Over budget $1B, NASA gets $1B more in stimulus
WASHINGTON (AP) – 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 alone NASA is nearly $1.1 billion over cost estimates that were set in the last couple of years.
Congress’ financial watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, reviewed NASA’s newest big-money projects and found most were either 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 fleet and 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, 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 GAO’s “high risk” list since 1990. Its cost overrun problems will be the subject of a House Science Committee hearing Thursday.
“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.