WASHINGTON — NASA can land a spacecraft on a peanut-shaped asteroid 150 million miles away, but it doesn’t come close to hitting the budget target for building its spacecraft, according to congressional auditors. NASA’s top officials know it and even joke about it.
This week, auditors found that on nine projects, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is nearly $1.1 billion over cost estimates that were set in the past couple of years.
Congress’ financial watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, reviewed NASA’s newest big-money projects and found most were over budget, late or both. That doesn’t include two of NASA’s largest spending projects whose costs have wildly fluctuated and still aren’t firm — replacements for the space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Historically, overruns have caused NASA to run low on money, forcing it to shelve or delay other projects. Often, the agency just asks taxpayers for more money. In fact, NASA got $1 billion from the new stimulus package. It’s to be spent on climate-watching satellites and exploration, among other things.
“Getting an extra infusion of money doesn’t necessarily mean you have a capability to spend it well,” said Cristina Chaplain, the GAO’s acquisitions chief who wrote the study.
A second GAO report used NASA as one of its leading poster children for bad practices in estimating costs. The space agency, which has a budget of about $18 billion, needs “a more disciplined approach” to its projects, the GAO said.
NASA spending has been on the GAO’s “high risk” list since 1990. Its cost-overrun problems will be the subject of a House Science Committee hearing today.
“A cancer is overtaking our space agency: the routine acquiescence to immense cost increases in projects,” NASA’s former science chief Alan Stern wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times in 2008. He quit last year over the shifting of money to pay for cost overruns.
NASA’s spending problems are so predictable and big that two years ago Congress put it under the same tough budgeting rules as the Defense Department. That means NASA must notify Congress if a program’s cost rises by more than 15 percent. The GAO report issued Monday was the first using NASA’s new requirements.
In a statement to The Associated Press, NASA said its missions “are one-of-a-kind and complex, which always makes estimating challenging. . . . We do believe NASA is a good investment of federal funds and strive to provide the best value.” The agency statement said external forces, such as launch availabilities, also cause delays and cost increases. The agency says it has improved its cost estimating.
Projects with Colorado links
Both ran over budget:
• Kepler Earthlike planet hunter, which was built by Ball Aerospace in Colorado and will be operated by a team at the University of Colorado. Price: $594.8 million, up $97.3 million since October 2006. Launch delayed nine months to March 2009.
• Orbiting Carbon Observatory global-warming satellite, which was partly designed by a Colorado State University team that planned to analyze its data. Price: $273.1 million, up $37.9 million since October 2007. Launch delayed five months to February 2009; equipment failed after launch and project was destroyed.
