Space Launch System

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – NASA's former No. 2 administrator said Thursday that the Space Launch System (SLS) being developed in Huntsville is wasteful old technology and should be canceled. Former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver made the comment in a radio interview.

Garver also criticized NASA's plan to send another rover similar to Curiosity to Mars in 2020. Another Mars rover, instead of a mission to the ice-covered Jupiter moon Europa, is what Garver called keeping the space agency's "parochial" interests "fed" instead of something new that would drive innovation.



NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville is leading development of SLS, a so-called heavy-lift rocket that could boost enough fuel and supplies out of Earth's gravity for missions to deep space destinations such as the moon, asteroids and Mars. Several thousand civil service and contractor employees work on the project in Huntsville, Mississippi and Louisiana .

Garver was deputy administrator of NASA until four months ago when she left to become general manager of the Airline Pilots Association. At NASA, she pushed programs like commercial space taxis to the International Space Station built by companies such as SpaceX instead of bigger projects like SLS built by legacy companies like SLS prime contractor Boeing. Garver was a key advocate of the Obama administration’s early decision to kill the phased Constellation rocket program also being developed in Huntsville.

"Right now, we're building a huge rocket called the Space Launch System, the SLS. It was something that Congress dictated to NASA that it had to do, with the Orion spacecraft," Garver said on the Diane Rehm show. "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?"

The website Space Politics, reporting on the show, noted that the "$3-billion figure she cited is actually the approximate combined value of the SLS and Orion budgets, not SLS alone."

Garver’s comments didn’t go unchallenged on the radio. Scott Pace of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute said that if humans are going to Mars, they need a big rocket like SLS to get there. Pace said the Constellation program, until Garver and the White House killed it, would have developed that big rocket in a better, phased program that began with the smaller Ares I, Space Politics reported.

Congress, led by powerful NASA supporters in the Senate like U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa), forced the White House in 2010 to include funding for SLS in NASA’s budget. The Obama administration has honored that deal in its budget requests since, but the tight budget environment led NASA to use legacy parts like the space shuttle engines whenever possible. Garver said Thursday that isn't what NASA should be doing.

“Would you really go to Mars with technology that’s 50 years old?” Garver asked. “That’s not what innovation and our space exploration should be all about.”