Their costs are rocketing upwards.
Several of NASA’s top private contractors have been plagued by budget overruns and delays that have forced taxpayers to cough up billions extra, a scathing new study has found.
Between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, the space agency shelled out some $60 billion in contracts while recouping $7.7 million in civil fines and $9.6 million in criminal restitution, while the Treasury Department recovered $33.5 million in fraudulent and wasteful spending, the study from transparency advocacy group Open The Books noted.
Among the worst offenders has been Boeing, which was forced to make 71 “corrective action requests” to the government related to its products between 2021 and 2023, the study found, citing NASA watchdog probe data.
Most notably, the aerospace company was tasked with developing the Boeing Starliner, a spacecraft intended to move crew in and out of the International Space Station (ISS).
Last summer, the Starliner made international headlines after a thruster glitch left two astronauts — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — stranded for months beyond their eight-day mission.
That same Boeing Starliner cost about $1.8 billion more than estimated, and its development ran six years behind schedule, an inspector general report found.
The spacecraft was originally intended to be finished in 2017 at a price of $962 million, now, its cost is expected to come in at $2.8 billion.
NASA has since announced plans to launch the SpaceX Dragon to bring home Williams and Wilmore as soon as Sunday.
In all, NASA dished out around $6.4 billion in contracts to Boeing between fiscal years 2021 and 2025, making it the space agency’s second-highest paid contractor after the California Institute of Technology ($9.8 billion) and ahead of SpaceX ($5.4 billion) during that period, per Open The Books.
Much of the spending on Boeing has been the $2.7 billion set aside for the Ares 1 Upper Stage, according to Open Secrets, which flagged the expense listed at USASpending.gov.
Ares 1 Upper Stage was part of a project that was ultimately scrapped in 2010 and succeeded by NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the first major attempt at a super-heavy lift rocket send astronauts to the moon or Mars since the Saturn V was retired in 1973.
SLS has been notoriously bogged down in cost overruns and delays, costing taxpayers at least $23.8 billion, and was first launched in 2022, six years behind schedule.
NASA contract funding has also been beset by criminal activity, with Open the Books highlighting the agency watchdog’s findings that there had been “24 convictions, 14 suspensions, and 20 debarments” between 2021 and 2024.
In one case, the CEO of a Florida government subcontractor pleaded guilty in March 2024 to doctoring nearly 200 quality control documents to help his products pass muster. The executive, Steven Lukens, was ordered to forfeit more than $270,000 his company received for the shoddy material.
Boeing has also received $1.4 billion to help develop the “Space Launch System Stages Production and Evolution Contract” to manufacture key components of NASA’s forthcoming mission to the moon.
The company has been under fire over recent years for quality control issues, including with its Boeing 737 MAX planes after two crashes in 2018 and 2019 killed 346 passengers.
The Post reached out to Boeing and NASA for comment.
SpaceX garnered $5.4 billion from NASA contracts, including $2.7 billion for a Human Landing System that is expected to be used in moon missions and $2.3 billion for bringing astronauts to the ISS.
The company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has been spearheading the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) drive to cut costs across the federal government.
As part of that effort, Musk has been doing a deep dive into government procurements and contracts, most of which appear to have left his companies unscathed — at least for now.
Open the Books did not flag major cost overruns or delays on the part of SpaceX in its brief assessment of NASA’s dealings.
Other top NASA contractors between 2021 and 2024 include Lockheed Martin ($2.8 billion) Northrop Grumman ($2 billion), Jacobs Engineering Group ($1.9 billion), John Hopkins University ($1.5 billion), Blue Origin ($1.2 billion), KBR ($1.2 billion) and Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings ($1.1 billion).
NASA had a budget of about $24.9 billion last year, down from $25.4 billion in fiscal year 2023.
