Space News by Jeff Foust — May 27, 2021
A Government Accountability Office report warns that NASA’s Artemis program faces technical risks as well as management issues that raise doubts about achieving the goal of returning humans to the moon by 2024.
The May 26 report by the GAO, requested by Congress in a 2018 appropriations bill, concluded that NASA’s approach to managing the various projects involved with the overall Artemis effort increased the odds of cost increases and schedule slips.
“With just over 3 years remaining, NASA lacks insight into the cost and schedules of some of its largest lunar programs in part because some of its programs are in the early stage of development and therefore have not yet established cost and schedule estimates or baselines,” the GAO stated in its report.
One factor in that lack of estimates and baselines is the use of service contracts, like the Human Landing System (HLS) program, where NASA will procure landing services from companies rather than the landers themselves. NASA argues that approach enables flexibility and innovation, the GAO noted.
However, it added that such an approach “may again result in NASA delaying the establishment of higher-level agency requirements as it obtains input from industry.” Those delays can have cost and schedule impacts. “The later the trade-offs occur, the more expensive they become to address.” It added that NASA has yet to provide a cost estimate of the Artemis 3 lunar landing mission, a recommendation the GAO made in late 2019.
More:
https://spacenews.com/gao-report-identifies-technical-and-management-risks-with-artemis/
