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NASA spending spirals as delays hit a swollen mission schedule

 Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr

An annual audit of NASA’s spending has found that more than half of its projects in development are either late or over budget, while delays to its rocket launches are breaking records.

In its 2018 report, published on 30 May, the Government Accountability Office found that NASA launches were an average of 13 months behind schedule—the longest average delay since the GAO began scrutinising major NASA projects in 2009. As of February 2018, nine out of 17 NASA projects in development reported that they were facing either growing costs or delays.

“NASA hasn’t been able to meet its cost and schedule goals on some of its costliest programmes,” the GAO said. The bulk of rising costs and delays are due to issues with the James Webb Space Telescope and a heavy rocket called the Space Launch System, neither of which are likely to hit their already-delayed launch dates in June 2020.

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