GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: GAO report calls for more transparency on SLS costs.

The Government Accountability Office called on NASA to be more transparent about the costs of the Space Launch System rocket, a vehicle senior agency officials acknowledged risked becoming “unaffordable.”

In a Sept. 7 report delivered to the leadership of House and Senate appropriations subcommittees that fund NASA, the GAO criticized NASA for a lack of details on costs of the SLS now that the vehicle has completed development. NASA spent $11.8 billion to develop SLS, a cost that covered work though the Artemis 1 launch in November 2022.

“NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program,” the report stated. “These ongoing production costs to support the SLS program for Artemis missions are not captured in a cost baseline, which limits transparency and efforts to monitor the program’s long-term affordability.”

Those concerns are not new. The GAO noted as far back as 2014 that it recommended NASA establish cost and schedule baselines for subsequent Artemis missions that would use the initial Block 1 version of SLS. The agency has not done so, nor has it developed a total lifecycle cost estimate for SLS, a concern the GAO raised in 2017.

The thing to remember is that the costs are the whole point of this project, which is pure pork.