NASA's spending is under scrutiny
Obama's transition team wants to know about the agency's basic money management, including cost overruns.
Reporting from Washington — Most nights it's possible to look skyward with a pair of cheap binoculars and see a $100,000 mistake circling the Earth. The glowing object -- an orbiting NASA tool bag -- was lost last month by an astronaut during a routine spacewalk.
The canvas-and-acrylic caddy contained two grease guns, a scraper, a trash bag and some wipes, hardly cutting-edge technology. So why did it cost $100,000?
NASA officials said they had no answer to that question -- beyond the fact that, as spokesman Allard Beutel put it, "space flight is expensive." That expense is drawing serious scrutiny from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.
Of 74 questions submitted to the agency by Obama's NASA transition team, more than half asked about basic spending issues, including cost overruns.
It's clear that NASA's long-standing inability to manage its money has attracted the team's attention.
For nearly two decades, NASA and its out-of-this-world projects have made a "high-risk" list compiled by government auditors because of cost overruns totaling millions -- sometimes billions -- of dollars.
The designation applies to programs that are "impeding effective government and costing the government billions of dollars each year," according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency.
NASA has been on this list since 1990.
"Our space program is running inefficiently, and without sufficient regard to cost performance," wrote Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator who has been mentioned as a possible replacement for Michael Griffin, the current NASA administrator.
In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Stern called the cost overruns a "cancer" that has cost the agency's science program about $5 billion over five years.
Few missions seem immune. In 1988, when NASA engineers started designing the International Space Station, the orbiting complex was to cost $23 billion and be completed by 1996. Today, the cost has topped $100 billion -- and it still is not finished.
Another project, a science satellite named Glory, was conceived more than a decade ago to help scientists better understand how the sun and particles in the atmosphere affect Earth's climate. Since 2007, its cost has jumped by nearly one-third, from $169 million to $221 million.
NASA says that part of the problem is the cutting-edge nature of what it does.
- Boeing Space Station Overruns Disclosed Mar 05, 1997
- Higher Space Station Costs Seen for Boeing Jun 25, 1998
- Boeing Overruns on Space Station Near $1 Billion Feb 23, 2000
