NASA’s Lori Garver, at the SIEPR Space Entrepreneurship Forum today, […]

NASA’s Lori Garver, at the SIEPR Space Entrepreneurship Forum today, before my talk:

“We intend to be back on the moon, certainly, and to visit asteroids. We see resource extraction as part of that.”

“Neil deGrasse Tyson said Govenrment funds missions for three reasons: fear, greed and glory. NASA delivers on all three.”

“SpaceX has the only system capable of returning cargo from the ISS. Their success is extremely welcome. The ISS is the centerpiece of our human spaceflight program.”

“We currently spend spend over $60M a seat for Russian launches. We can’t publicize our U.S. partners’ quoted prices to take astronauts to the ISS, but the Bigelow space hotel announced 60 day visits to their station for $27M flying on SpaceX and $37M for a Boeing CST flying on Atlas.”

Q&A on commercial space opportunities:
“Hosted payload, suborbital, lunar data purchase. We want to match the lunar X-prize. We want to buy that data. And the B612 Foundation – we have a Space Act agreement with them . We are so, so excited about these partnerships.”

Question from a DARPA person in the audience: How does the NASA culture change from the cost-plus era? How do you modify your behavior?
“Acceptance is the first step. [laughter] These programs do bring change. Everyone at NASA asks ‘How can we get on this train?’ because this is the train. For a long time people behaved like they were swimming: we have our lane and stay out of our lane. I tell them it’s like bicycling, where we help each other drafting in a line. We don’t take steroids, we drive faster.”

What are your top 3 priorities?
1) safety
2) delivering on what you say . Some say we are 1.5 years behind on COTS. I hate to say it, but we’re usually 5 years behind, so it’s pretty good.
3) culture. Government is set up to maintain the relentless momentum of the status quo. A lot of it is a safety net so it makes sense.
And we have to make sure NASA has exciting new projects. We get jealous. They get to take astronauts to space… but we get to go to asteroids and Mars so people still want to come to NASA.”