OIG On NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative

“Our review found that NASA deviated from its original, hands-off strategy for the initiative and from its plan for incremental progress towards larger missions. Rather, the Agency’s aggressive lander development schedules led to increasingly risk-averse practices and policies. For example, NASA insight and oversight increased, and more detailed vendor proposals were required. This resulted in higher costs and delayed delivery schedules while threatening the initiative’s ability to achieve its broad objectives. Specifically, inserting a larger lander to accommodate the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) into CLPS’s early schedule interfered with a progressive development approach. This introduced the added risk of beginning the first large lander delivery before knowledge could be gained from the success (or failure) of smaller deliveries. NASA’s planned hands-off approach was also somewhat negated when the Agency added augmented insight and placed added requirements on the vendors’ development process. We found that NASA-directed changes, including augmented insight and landing site changes, led to $171.4 million in project cost increases. … Our analysis showed these challenges will continue to hinder NASA’s ability to meet the initiative’s objectives. While the initiative has a contract capped at $2.6 billion through 2028, increased costs on previous task orders jeopardize the plan to issue two task orders per year. … In the 5 years since CLPS began, NASA has not reassessed market conditions to better understand the Agency’s role and changing market conditions. Finally, we found CLPS lacks a detailed management plan that could outline a disciplined approach, promote accountability for how the Agency measures success, and help the initiative weigh competing priorities.” Full report