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NASA SLS Cost Exceeds Congressional Agency Baseline Commitment

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 10, 2020
Filed under ,
NASA SLS Cost Exceeds Congressional Agency Baseline Commitment

NASA OIG: NASA’S Management of Space Launch System Program Costs and Contracts, OIG
“NASA continues to struggle managing SLS Program costs and schedule as the launch date for the first integrated SLS/Orion mission slips further. Rising costs and delays can be attributed to challenges with program management, technical issues, and contractor performance. For example, the structure of the SLS contracts limits visibility into contract costs and prevents NASA from determining precise costs per element. Specifically, rather than using separate contract line item numbers (CLIN) for each element’s contract deliverables, each of the contracts have used a single CLIN to track all deliverables making it difficult for the Agency to determine if the contractor is meeting cost and schedule commitments for each deliverable. Moreover, as NASA and the contractors attempt to accelerate the production of the SLS Core Stages to meet aggressive timelines, they must also address concerns about shortcomings in quality control.
Based on our review of SLS Program cost reporting, we found that the Program exceeded its Agency Baseline Commitment (ABC)–that is, the cost and schedule baselines committed to Congress against which a program is measured–by at least 33 percent at the end of fiscal year 2019, a figure that could reach 43 percent or higher if additional delays push the launch date for Artemis I beyond November 2020. This is due to cost increases tied to development of Artemis I and a December 2017 replan that removed almost $1 billion of costs from the Program’s ABC without lowering the baseline, thereby masking the impact of Artemis I’s projected 19-month schedule delay from November 2018 to June 2020. Since the replan, the SLS Program now projects the Artemis I launch will be delayed to at least spring 2021 or later. Further, we found NASA’s ABC cost reporting only tracks Artemis I-related activities and not total SLS Program costs. Overall, by the end of fiscal year 2020, NASA will have spent more than $17 billion on the SLS Program–including almost $6 billion not tracked or reported as part of the ABC.”

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

27 responses to “NASA SLS Cost Exceeds Congressional Agency Baseline Commitment”

  1. MAGA_Ken says:
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    The GAO mentioned last year that NASA was using accounting tricks to keep the project under the 30% overspend threshold. My understanding from the law is once a project goes over 30% above baseline that the Administrator must inform Congress and all work must stop on the project until Congress reauthorizes the project at increased spending.

    There doesn’t appear to be any wiggle room on this law other than its good to be the King and the Federal government loves to break its own laws.

    • Tom Billings says:
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      The problem then becomes the *rest* of the budget. Senator Shelby, Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has made it plain that if his space workers in Northern Alabama aren’t being paid, then the rest of the Federal Budget is going nowhere fast. That combination may yet prove a bitter spring, given COVID-19. Some compromise will be reached.

      Meanwhile, Boca Chica spent only 2 weeks to pop a pressure tank test, redesign and build a new one, and confirm the new design with a further test today. Eventually that speed of progress will make even NASA look for a ticket at $5 million per launch.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Yes, 9 days from wreckage to building and testing a new one! The odds are the total cost was under $250 thousand! It’s amazing what is possible when you don’t have NASA in the loop with their clipboards, view graphs and program reviews.

        And folks he is hiring if you are tired of bureaucracy and of building the Shelby Launch System to no where. ?

      • MAGA_Ken says:
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        I think there will be plenty of work, more so even it the funds were redirected to more cost effective projects. The case can be made. Here is where scientific groups should chime in about how much more can be done with the same pot of money.

  2. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    So ~$40B for Orion, SLS and KSC ground mods just to get to one uncrewed test flight in 15 years of development. What a travesty. The Boeing/NASA excuse of it’s been so long since we developed a new space system and there is a dearth of engineers falls flat. SpaceX designed, tested, built and flew flacon 1, 9, and heavy plus cargo dragon and soon crew dragon in less time and for significantly less money. Then again SLS and orion have never been about actually building and flying but sending large piles of cash flowing through Houston, Huntsville and Merritt Island to be spread around the country.

    • mfwright says:
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      >SpaceX designed, tested, built and flew

      I wonder if logistics at SpaceX such that lower level employees are more flexible in procuring hardware, build various test articles and subsystems, etc. Stuff like people working on components and subsystems that never make the news but builds a infrastructure of supply chains and knowledge.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        SpaceX does have a good CEO that is willing to get his hands dirty on the shop floor. Since Christmas he has spent most of his time at Boca Chica living in one of the houses he bought out working on the Starship, helping invent new techniques to build it. That is how the aviation industry used to move the ball down the field!

        • mfwright says:
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          Perhaps with Elon on site everyone sees he is a real person and probably pick up nuances you don’t see in photos or video. Being onsite he can see if people have problems like trying to do work-arounds with old equipment, he can simply say junk it, get a new item, and tell everyone to get back to work (though I think Musk hires those who are highly motivated and self starters).

          Reminds me of Howard Hughes was hands-on, maybe too much i.e. test flying the XF-11. Hughes also had the knack of identifying someone really smart and someone who is a flake (latter not getting hired), probably Musk has the same skill.

          Hopefully Musk doesn’t go off the deep end like Hughes, and probably not see him wearing a fedora hat while climbing into Starship on its first flight.

    • robert_law says:
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      15 years because the Obama Administration tried to destroy the space program and put back development of a heavy launch vehicle by five years. 15 years of development gets not one test flight but restores the capability lost when Saturn V production ended . SLS is still far superier to any other rocket.

  3. fcrary says:
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    Reports like this really make me feel like I’m living in the margins. I know of several ideas for robotic, planetary missions which could be built and flown for perhaps 5% of the SLS cost _overruns_. Possibly including launch costs, depending on the development process and assuming it flew on a Falcon.

    • sunman42 says:
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      Don’t feel bad. I know of plenty of heliophysics missions that would cost half or less of what a single, Block 13 F-35B goes for.

      You just have to center, be calm, and repeat your mantra: “It’s not a zero-sum game, and the two pots of money are not fungible.”

      If you include JWST and a few other big missions’ development costs, it’s hard to argue that the total spending on science (as defined by NASA) hasn’t risen along with everything else.

      • fcrary says:
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        Sure. And I’ve seen worse. When we were working on a Cassini extended mission proposal, sometime around 2010, a friend and I worked out the total (2012-2017) budget in hours of US military spending in Iraq. Hours was, by the way, the correct unit. The budgets don’t bother me, and someone could reasonable argue that a F-35 represents value for those dollars. (Well, maybe not so reasonably, but the case could be made.) Cost overruns are hard to justify in the same way. So, yes, knowing what we could do with 5% of cost waste and mismanagement does bother me. But it’s not one of the things I lose sleep over. If I did, the price of luxury yachts would also bug me.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          The question of course is what creates more jobs, spending the money on a planetary spacecraft or on luxury yachets?

          Recall how Congress in the 1990’s in one of its misguided attempts to tax the rich put a tax on luxury yachets? All it did was to make the rich richer by increasing the value of the yachets they owned while, according the National Boat Builders Association, putting 25,000 American middle class workers out of work… The government never did raise much money with that tax and what they did was greatly offset by the tax revenues lost from the boat yards going bankrupt and workers losing their jobs.

          • fcrary says:
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            When I mentioned luxury yachts, that wasn’t quite what I was thinking of. I’m not saying that people with money shouldn’t be able to spend their money as they please. And I’m not saying that tax policies to prevent that don’t work well. They don’t, and it just shuffles the money around in unanticipated ways. I was more thinking about what it would be like if funding a planetary (or other scientific) spacecraft were a status symbol. The way observatories and universities where a a hundred years ago. Mr. Lick certainly spent money on his house. But he also spent money on an observatory. And Mr. Carnegie spent quite a bit of his money on luxuries, but he also spent quite a bit to found a good university.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes, not to mention a number of scientific expeditions. I think two things happened. First the government started spending a lot more on science after WWII and so scientists stopped looking to the wealthy for funding since they had a sponsor (NSF, NIH, AEC, etc.) with deeper pockets who allowed them to divide up the money among projects however they wanted (peer review). The second, the government funding resulted in the culture of science changed and they were less likely to name
            discoveries after sponsors. Andrew Carnegie for example had a major dinosaur named in his honor for funding the expedition.

            Of course the money is still there. And breakthroughs like FH and Starship will make planetary exploration cheaper than ever. But scientists would need to look beyond NASA and learn how to market research ideas to the wealthy as they did in the past.

            That said there is the Allen Array and Keck Telescopes as more recent examples. So there is hope for a Gates mission to Jupiter or a Musk Mars lander. But could you reward them as in the past by naming a mountain range on Mars after Musk? Of course for Earth examples you have the Rockefeller Mountains, the Ellsworth Mountains, the Ford Ranges, etc.

          • fcrary says:
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            The post-war trend to government funding is clear, but I’m not convinced of your explanation. Large government funding and scientists attitudes were certainly issues, but so were the attitudes of private donors. The private money, I think, tends to go to things that the donors do not expect the government to fund. Personally, I give money to Wikipedia and Médecins Sans Frontières because they provide a valuable service which I do not expect any government to fund. In the case of science, the second world war and the cold war created “big science.” And with that there was an impression that valuable science was something that only a government could afford and that the government was funding it (only a few people look closely at how well or how efficiently the government does so.) And that science made something private donors no longer considered an appropriate field for donations. There have been notable exceptions, including Allen and Keck, but I think the, “Why should I donate? The government funds that.” attitude is pretty solidly ingrained.

            As far as naming things is concerned, someone would have to fight with the IAU about that. (Or convince people to ignore IAU dictates.) Naming the spacecraft after the sponsor is easy. Even copyrighting the images it returns, with every astronomy textbook having to put “Image curtesy of the [insert name here] Foundation” in the caption, is also easy. But naming geographic and astronomical features has gotten political or at least regulated.

            Even in the 1960s on Earth, there was a shift to the names of discoverers or people who did the actual work, not the funding sources. For example, the Pensacola range and Dufek massif in Antarctica. (The Navy provided support for the US IGY program in Antarctica. Adm. Dufek was in charge, and VX-6, largely trained at NAS Pensacola, provided the aircraft support.) For that matter, there’s also the Crary mountains in Marie Byrd Land, although my father didn’t give a cent to the traverse that discovered them (aside from things like buying the traverse leader a beer on occasion…)

            If you really want to get private funding for planetary science by naming geographic features for the sponsors, you’d have to reverse the trend of the past 75 years or so. Since that’s been institutionalized by bodies like the IAU, that won’t be easy. Possible, perhaps desirable, not easy.

    • MAGA_Ken says:
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      This is the exact way to kill this monster. The alternative spending can fund some great science.

  4. Henry Vanderbilt says:
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    I am shocked – shocked! – that a program whose primary purpose is to maintain an open pipeline from the NASA HSF budget to certain politically favored organizations should be performing exactly as designed.

    You say you thought SLS was supposed to be a program to develop a useful launch vehicle? No. Maintaining the plausible appearance of that is necessary, but actually doing that? You are a very silly person to expect any such thing. </cleese>

    • sunman42 says:
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      You took the words right out of my mouth.

    • fcrary says:
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      “I am shocked – shocked – to find that gambling is going on in here!” </renault> (or </rains>. Would it be the character or the actor?)

      • Henry Vanderbilt says:
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        When the character has a name, definitely the character. (Though “shocked – shocked!” really needs no attribution.)

        With a comedian playing a nameless character in a sketch, though, you have to just go with the actual person’s name. Though </pythonesque> might have been a better tag, as I can’t for the life of me recall exactly which sketch that line was from, and it might have been Chapman, not Cleese. But then they used variants of that line any number of times.

        • Andrew Sexton says:
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          perhaps you were thinking of the Casablanca Rick’s Café scene in which Capt Renault states “I am shocked – shocked to find that gambling is going on here!”

          • Henry Vanderbilt says:
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            And perhaps I started in that needs-no-labelling context, then switched to Python in the second paragraph.

            Ah well. My writing is still far less convoluted than SLS’s software <grin>

  5. imhoFRED says:
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    Zero flights.

    That’s a cost per pound to orbit of Infinity.

    Makes the Shuttle look like a bargain

  6. Jack says:
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    Could this be coffin nails for SLS?