NASA report blasts management of Boeing, SpaceX transport to International Space Station

Emre Kelly
Florida Today

NASA is facing a range of timeline, financial, and safety issues with its efforts to launch astronauts to the International Space Station from American soil, the agency's inspector general office said in a report released Thursday.

Delays facing the Commercial Crew Program, which in 2010 selected Boeing and SpaceX under $4.82 billion and $3.14 billion contracts respectively, have also put NASA in the unusual position of possibly having only one American astronaut onboard the ISS.

The program was designed to bring human spaceflight capabilities back online after the end of the space shuttle program and end the reliance on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to get Americans to the space station, which costs about $85 million per seat.

NASA's Office of Inspector General also noted that NASA will actually pay $5 million more than that per seat on Boeing's spacecraft, but will pay $30 million less per ride with SpaceX. The report also questioned NASA's decision to pay Boeing an additional $287 million to ensure it continued work on the program.

Timelines and ISS crew

NASA-released renderings of SpaceX's Crew Dragon and Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.

As of May 2019, according to the OIG report, the Commercial Crew Program had doled out about $5.5 billion of the total $8.5 billion set aside for the effort.

"However, regular crewed missions on commercial carriers will not occur before summer 2020 – three years after originally planned," said Ridge Bowman, director of NASA OIG's space operations directorate. "We found that Boeing and SpaceX each face technical and safety issues that need to be addressed before they are cleared to provide crew transportation to the ISS."

This newly released timeline puts crewed flights to the ISS beyond some of the latest NASA announcements, which previously noted the possibility of launching SpaceX's Crew Dragon sometime in the first quarter of 2020. The capsule successfully test fired its abort engines this week after a similar test in April resulted in an explosion.

The OIG said both Boeing and SpaceX face significant safety and technical challenges in the form of parachutes, propulsion, and launch abort systems. The issues may increase the risk of system failures or add additional delays, though both contractors have made progress on the issues in recent months.

Those challenges coupled with the reduction in the number of Russian Soyuz launches and a ban on payments to the Russian government, however, means NASA could be left on the ISS with a single astronaut. The OIG said that lone astronaut would have to focus on operations and maintenance, leaving little to no time for scientific research.

“SpaceX and NASA have worked in close partnership, applying all that we have learned from extensive testing and analysis to improve our systems and ensure Crew Dragon is one of the safest, most reliable spacecraft ever built," SpaceX said in a statement. "There is nothing more important to our company than human spaceflight, and we look forward to safely flying NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting early next year.”

Financial concerns

The OIG also noted serious concerns with Commercial Crew's financial operations, most notably the payment of an additional $287 million to Boeing.

"We found that NASA agreed to pay an additional $287.2 million above Boeing’s fixed prices to mitigate a perceived 18-month gap in ISS flights anticipated in 2019 for the company’s third through sixth crewed missions and to ensure the company continued as a second commercial crew provider," the 47-page report reads.

The OIG said NASA, under pressure to keep timelines intact, essentially paid Boeing higher prices to address schedule slippages, resulting in prices higher than those listed in the original, fixed-price contracts. The inspector general questioned $187 million of that as "unnecessary costs" that could have been mitigated by using Soyuz spacecraft or changing payment timelines.

"Given that NASA’s objective was to address a potential crew transportation gap, we found that SpaceX was not provided an opportunity to propose a solution even though the company previously offered shorter production lead times than Boeing," the report reads.

A Boeing representative said the company offered NASA additional schedule flexibility for its third through sixth crewed flights, leading to the higher prices.

"This flexibility means Boeing is taking significantly more up-front financial risk, and is already helping NASA with critical decisions key to optimizing future ISS operations," Boeing said. "Doing so under the structure of the original contract would have increased cost and schedule uncertainty and would have limited NASA’s flexibility in mission planning."

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, meanwhile, said Thursday night that the additional money given to Boeing "doesn't seem right."

"Meaning not fair that Boeing gets so much more for the same thing," Musk said.

The OIG's report also revealed for the first time per-set pricing on Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Crew Dragon: $90 million and $55 million, respectively. This means Starliner seats cost $5 million more than flights on Soyuz, while Crew Dragon seats cost $30 million less.

Recommendations for NASA

The OIG's report provided five overall recommendations to NASA's leadership:

1. Establish realistic timelines for remaining work to be done before final certification for Starliner and Crew Dragon to fly to the ISS.

2. Correct safety-critical technical issues, like parachutes, before the crewed test flights begin in 2020.

3. Begin working with Congress to obtain a legal waiver and pay Russia for more seats on Soyuz so as to avoid the possibility of one American astronaut on orbit.

4. Develop a plan to work with Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, to investigate possibilities of new flights to the ISS or extensions of existing missions.

5. And finally, make sure NASA's efforts comply with government contracting regulations. This includes adhering to fixed-price contracts and giving both contractors equal opportunities to compete for extra capabilities, such as the one offered to Boeing and not SpaceX.

The OIG said NASA management concurred with all of its recommendations.

Contact Emre Kelly at aekelly@floridatoday.com or 321-242-3715. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @EmreKelly.