Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens and I'm Jan Black.

On this episode, we'll get a behind the scenes look at this new era of space travel we're in right now and find out more about what's ahead. Our guest on this

episode is Lori Garver, who's headed the NASA transition team for President-elect Obama and was

the deputy administrator of NASA. In those roles, Lori collaborated with key players such as Obama,

Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos to usher in a more peaceful, inclusive, and meaningful space age.

Lori's new book is called Escaping Gravity, My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age.

Lori, thank you so much for joining us.

You are most welcome.

It's wonderful to be with you.

We have so many questions for you. There are so many

areas to get into. It's hard to know where to begin. But tell us why you wrote the book.

Sure. I knew that I had experienced something unique and meaningful because when I left NASA,

I've been there twice. And after 10 years, I had several journalists

asking for my notes who wanted to write about it. And I said, you know, maybe I'll keep those

and write about it someday myself. It has been a very unique time in aerospace. And in the 1990s, a lot of us thought this would happen sooner,

but under the policies of the last, you know, 10 to 20 years, we have been able to sort of lower

the cost of space transportation, which is what was important to opening up space for new activities.

And that was really hard to do because even though space is futuristic,

a lot of people are pretty wedded to the past and they wanted to keep their same old boy

contracts and things.

And so I went in there and tried to change things up a bit. And unbelievably, much of it

...