But One Journalist Feels The Document Has Been Politicized

The NASA Office of Inspector General (OIG) has released a report that is critical of Boeing, citing cost overruns and delays in the program.

"At its current rate, we project Boeing will expend 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. Between June 2014 and August 2018, Boeing spent over $600 million more than planned on developing Core Stages 1 and 2, and NASA officials have confirmed that in FY 2018 alone Boeing expended $226 million more than planned. Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance," the executive summary states.

"For example, Boeing officials have consistently underestimated the scope of the work to be performed and thus the size and skills of the workforce required. In addition, development of command and control hardware and software necessary for Core Stage testing is 2 years behind schedule, while equipment-related mishaps and an extreme weather event contributed to cost and schedule delays. Individually, each of these issues may have caused only minor cost and schedule problems, but taken as a whole they have resulted in a 2 ½-year slip to the SLS Core Stage delivery schedule and approximately $4 billion in cost increases for development of the first two Core Stages. Furthermore, Boeing’s cost and schedule challenges are likely to worsen given that the SLS has yet to undergo its “Green Run Test”—a major milestone that integrates and tests the Core Stage components.

"We found that several poor contract management practices by NASA contributed to the SLS Program’s cost and schedule overruns. First, contrary to current federal guidance, NASA lacks visibility into the Boeing Stages contract costs because all three of the company’s key activities—development of Core Stages 1 and 2 and the EUS—are co-mingled into the same contract line item number, making it difficult for the Agency to track expenditures. As a result, NASA is unable to determine the cost of a single Core Stage, which will affect the Agency’s ability to determine pricing for future Core Stages. Second, we found flaws in NASA’s evaluation of Boeing’s performance, resulting in NASA inflating the contractor’s scores and leading to overly generous award fees."

But writing in Forbes, journalist Loren Thompson says that after reading the full audit twice and speaking to Boeing officials, it appears to be "a political document engineered by a holdover appointee from the Obama Administration ... that tried to kill all of NASA's human exploration programs." Thompson says the audit "omits important information, misstates key facts and isn't even internally consistent in its assertions."

Thompson cites several examples, which you can read at the FMI link below. But the bottom line, he says, is that the NASA OIG "has put together an almost entirely negative assessment of a program that is making steady progress and is unique in the world."

Links to both are provided so that you can determine for yourself.

(Image from file)

FMI: NASA IOG Audit, Source report