These two programs account for 70 percent of NASA's development costs

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These two programs account for 70 percent of NASA's development costs
Washington Business Journal
Jill R. Aitoro Senior Staff Reporter- Mar 26, 2015, 12:24pm EDT



The Space Launch System being developed by The Boeing Co. as the replacement of the Space Shuttle for human space exploration is now the costliest program in NASA's portfolio, accounting for 37 percent of development costs.



Two programs — one led by Northrop Grumman Corp. and the other The Boeing Co. — account for 70 percent of NASA’s development budget, leaving 10 other major programs to fight for the leftovers.

Interestingly, the $6.19 billion James Webb Space Telescope under development by Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), which has faced its fair share of challenges, was overtaken as the most costly program in NASA’s portfolio, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office. The Space Launch System being developed by Boeing (NYSE: BA) as the replacement of the Space Shuttle for human space exploration is now the costliest. That program, which was confirmed in August 2014 and therefore is new to NASA’s portfolio, is expected to cost $7.02 billion.

It accounts for 37 percent of NASA’s development costs, while the JWST accounts for 33 percent. The GAO has called out NASA for underestimating the costs of the program before.

Also noteworthy, the current NASA portfolio is among the smallest assessed to date in terms of number of projects, a dozen in all, and yet it also has the highest amount of total baseline costs. The top five programs consume 78 percent of the funds for NASA’s major projects.

The result? Existing and new projects will be competing for remaining funds, according to the GAO.

“Fully accounting for the funding, schedule, and technical challenges facing these projects is important due to the cascading effects these challenges could have across the portfolio,” reported the GAO’s Cristina Chaplain, who authored the report.

In addition to SLS and JWST, the latter of which is the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope, the top five programs include:

Solar Probe Plus
Value: $1.06 billion
Contractor: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
Summary: The spacecraft will orbit the sun 24 times and its instruments will observe the generation and flow of solar winds from very close range.

Magnetospheric Multiscape program
Value: $878.8 million
Contractor: Southwest Research Institute
Summary: Consists of four identical spacecraft, each with 25 instruments, which will fly in a tetrahedron formation, investigating how magnetic fields around the Earth connect and disconnect, explosively releasing energy.

Ice, Cloud, and Land ElevationSatellite-2
Value: $763.7 million
Contractor: Orbital ATK
Summary: A follow-on mission to ICESat, the satellite will measure changes in polar ice-sheet mass, in order to better understand mechanisms that drive change and the associated impact of change on global sea level.


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