Major NASA projects that exceed budgets

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – According to a congressional monitoring agency, NASA's major projects have increasingly burgeoning budgets and schedules.

The US Government Accountability Office announced on Thursday that NASA's major projects exceeded basic costs by more than 27 percent and the average launch time was 13 months. This is the most important delay since GAO began evaluating major NASA projects 10 years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope, still in development, is the main offender. The planned launch date for this Hubble Space Telescope's advanced successor is now 2021, with an estimated price of $ 9.6 billion, the GAO said. The initial launch date was 2007, with initial cost estimates as low as $ 1 billion.

The space launch system, NASA's mega rocket, the Space Launch System, also faces huge cost overruns due to production issues and, possibly, even longer launch times.

On the positive side, the Parker Solar Probe launched last summer and whose increasingly tight loop around the sun has exceeded the budget and has been met on time.

GAO defines a major project as having a lifetime cost of at least $ 250 million. In total, NASA plans to invest $ 63 billion in the 24 major projects listed in the latest GAO report.

The partial closure of the government, which extended from December to January, was not taken into account in the report.

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