NASA official on aerospace industry: ‘Bro-culture’ is bad for business

• Lori Garver led the NASA programme that enabled SpaceX to bring human spaceflight back to U.S.
• She discusses this success and the cultural difficulties that are prevalent in the aerospace sector.
• Elon Musk’s SpaceX has become a major player in the commercial space race.

After a ten-year hiatus, Lori Garver led the NASA programme that enabled SpaceX to bring human spaceflight back to the United States. She discusses this success, the contentious cast of figures fueling this new space race, and the cultural difficulties that are prevalent in the aerospace sector in general in her new book and a recent interview.

When asked about SpaceX’s future, the former NASA deputy administrator had this advice for Elon Musk: “Don’t trip on your ego,” adding that the dangers and politics of spaceflight are already possible threats to the company’s future.

Garver discussed her emotions as she observed the triumph of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, the initiative that resulted in the first privately owned manned spacecraft and led to SpaceX’s historic 2020 astronaut mission, in her new memoir, “Escaping Gravity.”

SpaceX, encompassing all the major aerospace corporations, “has a vast lead and is running faster than any of the competition,” she added. That strikes me as both great and terrifying at the same time.

She also says, “Avoiding gravity is a difficult technique, and it will become impossible to do it consistently and securely in the future.

For mistakes that result in negative effects, the private sector will be held accountable by its clients. If they will be given the chance to make amends and carry on as NASA has in the past is something that can only become clear with time.”

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In an interview, Garver added that she was discouraged to read recent reports claiming poisonous corporate culture at SpaceX, given Elon Musk’s unpredictable behaviour on Twitter and a more general “bro culture” that dominates the aerospace sector.

Garver cautioned that businesses “will lose personnel” if they don’t take substantial action to address problems like harassment and a lack of diversity.

She said, “These rockets don’t make themselves. “The smartest and brightest people won’t tolerate behaviour that is actually distracting… Due to the predominance of white male engineers in the past, the bro culture was successful. That’s not the situation anymore. We benefit greatly from everyone who comes, too. all opinions”

Neither did SpaceX react to a request for comment for this story nor has it done so in years in response to routine questions from reporters.
In her book, Garver also discusses the harassment she claimed to have experienced over the course of her career in aerospace, which covered positions at NASA as well as different private and public sector organisations. She claimed that when she was in her twenties and thirties and working in aerospace, being objectified was just “part of being a woman.”

She describes a NASA manager who once “told me to come into his office so I could get my birthday spanking” in front of a number of coworkers in her book.

A senior aerospace contractor who had been overserved pushed his way into my hotel room and shoved me onto the bed, according to a another event that happened while Garver was in her twenties and travelling to Moscow.

I was able to escape from under him and flee into the hallway, where I found a coworker who could step in, the victim wrote.

“I never informed his job or NASA about the incident. Like so many others, I swept such incidents under the rug out of embarrassment and the assumption that my career would suffer “She composed. I’m embarrassed for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it seems like the conduct persisted.

It’s time to stop defending ingrained wrongdoing and the field’s preponderance of individuals who share the same aesthetic and mentality, including its leadership, Garver stated. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion progress has been far too slowly,”

When Garver was chosen to take over as NASA’s second-in-command in 2009, she said that she had previously been considering changing the space agency’s procurement procedures for decades. In some ways, the previous method of contracting, called “cost-plus,” offered NASA’s corporate partners a blank check to complete projects, which frequently resulted in delays and going over budget.

What is today referred to as the commercial contracting structure was developed by Garver and a small group of colleagues for NASA’s human spaceflight missions. Before NASA distributes predetermined quantities of money, it enables businesses to bid for contracts. Contractors are responsible for paying any costs incurred if projects go over budget. But many people involved in the aerospace industry resisted, claiming that human spaceflight programmes were too expensive and technically challenging for numerous companies to accomplish.

Garver remembers that the effort to alter the system was a difficult and dangerous battle.

In her book, Garver stated that “senior industry and government executives took pleasure in deriding [SpaceX] and Elon in the early years.” “This felt reckless to me.”

One of Musk’s “most fervent advocates [and] defenders,” as Garver once put it,

In the end, Congress gave the Commercial Crew Program its blessing and provided funding. In the past two years, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft has successfully transported its first crew of humans to the International Space Station. Both SpaceX and Boeing have been awarded multi-billion dollar contracts. Since then, the firm has undertaken two wholly commercial trips for affluent thrill-seekers as well as three more launches for NASA personnel. (Boeing is still trying to get its Starliner spacecraft up and running, but it just finished a test flight.)

Many earlier doubters of the Commercial Crew Program were persuaded by SpaceX’s success.

Garver acknowledges, however, that she did not anticipate SpaceX to be the leader in the commercial space race. It was “so long before the billionaire investors in space” became part of the public consciousness when she first came up with this novel method of contract awarding. We always assumed [legacy] aircraft firms like Lockheed Martin or Boeing would be involved, she said.

For a variety of reasons, it’s not what we anticipated, she added. The first is that we didn’t anticipate billionaires accumulating this much wealth.

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