STATE

NASA’s Mars rocket behind schedule and over budget, audit finds

Chabeli Herrera Orlando Sentinel (TNS)

ORLANDO — The NASA Office of the Inspector General released a scathing audit of Boeing and the space agency last week, detailing Boeing’s delays and billions of dollars of cost overruns in building key components of a next-generation rocket destined for missions to the moon and Mars.

The report also accused NASA of being overly generous with its evaluations of Boeing, leading to questionable payments.

Under a NASA contract, Boeing is currently building two of the core stages of the Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket that will carry the Orion spacecraft that will take astronauts into deep space. The components of the rocket will be put together and tested at Kennedy Space Center, before they launch from Florida’s Space Coast.

But the project is behind schedule and grossly over budget, the OIG report found, partially as a result of “Boeing’s poor performance.”

“With $5.3 billion spent as of July 2018, NASA expects Boeing to exhaust the contract’s current value by early 2019, nearly three years before the contract is supposed to end and without delivering a single core stage or the (exploration upper stage),” said Ridge Bowman, director of the NASA OIG.

At the current rate, the report found that Boeing will spend at least $8.9 billion through 2021 — “double the amount initially planned — while delivery of the first core stage has slipped 2½ years from June 2017 to December 2019 and may slip further.”

On a call with reporters last week, Boeing’s Space Launch System vice president and program manager, John Shannon, said the project is on track to deliver the first core stage of the rocket to Kennedy Space Center by the end of the year, where it will be integrated with the other components.

But the report disputed that estimate, saying Boeing would need an infusion of $1.2 billion through a renegotiated NASA contract for it to meet its goal of delivering to the Space Coast in December 2019 and then holding a test flight in June 2020. That doesn’t count the billions that would be needed to ensure delivery of the other components as part of Boeing’s contract.

“In light of the development delays, we have concluded NASA will be unable to meet its (Exploration Mission-1) launch window currently scheduled between December 2019 and June 2020,” the report said.

The Office of Inspector General assessed NASA’s management of the Boeing contract developing the Space Launch System’s (SLS) Core Stages and Exploration Upper Stage.

For its part, Boeing says the report is outdated and doesn’t reflect the changes Boeing has made to correct its past mistakes.

Boeing spokeswoman Patricia Soloveichik said in a statement that the report “makes requests for program or operations modifications that are already implemented.”

“An unprecedented rocket program has inherent challenges; developing the first unit of a system that will safely carry humans into space, even more so,” she wrote in an email. “We have restructured our leadership team to better align with current program challenges and we are refining our approaches and tools to ensure a successful transition from development to production.”

According to the OIG report, NASA also played a role in the challenges plaguing the program by mismanaging the contract and lacking visibility into Boeing’s spending, meaning NASA did not know how much a single core stage of the rocket cost.

The space agency was also found “inflating the contractor’s score and leading to overly generous award fees” in six evaluation periods since 2012 — when Boeing was awarded the contract. That led to $323 million in paid fees, of which nearly $64 million were found to be questionable by the OIG audit.

Ultimately, the delays put the future of the project at risk, the report concluded. The SLS rocket won’t be reused, but instead built multiple times for future missions, including a potential science mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2022. That timeline is now likely to slip, too.

But there are improvements on the horizon: The OIG report conceded that Boeing has taken “positive steps” to stay on track, including “making key leadership changes; requesting reviews of Boeing’s management, financial, and estimating systems; adding routine, in-depth performance reviews; and changing the procurement process to improve.”