From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: NASA Space Exploration Projects

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Cristina Chaplain,
Director, Acquisition and Sourcing Management

Related GAO Work:
GAO-16-612: NASA Human Space Exploration: Opportunity Nears to Reassess
Launch Vehicle and Ground Systems Cost and Schedule
and
GAO-16-620: Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle: Action Needed to Improve
Visibility Into Cost, Schedule, and Capacity to Resolve Technical
Challenges


Released: July 2016


[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's July
2016. NASA is in the midst of developing systems needed to support deep
space exploration by humans. A team led by Cristina Chaplain, a director
in GAO's Acquisition and Sourcing Management team, recently reviewed two
of these programs: The Space Launch System and the Orion multipurpose
crew vehicle. Eden Savino sat down with Cristina to talk about what they
found.

[ Eden Savino: ] In the 1960s, to get to the moon, NASA had Projects
Mercury, followed by Gemini, followed by Apollo. What are the goals of
the Orion and Space Launch systems?

[ Cristina Chaplain: ] That's a good question. We don't have goals as
clearly defined as we did back then. At this point, NASA's focused on
just building a capability to go farther out to space than the
International Space Station. It's focused on testing that
capability—first, just the systems themselves, and then humans. It also
has a couple of missions it's beginning to undertake that will involve
some of these systems. One will be retrieving an asteroid, for example,
but other than that, the long-term plans are still a little unclear.
NASA's in the beginning stages of developing plans to go to Mars, but
there's still a lot of debate about is Mars the right place? Or should
we be going to the moon? And how firm should these plans be? So there's
still a lot of questions to be answered.

[ Eden Savino: ] And your reports talk about three main programs.
There's the Orion crew capsule, the Space Launch System, and the
Exploration Ground System. Can you help me understand how these programs
interact?

[ Cristina Chaplain: ] The Space Launch System is the rocket that
they're developing,that'll be on the scale of the SaturnV, so the Apollo
era. The Orion crew capsule will contain humans and transport them.
It'll be integrated to the top of that rocket. The Exploration Ground
Systems is all the infrastructure that supports that on the ground. For
example, the Vertical Assembly Building, the crawler transporter. You
might remember some of these from the shuttle era. They're literally
rehabbing these systems to support this new effort.

[ Eden Savino: ] Now, we were just talking earlier about The Martian and
we know that it is not trivial to go out into deep space. Can you talk a
bit about some of the technical, scheduling and cost related challenges
you found with these three programs?

[ Cristina Chaplain: ] I like to put those challenges into two buckets,
technical and management. As far as technical challenges go, we're
seeing the kinds of things we would expect to see with these programs at
this point. The Orion capsule, for example, one of their main challenges
is developing a heat shield that can withstand these extra hard
environments that it's going to be operating in. The Space Launch System
has a challenge of building a core stage that is big and robust enough
to support this large vehicle. All the programs have challenges
associated with bringing everything together, integrating the system in
a way that is going to be seamless and be able to work well. On the
management side, we saw challenges related to managing cost and
schedule. For example, the Orion program does not have reliable cost and
schedule estimates right now. The Space Launch System is in need of
tools to help monitor and predict costs for contractors. All the
programs are working with very low management reserves in terms of
dollars and time. It makes it very difficult to manage a program under
those circumstances. It's put them in a position of deferring work to
later stages where it could be more costly and time consuming to
address. So the management challenges are a concern to us. The technical
ones, we would expect. They're working through them but to really work
through them successfully you have to have the management challenges in
order.

[ Eden Savino: ] So that leads directly into GAO's recommendations. It
sounds like there's many recommendations sort of coming out of these two
reports. Can you tell me a bit about them?

[ Cristina Chaplain: ] Yes and all the recommendations are focused on
those management challenges. All three efforts are moving into their
more difficult phases of development. We're investing a lot of money in
the program as this point. Several billion dollars a year. So it's
really important to have those management challenges addressed and so we
focus on things like having up-to-date cost estimates and having the
right tools to monitor costs. It's not only important for NASA to do
that to manage effectively, it's important for the Congress giving the
investment that they're making into the program.

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