In a major space policy address on January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush announced his “Vision for U.S. Space Exploration” (Vision) and directed NASA to retire the SSP after completing construction of the International Space Station in 2010 and focus its future human space exploration activities on a return to the Moon as a prelude to future human missions to Mars and beyond. As part of the Vision, NASA is developing new vehicles under the Constellation program, with an initial operational capability currently scheduled for 2015. In order to accelerate development and minimize development costs, NASA elected to pursue shuttle-derived options and the use of heritage systems for the new systems. The agency also found that shuttle-derived options are more affordable, safe, and reliable and provide the use, in some instances, of existing personnel, infrastructure, manufacturing and processing facilities, transportation elements, and heritage system hardware. NASA will transfer whatever real (land, buildings, and facilities) and personal (e.g., system hardware, tools, plant equipment) property is practical given program requirements to Constellation and other programs to offset the need for new acquisitions. Transferring property provides NASA with distinct financial benefits. First, the receiving program avoids the cost of acquiring the needed property. Second, the SSP avoids the costs associated with disposing of the property. The SSP and its contractors are currently conducting transition property assessments (TPA) of property belonging to the SSP in two phases. In Phase 1 the agency is identifying existing SSP personal property and determining property category, item status, availability date, and whether the property should be transferred or declared excess. This process is ongoing and continues to identify SSP property. For example, as of May 2007 NASA had identified about 1 million line items of SSP personal property. By May 2008 this number had increased to about 1.2 million line items. During Phase 2 of the TPA process, the agency is developing detailed plans for disposing of excess SSP personal property including identifying hazardous materials, cataloging recoverable precious metals, providing historical artifact justification, and identifying final destinations. Based on discussions between the Space Shuttle and Constellation programs, it is estimated that about 40 to 47 percent of SSP personal property will be transferred to Constellation and other NASA programs and the remaining property will be declared excess. NASA has yet to include an official estimate of the total cost of the SSP transition and retirement in any of its budget requests. Although NASA has developed a series of cost estimates for it—ranging from the $4.4 billion reported by the NASA Inspector General in January 2007, to the approximately $1.8 billion estimate prepared by the agency to support its fiscal year 2009 budget request—and has been funding SSP transition and retirement activities out of its approved Shuttle budget, the agency has not included any of the estimates for fiscal years 2011 and beyond in its budget requests to the Congress. NASA transition managers maintain that NASA made a strategic decision not to release an estimate of transition and retirement costs for fiscal years 2011 and later until the scope of the effort and the associated costs and schedule were better defined. According to NASA transition managers, the agency has now accomplished this better definition and plans to include an estimate substantially lower than the earlier $1.8 billion estimate for the total cost of SSP transition and retirement in its fiscal year 2010 budget request. We have previously reported on NASA’s management of the billions of dollars of government equipment under its control. We found weaknesses in the design and operation of NASA’s systems, processes, and policies covering the control and accountability of equipment. We made recommendations that focused on ways to strengthen NASA’s internal control environment and improve its property management. NASA faces disparate challenges defining the scope and costs of SSP transition and retirement activities. The Constellation program is finalizing the requirements that will inform the SSP of what real and personal property needs to be retained and what should be declared excess. Furthermore, the property assessments needed to inform NASA’s budget planning process may not be completed in time to support the cost estimates the agency plans to include in its fiscal year 2010 budget request. In addition, NASA faces other challenges that further hamper the agency’s efforts to develop firm estimates of SSP transition and retirement scope and cost, including finalizing plans for safing artifacts. The Constellation program is still finalizing its requirements and defining needed capabilities; therefore, the agency does not know, in all instances, what SSP property needs to be retained and what property can be declared excess. According to SSP and Constellation transition managers, there is a symbiotic push and pull relationship between the SSP and the Constellation program. Ideally, in this relationship the SSP would push the property that it no longer needs for the safe operation of the space shuttle to the Constellation program in order to avoid property maintenance and/or disposal costs. Likewise, in order to avoid acquisition costs, the Constellation program would pull the SSP property that it has designated as needed. Thus far, however, this relationship has not worked as well as the agency has desired. Essentially, the Constellation program has not finalized its requirements for personal and real property from the SSP because it is still in the process of defining its own programmatic requirements. For example, at the time of our review, the Constellation program had yet to hold its Preliminary Design Review during which it will finalize its preliminary design and operations concepts, two key steps in determining the Constellation program’s hardware and processing facility needs. Further, according to the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Transition Manager, the Constellation program is just now realizing the importance of “pulling” SSP assets to avoid costs, as any and all of the SSP transition and retirement costs post-2010 will be borne by NASA at the expense of the follow-on program(s) or Center Management and Operations budgets. NASA will not complete the last phase of the TPA process until after the agency’s budget request for fiscal year 2010 is submitted and may not complete all TPA activity until the end of fiscal year 2009. NASA plans to complete Phase 1 of the TPA process by the end of September 2008. However, delays in finalizing system designs within the Constellation program are hampering the efforts of the Solid Rocket Booster element of the SSP to complete Phase 1 on time. In effect, Phase 2 of the TPA process will develop the type of detailed information needed to support accurate SSP transition and retirement cost estimates. The TPA Phase 2 process, however, is not scheduled for completion until January 2009—well after the fiscal year 2010 budget request is formulated. Furthermore, the Space Shuttle Main Engine does not anticipate completing TPA Phase 2 until August 2009, well after the budget request is submitted to Congress. NASA faces other challenges that further hamper the agency’s efforts to define the scope and cost of SSP transition and retirement. In addition to the issues discussed above, NASA has not yet developed final plans and/or cost estimates for safing artifacts, including the orbiters Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour. Moreover, the SSP lacks a centralized information system to track and control all SSP property. A centralized system would be particularly useful as transition and retirement activities are expected to rapidly increase in 2010. These and other challenges are summarized in table 1 below. All of these challenges further hamper NASA’s efforts to develop firm estimates of SSP transition and retirement scope and cost. Lastly, at the time NASA will be experiencing an increase in transition activity, it will simultaneously be finalizing the designs for the Ares I and Orion vehicles and conducting potentially the most complicated sequence of shuttle flights ever attempted—completing the International Space Station and conducting a fifth servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope all by the end of 2010. These activities will likely create additional challenges for the transition efforts, as they may require more attention than anticipated from the workforce as well as more resources should unexpected problems occur. SSP transition and retirement costs are not transparent in NASA’s current budget request and are not expected to be fully reflected in its 2010 request. This is partly due to challenges and delays in finalizing cost estimates as described above as well as where costs are being reflected in the budget. Specifically, in laying out its plans for SSP transition and retirement, NASA elected to capture transition and retirement costs within its existing budget structure rather than display them separately. Consequently, the costs of the SSP transition and retirement are dispersed throughout NASA’s budget request. SSP’s direct transition and retirement costs are included in the SSP budget line. The Cross-Agency Support portion of NASA’s budget, however, includes funding for significant SSP transition and retirement activities that NASA considers indirect costs, including environmental compliance and remediation and demolition of excess facilities. These funds, however, are not identified as SSP transition and retirement costs and it is not easy to discern that they are transition related. Furthermore, NASA plans to offset some transition costs by utilizing an exchange/sale authority that allows federal agencies to exchange or sell non-excess, non-surplus personal property and apply the proceeds toward acquiring similar replacement property. The SSP budget request for fiscal year 2009 identifies a funding need of about $370 million for transition and retirement through fiscal year 2010 to pay for activities within each of the SSP’s three major projects—flight and ground operations, flight hardware, and program integration (see table 2). NASA will use these funds to cover the costs of the prime contractor, SSP personnel, and support contractors working on transition and retirement activities. These activities, however, do not represent the full scope of SSP transition and retirement. The Cross-Agency Support appropriation account within NASA’s budget includes or will include funding for significant SSP transition and retirement activities.