Space Pirates: How I Rebooted NASA and Helped Bezos, Branson, and Musk Launch the New Space Age

Lori Garver, a former NASA official, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the decades-long struggles between space bureaucrats and billionaires. Her book "Escaping Gravity" reveals how a group of "space pirates" transformed NASA and paved the way for the new space age, overcoming political patronage and bureaucracy.

Format: Hardback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 07 July 2022
Publisher: EverAfter Romance

Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver's firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries overcame the political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency.

The success of Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls "space pirates."

Their quest to transform NASA put Garver in the crosshairs of Congress, the aerospace industry, and hero-astronauts trying to protect their own profits and mythology within a system that had held power since the 1950s.

As the head of the NASA transition team for President-elect Barack Obama and second-in-command of the agency, Garver drove policies and funding that enabled commercial competition just as the capabilities and resources of the private sector began to mature.

She was determined to deliver more valuable programs, which required breaking the self-interested space-industrial cycle that, like the military, preferred to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on programs aimed to sustain jobs and contracts in key congressional districts.

The result: more efficiency and greater progress.

Including insider NASA conversations and insights on how the US space industry has been transformed.

Weight: 572g
Dimension: 163 x 235 x 28 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781635767704