Lori Garver, NASA’s powerful former deputy administrator who left the space agency in September, was once an advocate for the Space Launch System, the big rocket NASA is building.

In 2011, for example, she said of NASA’s human exploration program: “We plan a very robust future for not only human spaceflight, but for NASA generally.”

But after leaving NASA Garver appears to either have changed her mind or, more likely, she feels free to say what really is on her mind.

Today, on the Diana Rehm Show, Garver was asked what programs NASA should cancel in order to allow it to achieve more meaningful things in space. Below I’ve transcribed the relevant section of the interview:

Rehm: What programs do you think should be cut? Garver: To me I think those particular programs that are built on previous technology. Rehm: Like what? Garver: Right now we are building a huge rocket called the Space Launch System that is really … Rehm: The SLS? Garver: The SLS. It was something that Congress dictated to NASA, it had to do with the Orion spacecraft. It is a holdover from Constellation, which the Obama administration tried to cancel, and it’s $3 billion a year of NASA’s $17 billion. Is that how you would be investing in the space program? Where is it going to go? When will it even fly?

Later Garver also says NASA should scrap its Mars 2020 rover in favor of a robotic exploration of Europa, a moon of Jupiter that may harbor life in its water oceans.

The significance of Garver’s comments, in regard to the SLS, is that they are consistent with those of most observers who do not work directly for NASA, and thus are not beholden to the program of record as mandated by Congress and the White House.

Garver asks the right questions. Where is it going to go? After building such an expensive rocket — which critics have labeled a “rocket to nowhere” — there’s just no money to actually build the stuff, like payloads and habitation modules, that would allow NASA to actually use the SLS. When will SLS fly? NASA says it may fly in 2017.

Further reading: A recent interview I did with Chris Kraft, a retired flight director from NASA, offers a scathing analysis of SLS. Another interview, with NASA’s Dan Dumbacher, offers a defense.