WASHINGTON — Conversion of shuttle-era solid rocket boosters and engines to be used on the Space Launch System has cost NASA billions more and brought years longer than originally planned, the agency’s inspector general concluded.
In a May 25 report, NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) stated that contracts that date back to the Constellation program greater than 15 years ago have suffered about $6 billion in cost increases related to each changes in scope of the contracts in addition to technical issues. Those contracts have also experienced greater than six years of delays.
The contracts cover work by Northrop Grumman to develop and produce five-segment solid rocket boosters for the SLS based on the four-segment boosters used on the shuttle, and work by Aerojet Rocketdyne to adapt Space Shuttle Primary Engines, also often known as the RS-25, for the SLS core stage.
The contracts, covering development and production of the boosters and engines, originally had a combined value of $7 billion over 14 years. The fee-plus contracts at the moment are value a minimum of $13.1 billion over 25 years, of which $8.6 billion has been spent up to now. The OIG reported that the overruns have the effect of accelerating the price of a single SLS mission through Artemis 4 by $144 million, to $4.2 billion each.
A key think about the overruns was an underestimation of the issue of adapting shuttle-era hardware for the SLS. “While the RS-25 is a highly mature system, significant technical upgrades are required before it might probably be installed on the SLS as a result of the rocket’s increased technical complexity,” the report stated, starting from increased heat that required additional information to other system modifications to extend the flow of propellants to the engines.
Aerojet also needed to design a brand new engine controller unit, which accommodates the electronics for operating the RS-25, because parts for the unique unit were now not available. Nonetheless, the report found that Aerojet’s plans for the unit “lacked a comprehensive understanding of controller design requirements and an agreed-upon scope of labor, which resulted in significant technical issues culminating in increased costs and expanded schedule.”
The solid rocket booster also has significant overruns, particularly with its propellant liner and insulation, a brand new component that replaced an asbestos-based insulation used on shuttle-era boosters. That work began as a $4.4 million contract modification in 2011, but Northrop ultimately charged NASA $253 million for the work, including $28.5 million in award fees.
NASA contracting officers objected to paying the award fee, denying two requests by Northrop for the fee. The OIG report noted that agency officials then appeared to go around standard procedures by convening an “independent assessment team” of former NASA employees, who really useful the agency pay the award fee. The report called that effort a “significant and continuous disregard for Agency regulations and official processes.” NASA eventually agreed to pay Northrop $24.5 million.
That incident was just one among several examples of procurement shortfalls cited by the OIG report. It noted that only a handful of employees work on the booster and engine contracts, with limited supervisory review. It also took nearly 500 days to finalize one booster contract, outside of the guidance to accomplish that inside 180 days. Despite that delay, procurement lawyers got only six hours to review a 1,500-page contract, “likely contributing to unidentified omissions of required clauses and lack of a fully-defined scope of labor.”
The report noted that NASA is attempting to cut back costs for each future SLS boosters and the restart of RS-25 engine production. It cautioned, though, that “NASA’s efforts likely will fall in need of its expected savings given the continuing impact of efforts to restart RS-25 engine production and manage the complexity of upgrading and integrating heritage components.”
OIG offered eight recommendations to NASA to handle booster and engine contract issues, akin to shifting to fixed-price contracts for brand spanking new RS-25 engines. NASA accepted, partially or completely, all of the recommendations, but noted that it had already examined the RS-25 engine production issue and concluded that, given the work needed to restart production lines, a cost-plus contract was the higher contracting approach.
The NASA response was unusually critical of OIG’s overall assessment. Agency officials “are concerned that the foregoing report offers an incomplete view of this system’s decision-making regarding its boosters and engines elements and that the data within the report is presented without the context that might have rendered it more accurate,” stated a NASA response signed by Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, and Karla Smith Jackson, assistant administrator for the office of procurement. “In consequence, the directorate and this system don’t concur with, nor endorse, the facts as presented within the body of the report.”
OIG stood by the findings of its report. “We take issue with this summary characterization and are upset that in its formal response the Agency didn’t specify the facts within the report with which it disagrees,” the report states.
