by Tim Fernholz
Lori Garver had been a senior adviser to Dan Goldin, the NASA administrator under President Bill Clinton, and had spent the interregnum raising two children, consulting for Boeing, and attempting to fly to the future space station as a tourist, a plan ultimately foiled by cost. Obama’s transition charged this “Astromom,” as her space tourism effort was branded, with leading the handover duties at NASA—tallying up the existing programs, their expenses, their future prospects. But Garver encountered resistance to even basic questions. This surprised the transition team, since President Bush had made a point, given the chaotic economy, of encouraging his appointees to go above and beyond when bringing their replacements up to speed. “It was pretty phenomenal,” James Kohlenberger, who would become a key White House science adviser, said of the transition. “Except that was what caught our attention at NASA. I don’t think the team was getting the information they were looking for.”
Griffin appeared to be campaigning to keep his job. A petition organized by some former NASA types calling for Griffin to remain in his post attracted attention when Griffin’s wife sent out an email asking friends to sign it. The administrator’s effusive praise of Obama and publication of a collection of his remarks led Paul Light, an academic observer of presidential transitions, to comment that “it sounds like the only thing left is to stencil MIKE GRIFFIN on the side of a shuttle.” NASA spokespeople denied that Griffin was doing anything inappropriate, but they noted that others seemed interested in keeping him around. This wasn’t unprecedented. Though political appointees typically resign in a new administration, Bill Clinton had kept on Goldin, a Bush appointee, to run NASA. Goldin had been more of a technocratic figure, whereas Griffin was polarizing—in defense of Constellation, and also on the subject of climate change, where he had questioned the scientific consensus about humans’ role in global warming. Much of the data behind those claims was generated by NASA scientists.
Griffin reportedly called on contractors working on Constellation and asked them to lobby the administration to protect the program. His staff monitored meetings between career NASA employees and the transition team to see that they stayed on message. Griffin implied that the transition team members, most of whom had policy and not engineering backgrounds, lacked the knowledge to evaluate his proposals. These tensions would boil over, in a perfectly Washingtonian and appropriately dorky scene, during a Smithsonian Institution book party attended by both Griffin and members of the NASA transition team in December 2008. The history professor speaking that night noted that John F. Kennedy’s administration had all but ignored NASA during his transition.
“I wish the Obama team would come and talk to me,” Griffin said loudly, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “We’re here now, Mike,” one of Lori Garver’s colleagues responded. Griffin and Garver then entered into a heated conversation, with the Obama aide expressing her bewilderment at NASA’s refusal to answer basic questions about what was happening “under the hood” at NASA. Later, she told me that the program “was just not willing to show us more than a video that had two Ares [rockets] launching at once.”
“If you are looking under the hood, then you are calling me a liar,” Griffin reportedly replied. “Because it means you don’t trust what I say is under the hood.”
If nothing else, it was clear that Griffin had talked himself out of a job, instead of into one. But beyond his personal commitment to the new heavy rocket—“Ares V is a design I had carried around in my head for fifteen years,” he noted in one interview—there were institutional and political forces that the new administration would have to address. The Obama team was convinced that the need for change and the harsh judgments of the Columbia accident investigation, which they took as gospel, had not taken hold at NASA. The agency could not finish building the International Space Station, replace the space shuttle, and launch a mission to the moon at the same time. It was time to prioritize.
The contractors deeply engaged in those projects—seeing billions of future revenue hanging in the balance—weren’t going down without a fight. Nor would politicians from districts that hosted those jobs, including Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas (the home of the Johnson Space Center) and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland (home of Goddard Space Flight Center). At this point, none was more vital than Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a legendary defender of the Space Coast who had flown on the space shuttle while a member of Congress in the 1980s. Nelson also happened to be an ally of Obama’s, a Senate mentor who had been one of the first establishment backers of his outsider candidacy for president. He had seen what happened to Florida after the Apollo and space shuttle programs were wound down, and now he feared similar job loss in his state, already in the throes of a recession.
To accommodate Nelson’s desire for continuity at NASA, the president eventually picked Charles Bolden to lead the space agency. Bolden, an African American former Marine aviator, had become an astronaut in the 1980s and flown four shuttle missions, one alongside Nelson himself. He was respected at the space agency, an avuncular figure and a good spokesman who also had deep esteem for Obama. Garver, meanwhile, was tapped as Bolden’s deputy, with the aim of promoting the administration’s policy goals behind her boss’s amiable facade.
Facing a Congress unwilling to contemplate major change at the agency, the Obama administration decided to try the classic tool of a president looking for an end run around entrenched interests: How about a blue ribbon commission? Norman Augustine, the aerospace executive respected “by everyone from space shuttle welders to astronauts,” as one White House adviser put it, was tapped to lead the panel. He had led a similar panel to shape space policy in the wake of the Challenger disaster; two decades later, he and a team of luminaries were being asked to ensure that NASA’s human spaceflight program was “worthy of a great nation.”
The commission’s findings didn’t surprise Garver and others who had looked skeptically at NASA’s program. For Constellation to succeed on time, the program would need an additional $45 billion in funding—and the cancellation of the ISS by 2015. That kind of increase was politically untenable, and for reasons of diplomacy, investment, and inertia, canceling the station wasn’t an option. Meanwhile, NASA’s in-house plan would produce a vehicle only after the station was gone and would cost $1 billion every time it flew—far too much for anything but the most grandiose missions. “The issue is that the Orion is a very capable vehicle for exploration, but it has far more capability than needed for a taxi to low-Earth orbit,” the commission concluded. The United States was caught between protecting its capabilities in low earth orbit and reaching beyond to the moon or Mars.
The Augustine Commission attempted to find a suitable path forward. Nearly all of them involved three key steps: extending the space shuttle for two more flights to complete construction of the space station, canceling or postponing the Ares rocket, and expanding NASA’s commercial partnerships to include flying astronauts as well as cargo to the space station. Though neither SpaceX nor Orbital had launched a rocket yet, the promise of a cost-effective alternative led policy makers to kick-start what would become the Commercial Crew program. “It seemed after Augustine that everyone would accept the cancellation of Orion and Commercial Crew was ready for prime time,” Garver told me. “When I got there and started on transition, it was clear that COTS was going to become the program of record. I have always given Griffin and his group such credit for that.”
Obama okayed the decision to cancel the Constellation program in the fall of 2009. But the rollout could not have gone much worse. The decision was obscured by budgetary rules or hidden from lawmakers, depending on your perspective, until it broke publicly in February 2010.
The news was not well received at NASA. “The way the media spun it was that we’re canceling human exploration of space to go do this commercial stuff,” Valin Thorn, the deputy director of the program that was doing this commercial stuff, said later. “That was not really [the White House’s] messag
e—but even when I first saw it, that’s almost what I thought they said, and I was disappointed.” The day of the announcement, Thorn attended a senior staff meeting at Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight. “It was like going to a funeral, and you’re the lawyer representing the murderer that killed the family. Seriously, it was not good. The whole way that policy was rolled out could have made it easier for us. People blamed us internally, and they were angry.”
Lawmakers also flipped out. “The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama announced. Nelson was particularly furious, feeling that his political ally had blindsided him. For the same reasons, he deliberately cast his opposition in terms that the president’s political advisers, looking ahead to critical congressional elections that year, would understand. “There is outright hostility toward President Obama and his proposals for the nation’s human space program,” he said on the Senate floor, blaming the “misinterpretation” on “the budget boys” who were giving his friend Obama the wrong advice. To ensure that the good voters of Florida knew that Obama was fighting for their beloved space program, the president planned to visit Kennedy Space Center in April, to make a speech about his new approach to spaceflight.
Such visits, with Air Force One touching down on the huge airstrip that hosts space shuttle landings, are traditional elements of the political pageantry NASA can offer the president. One of the top concerns was finding a suitable photo opportunity. After all, most of the space hardware at Kennedy was related to the Constellation program or the space shuttle, both of which Obama had effectively canceled. That left United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture that was planning to launch a satellite for the government soon after the speech, and SpaceX, which had been moving equipment to the Cape in anticipation of testing the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft.
The president ended up visiting SpaceX’s facility to hobnob with Musk. But this visit was not without controversy. Two White House sources told me that ULA had refused to okay a presidential visit, either out of pique at the president’s new approach or because the security requirements at their site would rule out a crowd of photographers and reporters. Another source, however, says that SpaceX was chosen intentionally to send a message, noting that the Orion spacecraft appeared behind Obama during his remarks. SpaceX employees at the Cape say they found out that ULA was angling for a photo op with the president and warned SpaceX’s growing Washington office so they could lobby the commander in chief to visit the start-up.
However he got there, the dominant image of the event is Obama, his jacket tossed coolly over one shoulder in the Florida humidity, listening with interest as Musk, wearing a truly ugly tie, explained SpaceX to him. On the launchpad, Musk showed off the Falcon 9 and introduced the president to a handful of SpaceX employees, including Brian Mosdell, a longtime Boeing employee whom we last met in the control room when the Delta II rocket exploded in 1998. Since then, he had risen through the ranks to become the chief launch conductor at ULA before Musk poached him to run SpaceX’s operations on the Cape. While the company relied on Mosdell for expertise in the complicated choreography of launching rockets, on this day he served an additional purpose: a reminder that SpaceX could create jobs just as well as the big contractors currently giving Obama heartburn.
During the speech, the president recalled a childhood memory of sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders to watch astronauts return to Hawaii after splashing down in the Pacific. Obama promised a graduated path from finishing the space station to developing a new spacecraft that would carry astronauts beyond the moon, first to visit an asteroid by 2025 and then to orbit Mars in the 2030s. It didn’t hurt that he also touted $40 million to spend on an economic development plan for the Space Coast to help ease the loss of the space shuttle—whose cancellation, he reminded them, was decreed six years before, by his predecessor. The ISS, finally expected to be finished in 2011, would be extended until 2020. It made little sense to deorbit—that is, destroy—the space lab in 2015, according to the original plan, just a few years after it was completed.
The most fervent members of the space community found Obama’s failure to promise a grander vision disappointing; his defenders say it reflected an insistence on not misleading the American people. “We can’t just do flags and footprints and the blank check when the geopolitics don’t call for it,” one White House adviser told me. The most novel aspect of the Obama plan—a proposal to land on an asteroid—was largely ignored in the aftermath of the speech. “What we did not appreciate enough: there aren’t enough dollars going into this now, and since people chase dollars, the asteroid community had not been developed,” Lori Garver told me. “You didn’t have this big cadre of people jumping out of the woodwork to say, ‘Yeah, that’s what we need: more study of asteroids.’”
Lawmakers and the three major contractors involved in Constellation—Lockheed, Boeing, and Pratt & Whitney Aerojet—were, however, deep in the woodwork, trying to save what remained of their program. They leveraged the independence of the heads of the NASA research centers to do an end run around the president’s policy. They were exploiting a key gap between the president’s proposal and Augustine’s report: while SpaceX and Orbital could hypothetically fill the role of the space shuttle in servicing the ISS, their rockets lacked the heavy-lift capability of the big Ares rocket of Griffin’s dreams. A rocket powerful enough to lift more than one hundred metric tons of payload into space would be necessary for the success of any serious plan of further human exploration in the solar system. Right now it was just a blank space in the administration’s plan, which the companies set out to fill in.
They brought proposals to the NASA spaceflight centers that had previously hosted the Constellation programs, showing that they could repurpose that project’s staff and equipment toward a new exploration program that would preserve the jobs in their districts. Garver, the deputy administrator of the space agency, wasn’t looped in. When they were unveiled, she said, “I was just laughing out loud. It was literally ‘Oh, in three years, we can do this for $2 billion.’ Insane.” But the competing proposal set up a clash between the senior lawmakers who controlled NASA spending and the president, with the space taxi program as a key bargaining chip.
Obama had hit it off with Musk at their get-together on the Cape, developing what one person familiar with the relationship called “quite the bromance,” meeting a few times a year for dinner or conversation. Obama had just led a technology-aided campaign dedicated to rejecting the tired mantras of his party. A public-private partnership that created jobs while saving the government money, all dedicated to the goal of space exploration, was the rare topic that allowed a president to both claim the excitement of the new and also tie himself into the traditional fabric of American exceptionalism. Not everyone in Washington was convinced.
“The detractors said you are turning over the prestige of the American space program to these billionaires,” Phil Larson, who worked in the White House until 2014, when he joined SpaceX, told me. “No, we were just issuing contracts so they would save money, so anyone can compete, including the people that currently fly the rockets.”
Shelby, Nelson, and the other powerful senators were insistent that if the overall Constellation program could be cut, a heavy rocket program would be seeded, and the Orion spacecraft would be preserved. Political priorities won out: the economy was crashing, which made the administration reluctant to cut jobs-creating programs, and battles over health care and financial reform would require every ounce of political capital Obama could muster. “We didn’t go to the mat with the favorite Democratic senator from Florida; we didn’t take him on when we would need him a few years later,” one Obama aide told me. “We got like 40 percent of what we asked for. We got Commercial Crew, a little bit of space technology; we didn’t cancel Orion; we didn’t cancel the big stupid rocket, [but] we didn’t prioritize it.”
On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon capsule hung about eight hundred feet below the International Space Station, both hurtling through the void at nearly five miles per second. Inside the habitat, astronauts Donald Pettit and André Kuipers waited and watched, preparing to snag the nearly five-ton vehicle with the station’s robotic arm. Then it would be carefully drawn up to the airlock and fixed in place for unloading.
“From a crew point of view, we didn’t know if this was going to be a bucking bronco,” Pettit said of his five hundred rounds practicing this maneuver in a simulator. “This spacecraft had never flown in an environment where it was approaching within thirty feet of another huge spacecraft . . . You could get a stuck thruster and it could zoom right into the station, and how do you protect from that?”
The Dragon was a snub-nosed capsule almost ten feet tall and nearly thirteen feet wide at the base, where it was covered with a thick layer of heat shielding. Above that, it was studded with elliptical openings for eighteen Draco thrusters, another product of Mueller’s propulsion skunkworks. This time a simple thruster system was employed that relied on hypergolic fuels—chemicals that combust on contact, which are tricky to handle but the simplest way to generate small amounts of thrust in the vacuum of space. Inside, the storage lockers were empty except for 1,100 pounds of food and water. The interior volume was 350 cubic feet, 60 percent larger than the Apollo space capsule, though the shuttle orbiter’s cabin was more than six times bigger.
