Title: After Delayed Artemis 1 Launch, What's Next for NASA's Lunar Program Description: Over the next decade, NASA plans to return Americans to the moon, building a permanent lunar presence, and ultimately traveling to Mars. The Artemis 1 launch, which was recently delayed, is an important step in this effort. And while NASA has had other successes this year, like the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, many of its efforts continue to face setbacks and delays. We get an update from GAO's Bill Russell. Related GAO Work: GAO-22-105323, NASA Lunar Programs: Improved Mission Guidance Needed As Artemis Complexity Grows Released: September 2022 [Bill Russell:] NASA is improving on their management of integrating the complex Artemis programs, but there's more to do. [Holly Hobbs:] Hi and welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm your host, Holly Hobbs. Over the next decade, NASA plans to return Americans to the moon, build a permanent lunar presence, and ultimately travel on to Mars. The Artemis 1 launch, which was recently delayed, is an important step in this effort. And while NASA has had other successes this year, like the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, many of its efforts continue to face setbacks and delays. Today, we'll get an update on NASA's efforts from GAO's Bill Russell, an expert on NASA programs and a director in our Contracting and National Security Acquisitions team. Thanks for joining us. [Bill Russell:] Nice to be here, Holly. [Holly Hobbs:] So, Bill, the new news is that NASA's Artemis 1 launch was delayed. How might that delay impact NASA's other efforts, and how does it fit into the bigger picture of what NASA's trying to do? [Bill Russell:] Certainly the initial setbacks with the launch of Artemis 1 speak to just the overall complexity and challenges, technical and otherwise, to carry off a really ambitious mission. And in terms of how it fits into the larger picture, Artemis 1 is really the first step. This mission is un-crewed. The Artemis 2 will be crewed and be the second test flight into ultimately returning to the surface of the moon in Artemis 3. So all of those are building blocks. And what we saw in our review is that NASA has made some progress to think about some of the oversight structures to manage a set of complex programs to achieve the Artemis mission goals. But they have more to do, especially when it comes to thinking about schedule integration and some workforce issues. [Holly Hobbs:] We've done a lot of work on the Artemis projects, and also its delays. But what's new in this report? [Bill Russell:] In this report, we're pleased to update some of the progress that NASA has made over the last year—in particular, to strengthen some of their management and integration processes for the Artemis mission. So you're talking eight different programs, each of which are complex in themselves—the space launch system, the Orion crew capsule to name a few. And thinking all of those together to achieve the Artemis mission outcomes is no easy task. And we're happy to report this year that NASA has made some progress in how they think about the synchronization of the requirements and adding some new oversight groups to help strengthen the management of what is a complex set of programs. [Holly Hobbs:] The lunar program has had other delays, right? Artemis isn't the only delay it's faced. NASA had this goal of returning to the moon by 2024. But now they say that will happen no earlier than 2025. How might that change in goal impact other Artemis missions and going on to Mars? [Bill Russell:] There's a certain amount of turnaround time you need between the Artemis missions. So for example, once Artemis 1 is completed, NASA estimates it'll take about two years at least until they're ready to do Artemis 2. Each of the projects have its own schedule. They're working to their own milestones. They have different development tasks that have to be completed. So one of the key points from our review is that NASA was really lacking some of the mission-level schedule guidance that you need to figure out how those individual schedules would come together in a coherent way, such that you can pinpoint a time frame for things like the launch windows for the next missions. [Holly Hobbs:] So, NASA has this kind of history of complicated, challenging missions. Are the delays that we're seeing for Artemis kind of par for the course, or is there something special about this mission? [Bill Russell:] I would say that the Artemis mission set is of a size and scope and complexity that's not been undertaken by NASA before. If you think about these disparate programs, each of which can be more than a billion dollars on their own—put together to not only return to the moon, but to create a sustained lunar presence and all the infrastructure that goes with that, and then to ultimately be the launching pad to human exploration of Mars—that is just an order of magnitude greater level of difficulty, and it's going to require some special skills and management options to make that happen. And we think some additional thinking and steps around schedule management will help with the ambitious agenda. [Holly Hobbs:] So, NASA's big success story this year was the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. But like Artemis, it also faced delays. Are there any lessons to learn there for NASA? [Bill Russell:] Certainly, I think looking back at the history of the development of James Webb, there were a number of technological challenges, program management challenges that ultimately led to cost overruns and schedule delays. While it is excellent that the space telescope is delivering on its science mission, there were some big delays and cost overruns that I think NASA could take stock of and applied to the Artemis missions. Some of those have to do with the management challenges. And we were happy to see that NASA is being more proactive in thinking about risk and how to manage that risk with the Artemis efforts, as well as more attention to the scheduling and the discipline around coming up with good milestones and managing the schedules as you go along, especially when you have a number of programs that have to work seamlessly together to achieve mission ends. [Holly Hobbs:] And one of the other long term issues we highlighted in our report is workforce planning. Artemis is a long-term project, but the workforce planning is more short term. Can you talk about what's going on and why we flagged this as a challenge? [Bill Russell:] The Artemis mission set is projected to go well into the 2030s. As part of that, we took a look at how NASA is thinking about their workforce needs to cover that range of time. And what we found is NASA does a pretty good job thinking through the near-term issues—let's say the next five years—and the kinds of workforce skills they're going to need to support their activities, but found that they could do more around scenario planning for that longer term to cover the expected span of the Artemis missions. {MUSIC} [Holly Hobbs:] So Bill just told us that, despite the recent delay of Artemis 1, NASA has improved some of its planning and management of its lunar mission. But, that scheduling management and workforce planning continue to be challenges. So Bill, did we make any recommendations to help NASA prepare for these future missions? [Bill Russell:] We did. We made four recommendations, and I'll highlight a couple. One is to develop mission-level schedule management guidance to help integrate the individual project schedules that are already developed for the Artemis individual projects. But putting those together in a seamless way at the Artemis mission level along those lines to develop schedule risk analysis specifically for the Artemis 2 missions, since that's the next one coming up. And then last to think about how to collaborate and some guidance around how the different divisions involved in the Artemis mission set can collaborate around things like mission schedules. [Holly Hobbs:] And last question, what's the bottom line of this report? [Bill Russell:] The bottom line is that NASA is improving on their management of integrating the complex Artemis programs putting a structure in for better oversight. But there's more to do, especially around schedule and workforce scenarios. They've learned a lot from just the initial steps of the Artemis 1 mission and trying to get that to launch, and are on a path to incorporate some of the practices and recommendations from this review that will hopefully allow them to achieve Artemis 2 and beyond. [Holly Hobbs:] That was Bill Russell talking about GAO's recent review of NASA's efforts to send astronauts back to the moon. Thanks for your time, Bill. [Bill Russell:] Thank you, Holly. [Holly Hobbs:] And thank you for listening to the watchdog report. To hear more podcasts, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen and make sure to leave a rating and review to let others know about the work we're doing. For more from the congressional watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, visit us at GAO.gov.