The rocket NASA plans to use to get astronauts to the moon by 2024 has for years suffered significant cost overruns and schedule delays. But those problems are even worse than originally thought, according to a federal watchdog report expected to be released today.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, said NASA had masked the true price tag of the program by shifting some costs to future missions without accounting for them. It accused the space agency of “a lack of transparency … especially for its human spaceflight program” and said NASA misrepresentations made it hard to determine the true cost of the program.
It said the cost of the rocket, known as the Space Launch System, had grown by nearly 30 percent or nearly $2 billion and that the first launch of the rocket, initially expected in late 2017, might not happen until June 2021.
Still, NASA has continued to pay tens of millions of dollars in “award fees” to Boeing, the SLS’s primary contractor, for scoring high on performance evaluations.
After issuing one award fee to Boeing, a NASA official even “noted that the significant schedule delays on this contract have caused NASA to restructure the flight manifest for SLS,” the report said. The GAO called for NASA to use “ongoing contract renegotiations” to “reevaluate its strategy to incentivize contractors to obtain better outcomes.”
The report comes as NASA is seeking congressional support for its plan to return humans to the moon within five years. Originally, NASA had planned to do that by 2028, but the Trump administration requested that the timetable be accelerated. To meet that demand, NASA recently requested an additional $1.6 billion from Congress for its moon effort, dubbed Artemis. Last week, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told CNN that the cost of the program would be far more: $20 to $30 billion over five years.
But the key to that mission is the SLS, a rocket with a cost that is not fully known since “NASA’s current approach for reporting cost growth misrepresents the cost performance of the program,” according to the GAO.
Last year, NASA’s Inspector General blamed Boeing for a 2.5-year delay for the program.
In its latest report, the GAO said that NASA diverted nearly $800 million of program costs to future missions, which it said “obscures cost growth” for the program. It also noted that NASA cost estimate runs only through the first launch of the rocket, meaning there is a lack of transparency into what the total cost of the program is.
The GAO report also took aim at the program to develop the Orion spacecraft that would fly atop the SLS. The prime contractor for that program is Lockheed Martin, which also has been receiving regular award fees from NASA, despite being over budget.
A NASA spokesperson said the agency’s response would be “in the report when it is published” but declined to comment further.
Boeing said in a statement that the SLS “is critical to the nation and to the future of human spaceflight,” and that it was continuing to make progress. The core stage integration, assembly and testing of the rocket to be used in the first mission are in “the final stages,” it said.
