This year the space shuttle is scheduled to fly its final six missions to deliver hardware, supplies, and an international scientific laboratory to the International Space Station. NASA officials remain confident that the current flight manifest can be accomplished within the given time, and add that should delays occur, the International Space Station can still function. According to NASA, there are trade-offs the agency can make in what it can take up to support and sustain the station. However, failure to complete assembly as currently planned would further reduce the station’s ability to fulfill its research objectives and deprive the station of critical spare parts that only the shuttle can deliver. The recent review completed by the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee included the option of flying the space shuttle through 2011 in order to complete the International Space Station. However, the Committee noted that there are currently no funds in NASA’s budget for additional shuttle flights. Most recently, the Administration is proposing over $600 million in the fiscal year 2011 budget to ensure that the space shuttle can fly its final missions, in case the space shuttle’s schedule slips into fiscal year 2011. Retirement of the shuttle will involve many activities that warrant special attention. These include: disposing of the facilities that no longer are needed while complying with federal, state, and local environmental laws and regulations; ensuring the retention of critical skills within NASA’s workforce and its suppliers; and disposing of over 1 million equipment items. In addition, the total cost of shuttle retirement and transition—to include the disposition of the orbiters themselves—is not readily transparent in NASA’s budget. We have recommended that NASA clearly identify all direct and indirect shuttle transition and retirement costs, including any potential sale proceeds of excess inventory and environmental remediation costs in its future budget requests. NASA provided this information to the House and Senate Appropriations committees in July 2009 but did not identify all indirect shuttle transition and retirement costs in its fiscal year 2010 budget request. We look forward to examining the fiscal year 2011 budget request to determine whether this information is identified. Lastly, NASA has recognized that sustaining the shuttle workforce through the retirement of the shuttle while ensuring that a viable workforce is available to support future activities is a major challenge. We commend NASA for its efforts to understand and mitigate the effect of the space shuttle’s retirement on the civil service and contractor workforce. Nevertheless, how well NASA executes its workforce management plans as they retire the space shuttle will affect the agency’s ability to maintain the skilled workforce to support space exploration. Although it is nearing completion, the International Space Station faces several significant challenges that may impede efforts to maximize utilization of research facilities available onboard. These include: the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the loss of its unmatched capacity to move cargo and astronauts to and from the station; the uncertain future for the station beyond 2015; and the limited time available for research due to competing demands for the crew’s time. We have previously reported that the International Space Station will face a significant cargo supply shortfall without the Space Shuttle’s great capacity to deliver cargo to the station and return it to earth. NASA plans on using a mixed fleet of vehicles, including those developed by international partners, to service the space station on an interim basis. However, international partners’ vehicles alone cannot fully satisfy the space station’s cargo resupply needs. Without a domestic cargo resupply capability to augment this mixed fleet approach, NASA faces a 40 metric ton (approximately 88,000 pounds) cargo resupply shortfall between 2010 and 2015. While NASA is sponsoring commercial efforts to develop vehicles capable of carrying cargo to the station and the administration has endorsed this approach, none of those currently in development has been launched into orbit, and the vehicles’ aggressive development schedules leave little room for the unexpected. Furthermore, upon completion of construction, unless the decision is made to extend station operations, NASA has only 5 years to execute a robust research program before the International Space Station is deorbited. The leaves little time to establish a strong utilization program. At present, NASA projects that its share of the International Space Station research facilities will be less than fully utilized by planned NASA research. Specifically, NASA plans to utilize only 48 percent of the racks that accommodate scientific research facilities onboard, with the remainder available for use by others. Congress has directed NASA to take all necessary steps to ensure that the International Space Station remains a viable and productive facility capable of potential utilization through at least 2020. The Administration is proposing in its fiscal year 2011 budget to extend operations of the International Space Station to 2020 or beyond in concert with its international partners. Lastly, NASA faces a significant constraint for science on board the space station because of limited crew time. There can only be six crew members aboard the station at one time due to the number of spaces available in the “lifeboats,” or docked spacecraft that can transport the crew in case of an emergency. As such, crew time cannot presently be increased to meet increased demand. Though available crew time may increase as the six- person crew becomes more experienced with operating the space station efficiently or if the crew volunteers its free time for research, crew time for U.S. research remains a limiting factor. According to NASA officials, potential National Laboratory researchers should design their experiments to be as automated as possible or minimize crew involvement required for their experiments to ensure that they are accepted for flight. We have recommended that NASA implement actions, such as developing a plan to broaden and enhance ongoing outreach to potential users and creating a centralized body to oversee U.S. space station research decision making, including the selection of all U.S. research to be conducted on board and ensuring that all U.S. International Space Station National Laboratory research is meritorious and valid. NASA concurred with our recommendation and is researching the possibility of developing a management body to manage space station research, which would make the International Space Station National Laboratory similar to other national laboratories. NASA projects have produced ground-breaking research and advanced our understanding of the universe. However, one common theme binds most of the projects—they cost more and take longer to develop than planned. As we reported in our recently completed assessment of NASA’s 19 most costly projects—which have a combined life-cycle cost that exceeds $66 billion—the agency’s projects continue to experience cost growth and schedule delays. Ten of the 19 projects, which had there baselines set within the last 3 years, experienced cost growth averaging $121.1 million or 18.7 percent and the average schedule growth was 15 months. For example, the Glory project has recently breached its revised schedule baseline by 16 months and exceeded its development cost baseline by over 14 percent—for a total development cost growth of over 75 percent in just 2 years. Project officials also indicated that recent technical problems could cause additional cost growth. Similarly, the Mars Science Laboratory project is currently seeking reauthorization from Congress after experiencing development cost growth in excess of 30 percent. Many of the other projects we reviewed experienced challenges, including developing new or retrofitting older technologies, stabilizing engineering designs, and managing the performance of contractors and development partners. Our work has consistently shown that reducing these kinds of problems in acquisition programs hinges on developing a sound business case for each project. Such a business case provides for early recognition of challenges, allows managers to take corrective action, and places needed and justifiable projects in a better position to succeed. Product development efforts that have not followed a knowledge-based business case approach have frequently suffered poor cost, schedule, and performance outcomes. A sound business case includes development of firm requirements, mature technologies, a preliminary design, a realistic cost estimate, and sound estimates of available funding and time needed before the projects proceed beyond preliminary design review. If necessary, the project should be delayed until a sound business case, demonstrating the project’s readiness to move forward into product development, is in hand. In particular, two of NASA’s largest projects—Ares I and Orion, which are part of NASA’s Constellation program to return to the moon—face considerable technical, design, and production challenges. NASA is actively addressing these challenges. Both projects, however, still face considerable hurdles to meeting overarching safety and performance requirements, including limiting vibration during launch, mitigating the risk of hitting the launch tower during liftoff, and reducing the mass of the Orion vehicle. In addition, we found that the Constellation program, from the onset, has faced a mismatch between funding and program needs. This finding was reinforced by the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight Plans Committee, which reported that NASA’s plans for the Constellation program to return to the moon by 2020 are unexecutable without increases to NASA’s current budget. To its credit, NASA has acknowledged that the Constellation program, for example, faces knowledge gaps concerning requirements, technologies, funding, schedule, and other resources. NASA stated that it is working to close these gaps and at the preliminary design review the program will be required to demonstrate that the program and its projects meet all system requirements with acceptable risk and within cost and schedule constraints, and that the program has established a sound business case for proceeding into the implementation phase. Even though NASA has made progress in developing the actual vehicles, the mismatch between resources and requirements remains and the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget leaves the future of the program in question. NASA has continually struggled to put its financial house in order. GAO and others have reported for years on these efforts. In fact, GAO has made a number of recommendations to address NASA’s financial management challenges. Moreover, the NASA Inspector General has identified financial management as one of NASA’s most serious challeng In a November 2008 report, the Inspector General found continuing weaknesses in NASA’s financial management process and systems, including internal controls over property accounting. It noted that these deficiencies have resulted in disclaimed audits of NASA’s financial statements since fiscal year 2003.