Tough budgets

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the bulk of a large space project's costs occur during the development phase, when testing and evaluation reveal unanticipated challenges.

Efficient programs, then, receive a budget bump up front that trails off over time as the project moves into operations.

Unlike some historic NASA programs like Apollo, SLS and Orion have not received significant funding increases during development. Their budgets are flat—a reference to what a line graph of time versus dollars spent looks like.

Under those constraints, program managers are often forced to push non-critical development tasks—such as Orion's in-flight abort test—into the future. It's like paying off a large credit card debt over time, rather than all at once: short-term costs are lower, but overall costs and the time required to pay are higher.

Todd May, the current director of Marshall Space Flight Center and former SLS program manager, said that despite these challenges, SLS managed to complete a key milestone known as the critical design review in the same amount of time it typically takes a NASA science mission to reach the same milestone.

In the case of SLS, this was less than four years.

"A spacecraft that might fit on a conference room table at one of the (NASA) centers versus something the size of that Statue of Liberty that has a gross liftoff mass of a million pounds—it's pretty amazing," he told me.

The flat budget also amplifies a problem familiar to many government programs: year-to-year funding uncertainties.

As we described in part four of our series, the White House proposes NASA's initial budget. Congress weighs in by passing bills that authorize programs and allocate funding. The President gets a final say by either signing or vetoing those bills.

Since the scuffle over NASA's human spaceflight program in 2010 and 2011, the White House and Congress have consistently disagreed on how much money SLS and Orion should get each year.

The White House always asks for less money than Congress is willing to give, due to either differing priorities, a calculated political strategy, lingering resentment from 2010 and 2011, or some combination of all three.

An analysis of those offsets shows that over five years, Congress has increased the SLS, Orion and ground systems budgets by about $3.2 billion.

Despite those increases, in the case of Orion, a recent Government Accountability Office report notes "the basic flatness" of the budget has not changed. Worse yet, budget battles now routinely drag into subsequent fiscal years.

As a result, from 2012 through 2016, Orion received its funding between four and eight months late—a cumulative delay of 26 months.

This can disrupt the programs' already precarious timelines, said the GAO.

"NASA and contractor staff have spent significant time developing contingency plans to ensure continuity of operations," the report said. "...in 2015 and 2016 management delayed some purchases and made multiple individual purchases rather than purchasing in bulk. Officials estimated these measures increased costs by 10 to 25 percent. For example, Program officials approved a year-long delay in purchasing a full set of valves for the life support system for EM-2 (the first crewed SLS-Orion flight) and delayed purchases related to the heat shield and propulsion thrusters for the mission to keep expenses within funding targets."