GAO Report: NASA needs to improve transparency into Artemis program and mission costs.
Monitoring program costs. NASA needs to improve transparency into Artemis program and mission costs. Artemis missions, which aim to return astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars, are composed of some of NASA’s most expensive and complex projects. We recommended that if NASA continued to fly the Space Launch System Block I beyond the first two missions, it should establish separate life-cycle cost and schedule baseline estimates for those efforts, to include funding for operations and sustainment, and report this information annually to Congress via the agency's budget submission. At the mission level, NASA has not taken steps to create a life-cycle cost estimate for the Artemis III mission, which was planned to be the program’s first lunar landing, as we recommended in December 2019. This is important as NASA plans for its mission to return U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon in 2028. A life-cycle cost estimate would provide transparency into the cost of the programs necessary to execute the mission. Cost estimates provide management with critical cost-risk information to improve the control of resources as NASA plans to invest billions of dollars in the coming years to support human spaceflight and exploration. If the Artemis program experiences cost and schedule growth, it could have a cascading effect on NASA’s portfolio.