US Government Accountability Office GAO

"...a complex interplay of hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns that collectively posed risks to crew safety."
p.61

• Testing — Insufficient thruster testing left NASA and Boeing with knowledge gaps about the propulsion system community
• Responsibility — Inadequate subcontractor oversight of Boeing's systems engineering
• Communication — NASA's own systems knowledge of Boeing's spacecraft was incomplete

"Managing the changes described in the table presents a significant acquisition management challenge to NASA... changes to one project may have cascading effects on another."
p.24

• Coordination — Gateway, SLS Block 1B and ML2 paused/cancelled while Orion, HLS and EGS must redesign interfaces simultaneously regulatory system
• Design — Interface rework driven by a December 2025 executive order redefining the lunar-return architecture

"DAVINCI lost critical team members with leadership roles in program management and engineering to the deferred resignation program and was unable to backfill the positions in fiscal year 2025."
p.32

• Human capital — Skills and knowledge-retention loss at Goddard Space Flight Center, forcing a rescope of risk-reduction work human capital regulatory system
• Guidance — A new NASA-wide directive to rebuild in-house technical roles responds to the gap

"...during the SCIPA thermal vacuum testing, they identified cryogenic frost (microscopic ice) buildup on the WFI detectors."
p.80

• Testing — A positive counter-example to the Starliner case: thermal vacuum testing worked exactly as intended, catching two design flaws pre-launch
• Process optimization — New decontamination-cycle procedures developed in response

"NASA project officials were informed by the Department of Energy that the MMRTG will produce less thermal power than the project requires under the current concept of operations."
p.66

• Asset — The radioisotope power source is a shared, externally-supplied asset NASA does not itself control asset
• Domain knowledge — Technical dependency surfaces at an interagency boundary rather than within NASA's own chain domain knowledge
• Stakeholders — Department of Energy, as a fellow federal agency, is an under-examined stakeholder stakeholders

"ROSA's top risk is the delay in receiving nuclear launch authorization... The selection was delayed by 3 months because of the government shutdown."
p.81

• Regulatory system — A government-wide appropriations lapse propagates into a project-specific licensing delay regulatory system
• Coordination — Launch-vehicle selection and the Department of Energy's nuclear-authorization schedule are sequentially dependent

"NASA began closing out the program before it completed its assessment of these options."
p.73

• Handover / Results review — Closeout initiated ahead of the NASA-led vs. commercial-lander cost comparison meant to inform it
• Human capital — Engineering expertise dispersed mid-decision human capital
• Finance — Cancellation driven by an affordability threshold finance

"Orion's overruns account for 52 percent of the portfolio's annual cost overruns," and its departure will remove "approximately $3.5 billion... or 73 percent of the current portfolio's total development cost overruns."
pp.16, 19

• Reporting — A single dominant project distorts aggregate portfolio metrics, masking the other 17 projects' performance
• Finance — Baselines need to be read project-by-project, not only in the aggregate finance

"...tracking a risk to its cost reserves due to the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and the euro, which is increasing the cost of work completed by European contractors."
p.69

• Nature — GRACE-C and SBG-TIR monitor water, ice mass and land-surface change nature
• Stakeholders — International partners DLR (Germany) and ASI (Italy) stakeholders
• Finance — Currency risk runs alongside, not instead of, domestic budget exposure finance