Space Launch System Program Lacks Transparency
Space Launch System Program Lacks Transparency
GAO Study Finds NASA Does Not Track Future Costs for the Program
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) study released last week has found that NASA is not monitoring ongoing production and other costs needed to sustain the Space Launch System (SLS) program vital to its efforts to return astronauts to the Moon and go on to Mars.
Because the original SLS version's cost and schedule commitments, or baselines, were tied to the launch of Artemis I, ongoing production and other costs are not monitored. Instead, NASA created a rolling 5-year estimate of production and operations costs to ensure that the costs fit within NASA's overall budget. However, neither the estimate nor the annual budget request track costs by Artemis mission or for recurring production items. As a result, according to the GAO, the 5-year estimate and the budget requests are poor measures of cost performance over time.
NASA plans to spend billions of dollars to produce more and progressively more powerful rockets for use on Artemis missions into the 2030s. GAO found that NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of its most powerful rocket, but does plan to continue producing multiple SLS components, such as core stages and rocket engines, needed for future Artemis missions. The program is also concurrently producing hardware for more capable versions of the SLS, the Block 1B and Block 2, for use on later missions.
Senior NASA officials told GAO that at current cost levels, the SLS program is unaffordable. The SLS program developed a roadmap outlining short-term and long-term cost-saving strategies for future missions. For example, NASA plans to use contract types that shift cost risk from the government to the contractors and that achieve manufacturing efficiencies, but it is too early to determine the effects of such strategies. NASA is also considering long-term options, including purchasing future SLS launches and payload capabilities from a contractor who would own, operate, and integrate the SLS rocket.
NASA requested $11.2 billion in the fiscal year 2024 president's budget request to fund the program through fiscal year 2028, in addition to the $11.8 billion spent developing the initial capability. In November 2022, NASA successfully demonstrated SLS Block 1 during its Artemis I flight test. NASA intends to fly a series of increasingly difficult missions, including Artemis II—a crewed test flight—and Artemis III—a crewed lunar landing.
GAO's April 2023 high-risk report noted that NASA needed to improve transparency into the long-term costs and affordability of human spaceflight programs, including by establishing cost and schedule baselines for additional SLS capabilities.