NASA spent $11.8 billion to develop SLS, a cost that covered work though the Artemis 1 launch in November 2022. “NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program,” the report stated. “These ongoing production costs to support the SLS program for Artemis missions are not captured in a cost baseline, which limits transparency and efforts to monitor the program’s long-term affordability.”Those concerns are not new. The goal of that contract, NASA officials said then, would be to reduce SLS production costs by as much as 50%. “NASA has made some progress toward implementing these strategies,” the GAO said of those and other efforts to control SLS costs, “but it is too early to fully evaluate their effect on cost.”

Source: CNN September 09, 2023 01:27 UTC