NASA expects to spend $6 billion on a rocket that's six years late.

The Space Launch System rocket, which is anticipated to be the means of transportation astronauts would use to get to the Moon, has been the subject of a fresh audit by NASA's Inspector General.

The audit estimates that by the end of 2025, NASA would have spent up to $93 billion on the Artemis Moon mission, $22 billion of which will have gone into the building of the Space Launch System rocket (SLS). Notably, the audit claims that the extra expense may be put down to development roadblocks and errors that resulted in a six-year delay for the SLS rocket. The NASA audit also shows that the space agency anticipates a rise in both of these expenses and the SLS timetable.

Poor design assumptions are to blame for the schedule delays and assembly costs that have already increased NASA's budget for the Artemis Moon program by more than $6 billion due to the development of the SLS rocket, according to the audit. reuse of space shuttle launch engine recoveries. Each launch of the SLS rocket requires four RS-25 engines, which are either completely or completely destroyed following launch.

These increases are brought on by connected problems, such as expectations that using legacy systems from the Space Shuttle and Constellation programs will save a lot of money and time in comparison to creating brand-new systems for the SLS. The complexity of creating, improving, and integrating new systems with old components, however, proved to be far more than anticipated, according to the audit.

NASA will switch to the RS-25E engines, which are anticipated to be 30% less expensive and 11% more powerful, once it has exhausted the 16 recovered RS-25 engines. According to the Inspector General's report, the space agency underestimated how difficult it would be to construct, update, and integrate new systems with old components, which resulted in a very significant budget gap for the Artemis Moon mission.

Additionally, the audit reveals that the usage of "cost plus," which permits contractors to raise the cost of component development, is to blame for these escalating prices. A transition to fixed-price contracts is advised by the NASA audit. With a 5-year development delay, the recall contract's budget and timeline increased significantly, increasing from $2.5 billion when the Artemis program was first announced to $4.4 billion.

"$6 billion in cost increases and more than six years of schedule delays from NASA's original projections," the report said.

For those unaware, the Artemis program was originally based on the Constellation program, which planned to bring astronauts back to the surface of the Moon by 2020. However, this program was terminated by the administration. Obama, which sparked widespread criticism of the thousands of jobs that were no longer guaranteed.

Will we return to the Moon? While the SLS rocket suffers from a development delay, there is another option - SpaceX's Starship rocket. However, Starship exploded shortly after its first orbital launch attempt, and although SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says another launch should take place in just a few months, there are hurdles that the company will have to cross before seeing Starship in flight again.