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GAO Report on Large-Scale NASA Projects

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 17, 2013
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GAO Report: NASA: Assessments of Selected Large-Scale Projects
“The performance of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) portfolio of major projects has improved in the areas of cost and schedule growth since GAO’s first assessment in 2009. Average development cost growth and schedule delay for the current portfolio have decreased to about a third of their 2009 levels. These figures exclude the cost and schedule growth of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), NASA’s most expensive science project, in part because of its disproportionate effect on the portfolio average. Including the JWST in the calculation would increase the 2013 portfolio’s average development cost growth from 3.9 percent to 46.4 percent and would double the average launch delay, from 4 to 8 months and obscure the progress the rest of the portfolio has made toward maintaining cost and schedule baselines.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

4 responses to “GAO Report on Large-Scale NASA Projects”

  1. Paul451 says:
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    NASA has improved cost and schedule overruns by two thirds in 4 years…

    I wonder if there’s a similarity to the psychology of workplace accidents? When workplaces endeavour to “reduce” workplace accidents, they often have a reasonable success while everyone is paying attention. But when the entire company commits to zero workplace accidents, it often fundamentally changes the whole company culture for the better.

    Right now NASA has someone watching over their shoulder, and they are very aware of overruns… but the goal is still “reduction” not “elimination”. That means that when attention drifts, things will return to how they were (or worse when things pushed under the rug by this period come back out.)

  2. dogstar29 says:
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    They don’t seem to mention the cost of SLS/Orion; since it has no defined mission there may be no cost estimate. 

  3. Geoffrey Landis says:
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    It would be interesting if they would compare NASA project performance to similar scale DOD projects.

  4. jnarcus says:
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    This is insanity. JWST should have been shut down and cut off years ago. They blew past the first launch date and budget and the second and the third. When I left for greener pastures they were already saying 2013 for launch and only a total cost of 5 billion…..now 2018 and 8 billion…..friggin waste of time and money at this point. Just kill it