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Law360 (April 1, 2021, 9:27 PM EDT) -- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has registered a $3 billion additional cost burden due to challenges posed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, an inspector general's report found Wednesday.
NASA Inspector General Paul K. Martin said that in the face of unprecedented facility closures and project delays, the agency's operations would take a several-billion-dollar hit over the next several years.
"Although NASA managers include schedule margin in program and project plans to address unforeseen circumstances, in many instances the margins were not sufficient to absorb the impact of the pandemic, a public health emergency that continues to rage across the world," Martin said, adding that it would be impossible to determine the full fiscal impact to the agency until the pandemic is over.
Many of the programmatic delays were still not reflected in the $3 billion figure, even if the delays had serious impacts on NASA projects, because they did not result in a hit to the agency's budget.
Martin said that by April of last year, 90% of NASA personnel were working from home and two-thirds of the agency's major facilities were closed. These constraints were cited as significant contributors to the fiscal consequences felt by the agency.
Of the total estimated impact, $1.6 billion comes from NASA's 30 major programs and projects, Martin said. One such project, the James Webb Space Telescope, was rated as enduring a "significant" impact because of COVID-19.
According to the report, the pandemic caused NASA officials to delay the telescope's launch by seven months, racking up an additional cost of $100 million.
The agency's Space Launch System, a launch vehicle responsible for sending astronauts and cargo into outer space, is expected to take an even larger hit, facing added costs of $8 million in the 2020 fiscal year and $355 million over the following three fiscal years.
Martin said that the launch system experienced serious impacts associated with the pandemic, such as facility shutdowns that delayed testing and software development.
The launch system, the James Webb telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope together account for 53% of the pandemic's added fiscal impact on NASA's major programs.
"Due to the continued uncertainties around the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA will likely continue to experience impacts to its major programs and projects," the report said. "While we did not make any formal recommendations, we encouraged the [Office of the Chief Financial Officer] to continue collecting accurate and comprehensive information to fully quantify the pandemic's impact."
In response to the report, NASA's acting chief financial officer told the inspector general that the coronavirus pandemic was an unprecedented event and that the agency would likely not have a full accounting of the budgetary impacts until operations return to normal.
"As acting Administrator Steve Jurczyk recently noted, NASA and its partners have made 'extraordinary things happen under extraordinary circumstances,'" Stephen Shinn, the financial officer, said. "The challenges of NASA's missions have been exceeded only by the resiliency of our technical and programmatic processes and the commitment of our people."
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for NASA pointed Law360 to the agency's statement in the report.
--Editing by Peter Rozovsky.
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