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"exec" writes:

At the request of Congress, the nonpartisan US Government Accountability Office reviews the finances and management of federal programs, and this week it released a study critical of NASA’s crew capsule, Orion. Most worryingly, the 56-page report (PDF) regularly draws parallels between the Orion program and another large NASA project, the James Webb Space Telescope. The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is notorious for ballooning from a 10-year, $500 million project to a 20-year, $8.8 billion (£6.7 billion) instrument that may finally launch in 2018.

Although Orion has not yet experienced such dramatic increases in costs, the spacecraft is now into its second decade of development. NASA estimates that it will spend a total of $16 billion (£12 billion) to ready Orion for its first crewed flight in April 2023. However, the GAO review, signed by Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management Cristina T. Chaplain, did not find these numbers to be reliable.

The federal auditing agency based this conclusion on the fact that only a handful of NASA’s methods for estimating costs and schedule were consistent with “best practices.” Moreover, the GAO found, in making a number of its estimates, NASA appears to be relying too heavily on data analysis from the primary contractor for Orion, Lockheed Martin. In regard to Orion’s cost and schedule estimates, then, the GAO report concludes, “They do not fully reflect the characteristics of quality cost or schedule estimates and neither estimate can be considered reliable.”

[...] Few blame the NASA engineers themselves for these difficulties, but rather changing requirements and bloated government procurement processes for a program that formally began in 2006. The 5-meter capsule has seen significant modifications during that time, first envisioned as a means to transport astronauts to the space station and now more focused on deep space exploration.

[...] It's nevertheless striking that it will probably take NASA about 17 years to design and develop Orion before finally flying its first crewed mission in 2023. During the same amount of time, from 1964 to 1981, the space program flew the Gemini spacecraft; designed, developed, and flew the Apollo capsule; and designed, developed, and flew the much more complex space shuttle.

Source: ArsTechnica

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