As NASA talks up its Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon by the year 2024, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office raises questions about the space agency's ability to build the spacecraft and rockets intended to carry out that mission.

Instead of launching in 2020, the Artemis-1 mission that will see a Space Launch System rocket boost an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the Moon will instead launch as late as June 2021, the GAO report finds. NASA also appears to have been obscuring the true cost of its development programs, particularly with the large SLS rocket, which has Boeing as its prime contractor.

"While NASA acknowledges about $1 billion in cost growth for the SLS program, it is understated," the report found. "This is because NASA shifted some planned SLS scope to future missions but did not reduce the program’s cost baseline accordingly. When GAO reduced the baseline to account for the reduced scope, the cost growth is about $1.8 billion."

NASA now estimates that it will spend about $10 billion to develop the rocket and associated ground systems at Kennedy Space Center, where the vehicle will launch from. This figure assumes the vehicle does not encounter additional technical problems during the test and qualification phase of the hardware—which is where such problems typically arise.

NASA originally had planned to launch the SLS rocket in 2017 but has since pushed that date back multiple times. The agency's current administrator, Jim Bridenstine, has said NASA is looking at all options to keep the rocket's inaugural launch within calendar year 2020.

Award fees

Despite these delays, however, the report found that NASA has continued to pay Boeing substantial award fees. From July 2014 through September 2018, the GAO found that NASA assessed Boeing's performance on development of the SLS rocket's core stage as "good," "very good," and "excellent" at various times. The agency gave Boeing $271 million in award fees during this period, even after the rocket's scheduled launch continued to slip.

The report found several areas in which Boeing could have done more to keep the rocket on schedule. Perhaps most damning, the report states that, "As core stage production began, Boeing was focused on minimizing the number of technicians, in part to keep costs low, and hired about 100 technicians." The company actually needed two-and-a-half times that amount to keep the project on schedule.

In its response to the report, NASA said government investigators had failed to take into account the complexity of its undertaking to build a very large rocket and a deep-space capsule. The response letter from William Gerstenmaier also complained about the tone of the report.

"The GAO report repeatedly projects the worst-case schedule outcome," Gerstenmaier wrote in a letter to the GAO. "The agency does take exception to the unnecessarily negative language used in the report title and section headings and the lack of acknowledgement of progress the agency has made."

Cristina Chaplain, the chief author of the report, appeared to reject this criticism. "It would be misleading for us to continue to report the June 2020 launch date when we were told there was substantive risk to that date," she replied.