Aviation Week Picks Lori Garver as #2 Person of the Year

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http://nasawatch.com/archives/2014/01/aviation-week-p.html

Aviation Week Picks Garver as #2 Person of the Year
By Keith Cowing on January 23, 2014 1:34 PM. 3 Comments

Garver Drove Shift In Space Policy, Aviation Week Person of the Year (#2)

"Lori Garver does not inspire ambivalence. Few who worked with her when she was deputy NASA administrator came away from the experience with a neutral opinion. To some, she is a ruthless powerhouse whose abrasive ego has run roughshod over opponents, leaving in her wake lost careers and hurt feelings as she trashed policy adversaries among the U.S. space agency's civil servants and congressional backers. To others, she labored tirelessly to put the U.S. space program on a more realistic footing, redirecting it from its role as an overtasked, underfunded government pork barrel. In this view, Garver has been key in moving NASA toward a true public-private partnership where the government will only take on pre-commercial projects before they generate any profit."

From the Aviation Week article:

Now that she has left office, Garver is more open in her opposition to SLS. She has publicly called for killing the big rocket. And there is at least a chance she'll be able to take up that fight as a political appointee down the road, should her mentor Hillary Clinton wind up back in the White House as president.

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1. Behind the scenes...

A little more from Aviation Week:

Behind the scenes, says Garver, the White House was digesting the report of the human-spaceflight panel chaired by Norman Augustine, which said the Constellation Program was not sustainable, even with an extra $3 billion a year (AW&ST Sept. 14, 2009, p. 36). Discussions at “very senior” levels among NASA, OSTP, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Economic Council honed the shift from Constellation to commercial that Garver was pushing, but not at the pace she would have preferred today.