The inspector general for NASA told Congress that current spending levels are “unsustainable” if the United States hopes to achieve its goals of returning to the moon and sending astronauts to Mars.
NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin appeared before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on April 19 as part of a hearing on “Protecting American Taxpayers: Highlighting Efforts to Protect Against Federal Waste, Fraud, and Mismanagement.”
Martin told the panel that “while undoubtedly innovative and inspirational, NASA faces long-standing challenges with its contracting and project management that have led to substantial cost and schedule growth in many of its programs.”
Currently, NASA has a series of initiatives that seek to expand humanity’s reach in the solar system, beginning with a return to the moon decades in the making called the Artemis program. Later, NASA hopes to use the lunar missions as a baseline for further exploration to Mars and beyond.
But, Martin told Congress, NASA has consistently gone over budget in a way that’s “unsustainable” if the agency hopes to meet these aspirations. Martin said that NASA has had persistent problems creating “comprehensive and accurate” estimates for costs and scheduling.
“NASA has worked for years to develop reliable lifecycle estimates for many of its multibillion-dollar programs, including Artemis and the James Webb Space Telescope,” Martin explained.
“For Artemis, NASA lacks a comprehensive cost estimate that accounts for all program costs—an omission that contributes to a lack of transparency into the funding required to sustain the program.”
Martin said his office audit of NASA found that the agency will spend $93 billion on the Artemis program between 2012 and 2025.
Moreover, they discovered a per-launch cost of $4.1 billion. This level of spending, Martin said, is “unsustainable.”
“NASA must accelerate its efforts to make its Artemis later programs more affordable; otherwise relying on such an expensive single use rocket system will inhibit NASA’s ability to sustain its exploration goals for the moon and Mars essential project management,” he said.
One of the greatest challenges for space exploration is the expense required to launch a space mission. The rockets that complete the launch cost billions to create and are good only for a single use with current technology.
Billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of NASA competitor SpaceX, has begun the process of overcoming this challenge, developing a reusable rocket that could drastically cut long-term space exploration costs.
NASA, however, is still stuck using the much more expensive single-use rockets. Many of NASA’s issues, Martin said, stem from its poor track record in choosing contractors.
But Martin said NASA also “has a history of paying overly generous award fees to contractors that are often inconsistent with a particular performance.”
He cited an incident in 2018 with Boeing: Poor performance by the company led to a 2.5 year schedule increase and a $4 million cost increase. Nevertheless, between 2012 and 2017, NASA paid Boeing $323 million in award fees, of which Martin said $64 million was suspected to be wasteful or unearned.
The United States previously landed astronauts on the moon in 1972 as part of its Apollo 17 mission.
In December 2022, NASA launched the Artemis 1 mission, an unmanned return to the moon. NASA hopes to return Americans to the lunar surface in November 2024.
