day one he could run his new government effectively. On November 5, 2008, President Elect Obama’s transition team got to work.
Lori felt the burden of the job straightaway. Here she was, a Haslett dreamer who had worked campaigns since she was in diapers, now helping to facilitate democracy at its finest and most magical moment—the peaceful transfer of power—and she was in charge of space! She dropped her entire portfolio of consulting clients to avoid conflicts of interest, and embarked on a cross-country tour of each NASA center to understand ongoing activities, learn where they were prospering, where they were struggling, what they needed for success, and where they intended to go from here. Her favorite meeting was with Charles Elachi at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There was no subterfuge in the director’s presentation, no obfuscation. He declared that Mars Science Laboratory was over budget and behind schedule, and while they could make the mission launch date if told to do so, there would be a very high probability of failure. Elachi listed the technical reasons for the delay and key things he needed for success, chief among them: four hundred million dollars and two more years. She believed him. I mean, NASA was almost two billion dollars in at that point. You’re telling me you need more time? OK. You’ll have more time.
For every one of those seventy-seven days, she met with center directors and mission directors in back-to-back meetings. NASA rank and file, overall, were very accepting of Lori and her team. She had been there before, had by now clocked a career in space spanning twenty-five years, was a prominent space advocate, and had a lot of friends. She encountered occasional pushback from senior officials who were nonplussed with a new administration coming in and asking questions, but there was no time for political posturing. Personnel changes could be made soon enough, and she had weekly reports due to Rahm Emanuel, the abrasive incoming chief of staff of the Obama White House. You did not want to disappoint Rahm Emanuel.
Of all NASA’s programs, the one that soon clarified in Lori’s eyes as the most troubling was Constellation. The program began in response to the Vision for Space Exploration, a long-term plan for human spaceflight initiated under Sean O’Keefe and announced by President George W. Bush in 2004.388 Broadly, it shared the same goals as George H. W. Bush’s Space Exploration Initiative: station-moon-Mars.389 It was billed as Apollo on steroids, which was almost an understatement. NASA would build Orion, a new category of crew capsule capable of connecting to the space station or carrying astronauts to the moon. The agency would also build a new lineup of rockets, called Ares. (If there was any doubt as to where Constellation intended to fly, Ares is the Greek equivalent of the Roman god Mars.) The smallest of the Ares rockets would launch Orion to the International Space Station. Ares V, the gargantuan heavy-lift variant in the lineup, would send astronauts to deep space. There would be transports between Earth and the moon, lunar landers, rovers, Mars transports, Martian landers—the works. NASA would work out all the kinks of serious settlement on the lunar surface and apply the lessons learned to the Red Planet. The program was possessed of boundless ambition and engaged the entire agency. It, at last, was a vision: a clear, no-hedging answer to What Are We Doing Here, Anyway? Why do we have a NASA? To build the infrastructure and equipment to send astronauts to Mars. And we are going there to stay. We have already started building the equipment. It is going to happen.
The problem was paying for the thing. Congress demonstrated little interest in appropriating the numbers NASA needed to get Constellation off the ground. Had this been a piecemeal effort, the agency might have been able to work around the flat funding, but by the time Lori was running the transition team, billions had been spent on the program, and . . . it just wasn’t going anywhere. Its prerequisites were untenable.
The more Lori and the transition team heard, the less sense it made. According to the current NASA plan, Orion and Ares would be paid for by mothballing the shuttle fleet in 2010 (saving three billion a year) and tearing the International Space Station from space in 2016, literally dropping it into the ocean (even though NASA was, at the time, still building the thing).390 This would save fourteen billion dollars otherwise spent extending it through 2020.391 But Orion was designed to go to the space station and was not scheduled to fly until a year after said station had become the world’s most expensive habitat for startled fish. Which
meant . . . the Orion plan only worked if it assumed that deorbiting the space station wasn’t really going to happen. The entire program was like a political sleight of hand.
This did not go over well with Lori Garver, who knew, among other things, that YOU DO NOT START LYING TO THE PRESIDENT ON HIS FIRST DAY IN OFFICE.
Four months after his inauguration, Barack Obama nominated Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and Marine Corps general, to become the administrator of NASA. Obama had previously put forward other candidates, but Senator Bill Nelson of Florida didn’t like his first or second or third choice, and Nelson had the power to kill said nominations dead, and did.392, 393, 394 Nelson was up-front about it: he wanted Bolden as administrator, because, at least in part, he and Charlie had flown together on the shuttle Columbia in 1986. Nelson, a payload specialist on the mission, liked Charlie, trusted Charlie, and that was that.
Just before she and Bolden were confirmed by the Senate, Lori set in motion an independent commission to figure out the state of the American space program, and chiefly to get to the bottom of this Constellation business. Led by Norman Augustine, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Lockheed Martin, a panel of ten luminaries in space policy met seventeen times by teleconference and at various NASA facilities between June and October 2009.395 Sally Ride served on the panel, as did Christopher Chyba, who chaired the first Europa Orbiter science definition team in 1998; Wanda Austin of the Aerospace Corporation (the same that had so vexed the Jupiter Europa Orbiter team in the Decadal Survey); and a mix of astronauts, engineers, scientists, established players in the aerospace industry, and upstarts in the burgeoning New Space movement of private cosmic explorers. At the end of the commission’s study, it issued a one-hundred-fifty-five-page report titled Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program Worthy of a Great Nation. The set of findings was extensive, examining every aspect of space exploration: where we go first (moon? Mars? elsewhere?); how we get there; why we go there; what we do there; how we pay for it; and how we balance human and robotic exploration. The report presented five options for how NASA should proceed. Each option, in Lori’s estimation, was excellent. And every single one of them canceled Constellation.
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