NASA inspector general finds more cost overruns in the agency’s SLS rocket program
Surprise! Surprise! A new NASA inspector general report [pdf] has found that the agency’s SLS rocket program is continuing to experience cost overruns and mismanagement that are “obscene”, as noted in this news report.
An independent report published Thursday contained troubling findings about the money spent by the agency on propulsion for the Space Launch System rocket. Moreover, the report by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin warns that if these costs are not controlled, it could jeopardize plans to return to the Moon.
Bluntly, Martin wrote that if the agency does not rein in spending, “NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public’s trust in the agency’s ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives—including returning humans safely to the Moon.”
Things are really much worse than this, mostly because it appears the Marshall Space Flight Center that runs the SLS program for NASA uses cost-plus contracts, which are essentially a blank check for contractors to run up costs endlessly, all of which the government must cover, and allows the process to go over-schedule against its own regulations. Furthermore, the cost overruns are for rockets and engines that are not newly developed, but in use for decades by Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Note that this really isn’t news. Anyone with any intellectual honesty at all will know that every aspect of SLS and Orion is mismanaged and will go over budget and behind schedule endlessly. These problems are not a bug, however, but a feature of the system. The goals of SLS and Orion are not really to build a rocket to explore the solar system but to create an endless jobs program in congressional districts here on Earth. This misguided approach meanwhile robs America of a viable space effort because the money wasted could have actually been used to jumpstart a viable and competitive space-faring economy that actually achieves something.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Surprise! Surprise! A new NASA inspector general report [pdf] has found that the agency’s SLS rocket program is continuing to experience cost overruns and mismanagement that are “obscene”, as noted in this news report.
An independent report published Thursday contained troubling findings about the money spent by the agency on propulsion for the Space Launch System rocket. Moreover, the report by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin warns that if these costs are not controlled, it could jeopardize plans to return to the Moon.
Bluntly, Martin wrote that if the agency does not rein in spending, “NASA and its contracts will continue to exceed planned cost and schedule, resulting in a reduced availability of funds, delayed launches, and the erosion of the public’s trust in the agency’s ability to responsibly spend taxpayer money and meet mission goals and objectives—including returning humans safely to the Moon.”
Things are really much worse than this, mostly because it appears the Marshall Space Flight Center that runs the SLS program for NASA uses cost-plus contracts, which are essentially a blank check for contractors to run up costs endlessly, all of which the government must cover, and allows the process to go over-schedule against its own regulations. Furthermore, the cost overruns are for rockets and engines that are not newly developed, but in use for decades by Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Note that this really isn’t news. Anyone with any intellectual honesty at all will know that every aspect of SLS and Orion is mismanaged and will go over budget and behind schedule endlessly. These problems are not a bug, however, but a feature of the system. The goals of SLS and Orion are not really to build a rocket to explore the solar system but to create an endless jobs program in congressional districts here on Earth. This misguided approach meanwhile robs America of a viable space effort because the money wasted could have actually been used to jumpstart a viable and competitive space-faring economy that actually achieves something.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Yet another WOMBAT: Waste of Money, Brains, and Time. Let Elon do it!
The trick for SpaceX is going to be to continue to meet their contractual obligations to Artemis, while progressing on their own Starship program that could probably replace it en mass. NASA probably won’t be able to admit that before they spend another few tens of billions on this pig!
Of course, if Boeing chokes (see NASA Safety item), then that will just add to the pressure, as will any delays from ULA or BO, both notorious for delay at this point.
Then we have the environmentalists and corrupto-crats that hate SpaceX… the Chinese must be enjoying this!
The whole government contracting service changed after WWII and through out Korea.
It used to be that manufacturers designed and built an item and then tried to sell it to the government. Then the government set requirements for what they wanted to buy and evaluated all manufacturers who submitted a working prototype.
After WWII the government eventually switched to reviewing only proposals and not working prototypes. And then they issued the those wonderful cost plus contracts and even removed the requirements of ever making a working product.
That was the real creation of the military industrial complex.
The whole effort to make the RS-25 cheaper to build and operate has now inflated to the point where “cheaper” means “more expensive” unless the number of engines purchased goes to around 12 flights. At any number less than that, the money spent on the effort is greater than the cost reduction of the individual engines.
The goals of SLS and Orion are not really to build a rocket to explore the solar system but to create an endless jobs program in congressional districts here on Earth.
In this respect, SLS *always* delivers its payload on schedule!
Not to worry. It looks like the government is going to raise their debt ceiling so they’ll have plenty of money to throw around on things like this. Wall Street was up 2% on Friday on that good news as they know some of that loot will slush their way.
The bad news the government is borrowing the money from our great, great-great, and great-great-great grand kids and writing bad checks to pay for it all.
From the report:
$93 billion is quite a cost for Artemis, but if SLS alone is only $23.8 billion, where did the other $70 billion go? Not all of it went to Orion (some Orion expenditure occurred before 2012).
Robert wrote: “Things are really much worse than this, mostly because it appears the Marshall Space Flight Center that runs the SLS program for NASA uses cost-plus contracts, which are essentially a blank check for contractors to run up costs endlessly, all of which the government must cover, and allows the process to go over-schedule against its own regulations.”
Of course SLS was a cost-plus contract. A cost-plus contract makes sense when developing a rocket from scratch with new technologies and bold new techniques, such as Starship is using or Apollo used, because for such development projects it is difficult to estimate the costs of such development or even if the technologies and techniques would work (e.g. Starship’s attempt to avoid flame diverters and water deluges didn’t work well, so another technique is being tried). This also makes scheduling difficult, so expensive delays should be commonplace. Thus it is unfair to expect SLS to be anything but cost-plus.
However, a project that uses existing hardware, technologies, and techniques, such as SLS uses, should easily be done on a fixed price contract and should be expected to be accomplished much faster than Project Apollo. This is why the COTS (Cargo Resupply) series of contracts and the Commercial Crew Program contracts were fixed price. Although the contracted companies weren’t experienced in these designs and operations and had to develop their own hardware (unlike SLS, which started with existing hardware, sometimes literally existing rather than having to be manufactured from existing designs), the technologies and techniques for these fixed price contracts were similar to what already exits. Boeing, Orbital Sciences, SpaceX, and now Sierra Space have fixed price contracts (totaling somewhere around the amount spent on SLS from 2012 through 2022), and they have made two or three dozen already completed missions look rather easy. (Boeing not quite so easy, but they were the most space-experienced company, what with a century of aircraft, half a century of spacecraft, a third of a century of ISS, and an eighth of a century of SLS experience, so naturally Boeing is three years (50%*) behind the newcomer company.)
Over the course of eleven years, Artemis development cost $93 billion and SLS development cost $23.8 billion, but Starship development has cost SpaceX only about $3 billion from 2014 through 2022, although most of that has been over the past three years or so. Artemis is costing an average of $8 billion per year, SLS an average of $2 billion (to develop existing hardware), and Starship $1/3 billion (or more likely closer to $1 billion annually in the recent three years to develop flight hardware and ground facilities that Artemis mostly already has).
The Orion capsule has not undergone many tremendous changes, but its service module has. The Orion capsule has mostly just had to slow down its development schedule, so instead of a relatively quick development, it took two decades before NASA was ready to use it. In essence, armies of administrators were a relatively fixed annual cost on Orion, as it was slowed by NASA’s schedule slips.
There are advantages to the cost-plus contract:
It isn’t only a blank check for contractors, but it allows the government to make plenty of changes in the middle of the contract period. For instance, Orion-SLS started with absolutely no goal or purpose. Eventually, they were to be used to fly mankind to an asteroid, with an almost immediate change to move part of an asteroid to lunar orbit and use Orion-SLS to get mankind to that chunk. After that came the realization that that mission was, well, stupid, and the mission was once again changed to returning man to the Moon — sorry — taking the first woman and the first person of color to the Moon. Each mission change means a restart on important aspects of the design. The base design may seem the same, but there are unseen aspects that are thrown away and other unseen aspects that start from scratch. The latest change has one change that was obvious: the lunar lander. This change required new contracts, but the mission for Orion-SLS now requires transferring the first woman and the first person of color to land on the Moon from Orion to the lander. That is a very different thing than rendezvous with a bit of an asteroid. For one, the spacesuit isn’t for freefall EVA (like on the ISS) but long term lunar EVA, with all the ill effects of lunar dust, which wore heavily on the Apollo spacesuits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k9wIsKKgqo (Real Engineering: “The Problem with the Next Moon Mission” 15 minutes)
Footnote 8 on page 5 of the report gives another advantage:
NASA gets great control over the delivered end item. For the commercial fixed price contracts, the contractor controls and owns everything except the requirements set by NASA, and the contractor may make money on the side by using the hardware for other customers. The deliverable item is the service, not the hardware that was developed and built on the contract.
“The goals of SLS and Orion are not really to build a rocket to explore the solar system but to create an endless jobs program in congressional districts here on Earth. This misguided approach meanwhile robs America of a viable space effort because the money wasted could have actually been used to jumpstart a viable and competitive space-faring economy that actually achieves something.”
This is an unfair assumption. A space-faring economy is not NASA’s goal, and since the signing of the Outer Space Treaty it hasn’t been government’s goal, either.
If we didn’t spend these $93 billion paying scientists, engineers, and technicians to get us back to the Moon in three-times the time it took us the first time, when we didn’t have the necessary knowledge, hardware, technologies, techniques, and alloys, then that money would not have gone to create a viable space-faring economy but would have been added to the amount that we pay people to not work. The welfare system is wildly successful at providing the bare luxuries (e.g. cell phones and X-Boxes) to people who sit around all day not looking for productive employment, and it is especially good at taking money from the productive people, who would have only squandered their money on goods and services that could have employed those lazy, X-Box playing, layabout wastrels.
Indeed, our politicians insist that we import millions of illegal aliens, because the slackers — that these politicians are actively encouraging to not work — won’t work, so the illegals have to do the jobs that government is paying the loafers to not do.
When we let government be in charge, all we get is what government wants (e.g. parasitic leeches feeding off the nation’s productive portion of the population). When We the People take charge, we get what we want (e.g. a viable and competitive space-faring economy that actually achieves something, such as frequent low-cost access to space).
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* Depending upon the point of view. It was supposed to take four years to develop the crew vehicles, but Congress slowed things down so that it took six. Using the six-year baseline, Boeing is taking 50% longer (more than twice the original schedule) to launch a manned spacecraft to ISS. If we use the current nine-year duration of the contract, then they are only 33% slower.
How does any of this have anything to do with NASA’s inspector general report? It has more to do with showing that the over reliance on cost-plus contracts has made heritage government contractors unable to successfully handle other kinds of contracts. Boeing is having trouble sticking to schedule or controlling costs on the Starliner fixed-price contract. Unfortunately for them, they have to pay the extra expenses, and we can only hope that they accounted for this possibility in their bid.
Elon has his own problems
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhwD_ABOzuM&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.secretprojects.co.uk%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo
From where I sit, government is the biggest obstacle to keeping costs down and maintaining schedule. The auditors (that visit my private sector site) have auditors and their usually inane requirements drive up overhead without providing value. Bureaucrats have no incentive to use their brains.
From page 33 of the report:
Some cases? How can it be only some cases and not all cases? The next few sentences explains:
NASA and the military have become accustomed to making changes to the already agreed-to designs, adding requirements to signed contracts, and changing the scope of existing contracted projects. These are just three ways that cost-plus contracts increase in cost and slip their schedules. The same thing can happen to fixed price contracts, if the vendor lets their customers make these kinds of changes.
I once worked on a cryocooler for the ISS when the Germans joined the team, and needing something for the Germans to do, NASA gave them the cryocooler, and I found another project to work on. Later, NASA told the German company that they wanted changes, but the German company said no, they had a contract for what they were making, and they were going to make it, no changes. NASA eventually gave the cryocooler to a more flexible vendor, who undoubtedly made a bundle on future changes from NASA.
Come to think of it, I am not sure whether the cryocooler was ever installed on the ISS. I worked on a mockup for the glovebox that I have seen on ISS, but I haven’t seen anything in pictures that I recognized as a cryocooler.
My story does not present a successful attempt in preventing NASA from making changes, and it even shows that forcing the existing contract can result in losing the contract. This is part of the dilemma that has been created through the overuse of cost-plus contracts. Weening government and its contractors from these cost-plus contracts will be difficult.
SamE wrote: “Bureaucrats have no incentive to use their brains.”
The entire idea behind the concept of the bureaucrat is that he follows or enforces policy, regulations, laws, and rules without any use of a brain. In theory, any bureaucrat can be substituted with any other bureaucrat. The only difference between them are the rules and regulations between the governmental departments or ministries.
A major problem with a brainy bureaucrat is that if he tries to enforce the spirit of the law or rule, he may violate the letter of the law or rule and get into trouble. If he enforces the letter of the law or rule, he is unlikely to get into trouble, because he is not supposed to know its spirit.
This is why Virgin Orbit is out of business. British bureaucrats understood the letter of the policy, that they could take up to 15 months to approve a launch, which could discourage orbital launches from the U.K., but they had no care about the spirit of the policy, which is to encourage orbital launches. Bureaucrats to not always work to anyone’s favor, but they are not paid to care about that. They are only paid to follow or enforce the letter of the rules.