NASA’s future monster rocket is once again over budget and behind schedule

NASA is still having trouble managing the development of its next big rocket, the Space Launch System, a new audit has found. The report is the latest in a string of damning reports from NASA’s inspector general, which has been warning about scheduling and budget problems with the rocket for years. The Space Launch System, or SLS, is the epicenter of NASA’s Artemis program, the agency’s plan to return humans to the Moon by 2024 and put the first woman on the lunar surface. Once complete, the SLS is set to be the most powerful rocket in the world, capable of lofting more than 200,000 pounds of material into low Earth orbit.

NASA plans to fly people on top of the SLS, sending them to dock with a small station around the Moon where they will then journey down to the surface in a lander. Since the SLS is so crucial to NASA’s lunar ambitions, the inspector general did a complete assessment of the contracts for all of the major elements of the rocket. Three government contractors — Boeing, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Northrop Grumman — are working on the rocket; Boeing is handling the majority of the vehicle, while Aerojet makes the engines and Northrop is making boosters that will give the rocket extra thrust at liftoff. All of the contractors have experienced technical problems and setbacks, resulting in $2 billion of cost increases and two years of delays, the report said.

In fact, the entire SLS program is over budget and behind schedule by more than 33 percent, compared to the baseline figures NASA gave Congress for 2019. And that will probably grow to 43 percent, the report says, as more schedule delays occur. NASA originally hoped the rocket would make its debut in 2017. But Boeing only finished building the core of the rocket earlier this year before shipping it to Mississippi for testing.

For a while, NASA has been targeting the SLS to launch on its first uncrewed test flight in November of this year, but officials at the agency have conceded that SLS won’t fly until 2021 at the earliest. In the meantime, the cost of the program has ballooned. Until December 2019, the SLS program had cost a total of $14. 8 billion, and it’s expected to grow to $17 billion by the end of this year, according to the inspector general.

Of that total, $6 billion isn’t being reported or tracked. Regardless, the total cost is 60 percent more than the $10. 8 billion that NASA had originally envisioned for the project back in 2014, the audit said.