Boeing blasted for delays in Mars rocket
Audit: Craft behind schedule, over budget for ‘poor performance’
Years of delays and billions of dollars of cost overruns have marred Boeing’s building of key components of a next-generation rocket that one day is meant to take humans to the moon and Mars, according to a scathing audit released Wednesday by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General.
The report also found that in addition to Boeing’s mistakes, NASA was being overly generous with its evaluations of the company, leading to questionable payments.
Under a NASA contract, Boeing is currently building two core stages for the Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket that will carry the Orion spacecraft and astronauts into deep space. Boeing’s contract is the largest in the Space Launch System program, comprising more than 40 percent of the program expenditures
Boeing’s parts will be integrated with other components of the rocket at Kennedy Space Center, before they launch from the Space Coast.
But the project is behind schedule and grossly over budget, partially as a result of “Boeing’s poor performance,” according to the report, the first in a series of audits of the Space Launch System program.
“With $5.3 billion spent as of July 2018, NASA expects Boeing to exhaust the contract’s current value by early 2019, nearly three years before the contract is supposed to end and without delivering a single core stage or the [exploration upper stage],” said Ridge Bowman, director of the NASA OIG.
At the current rate, the report
found that Boeing will spend at least $8.9 billion through 2021 — “double the amount initially planned — while delivery of the first core stage has slipped 2 ½ years from June 2017 to December 2019 and may slip further.”
OnBoeing’s Space Launch System vice president and program manager, John Shannon, said last week that the project is on track to deliver the first core stage for the rocket to Kennedy Space Center by the end of the year.
But the report disputed that estimate, saying Boeing would need an infusion of $1.2 billion through a renegotiated NASA contract for it to meet its goal of delivering to the Cape in December 2019 and then holding a test flight in June 2020. That doesn’t count the billions needed to ensure delivery of the other components of Boeing’s contract.
“In light of the development delays, we have concluded NASA will be unable to meet its [Exploration Mission-1] launch window currently scheduled between December 2019 and June 2020,” the report said. Boeing responds
For its part, Boeing says the report is outdated and doesn’t reflect the changes Boeing has made to correct its past mistakes.
“An unprecedented rocket program has inherent challenges; developing the first unit of a system that will safely carry humans into space, even more so,” the company said.
The OIG report conceded that Boeing has taken “positive steps” to stay on track, including “making key leadership changes; requesting reviews of Boeing’s management, financial, and estimating systems; adding routine, indepth performance reviews; and changing the procurement process to improve.”
But Boeing wasn’t the only one to make mistakes. According to the OIG report, NASA mismanaged the contract and failed to keep track of Boeing’s spending. The lack of transparency meant NASA did not know how much a single core stage of the rocket cost.
The space agency was also found “inflating the contractor’s score and leading to overly generous award fees” in six evaluation periods since 2012 — when Boeing was awarded the contract. That led to $323 million in paid fees, of which nearly $64 million were found to be questionable by the audit.
The report offered seven recommendations to NASA, six of which the agency has agreed with.
“NASA and Boeing are well underway in implementing the report’s recommendations, several of which are already yielding steady and significant improvements,” NASA said in a statement. “NASA continues to carefully monitor SLS performance as the teams make significant progress.”
As to the future of the project, plans are on hold for additional core stages for future missions. The SLS rocket won’t be reused, but instead built for each trip, including a potential science mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2022. That timeline is now likely to slip.
According to the audit, “Unless senior officials at NASA and Boeing are involved and collectively agree to the solutions, launch dates will continue to slip and the costs will increase, raising questions about the program’s longterm sustainability.” Space Launch System’s future
But does the audit mean the Space Launch System rocket may never lift off? For a program that has major support from Congress, with nearly $12 billion poured into it so far and the participation of 1,100 contractors across 43 states, that’s not likely, said Laura Seward Forczyk, owner of space consulting firm Astralytical.
“It’s not necessarily about performance, it’s about funding that is being allocated to key areas, key districts and key states,” Seward Forczyk said. “It’s about the Senate saying they are creating a large program for their constituents.”
Ironically, one of the issues Boeing faced on the Space Launch System was rushing to hire more employees when it realized it had underestimated the workload — and struggling to find qualified personnel. It took the company four to six months to find enough staff, the report found.
Ultimately though, it’s really a lack of incentive to meet deadlines that has stalled the rocket’s launch, Seward Forczyk said.
The Soviet Union isn’t breathing down NASA’s neck anymore, and the success of the commercial space industry in heavy-lift rocketry is still untested.
“If you see those two rockets [SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy or Big Falcon Rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn] come into operation and have a successful track record, if you continuously see a successful track record, that might be an incentive … for the administration and Congress to then start to change direction,” Seward Forczyk said