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The Orion spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis II crewed flight test is being processed at Kennedy Space Center. Launch is targeted for April 2026, although the date is under review.
Most of NASA’s major programs are on schedule and within 15% of their budgets, but the agency’s flagship initiative to expand human presence into deep space under the Artemis program continues multibillion-dollar cost overruns, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its annual review of key space agency projects.
The GAO determined that 14 of 18 NASA projects assessed were within cost and schedule margins during fiscal 2025, but four programs—led by the Orion deep-space crew capsule—are over budget by a total of nearly $500 million. Of that, Orion alone accounted for more than $360 million in cost overruns, the GAO said in a July 1 report.
The cost spike was primarily due to technical issues stemming from the capsule’s Nov. 16-Dec. 11, 2022, uncrewed fight test around the Moon, which revealed unexpected heat shield erosion. That investigation sparked delays in the follow-on Artemis II crewed flight test, currently targeted for April 2026.
“They really needed some time to figure out what happened after Artemis I in terms of the integrity of the heat shield and what the possible solutions would be,” William Russell, director of GAO Contracting and National Security Acquisitions, said in an interview posted on the agency’s website along with its report.
NASA also added some new requirements, such as a docking capability, which further hiked costs. Historically, the cost increases were due to COVID-19 pandemic-related work and supply issues, Russell said.
The other three over-budget programs were:
• The Low Boom Flight Demonstrator, which reported a $59.7 million development cost increase due to contractor performance and technical issues.
• Europa Clipper, which launched in October 2024 following resolution of radiation-hardening issues and deferred software development that drove a $50.7 million overrun.
• The joint NASA-Indian Space Research Organization Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, which ran $40.9 million over budget due to radar antenna reflector issues discovered in early 2024.
For its latest report, the GAO reviewed 53 major NASA programs—those with an expected life cycle cost of more than $250 million—dating back to 2009 to assess NASA’s historical performance. Of those, at least 30 were developed at or near their cost estimates, which the GAO determined to be less than 15% over budget. The rest required rescoping, new budget baselines and/or additional money to complete.
Most of the budget-busters were in the Artemis portfolio. “Those accounted for pretty much the same amount of cost increase as the rest of completed projects in NASA’s entire portfolio,” Russell said.
The GAO determined that 48 non-Artemis projects had cost overruns totaling about $8.1 billion. Five Artemis projects were over budget by almost $7 billion. “It shows the outsized impact of some of those Artemis projects and the level of complexity,” Russell said. “The scale of the efforts are pretty big so when changes to those programs or delays occur, it really adds up.”
NASA recently began nine new Artemis projects, with total estimated costs of more than $20 billion, the GAO noted. “These projects are interdependent, meaning that challenges and delays in one can create challenges and delays for all of them. Further, delays to mission dates can also increase costs,” it said.
NASA last year revamped its management of the Artemis initiative under a new Moon-to-Mars program office to try to identify and prevent problems that could sweep across the project. The GAO noted that current Orion development cost estimates “do not align” with the program’s April 2026 targeted launch date.
Orion’s cumulative cost overruns tally $3.2 billion, of which $2.5 billion stems from NASA’s August 2021 decision to rebaseline the program and add new requirements, the GAO said.
“When assessed against the 2021 cost and scheduled rebaseline, the Orion program has experienced $684 million of development cost growth and a two-year delay,” the report said.
In total, Orion’s development costs have grown to $14.5 billion, a 28.5% increase over its initial $11.2 billion baseline estimate.
The Trump administration is calling for an end to current Artemis architecture, which is built around NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, Orion capsule, Gateway lunar-orbiting base and commercial flight service contracts for last-leg crew travel between lunar orbit and the Moon and spacesuits for moonwalks.
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