Contracting projects that go over time and budget are not all that uncommon, but this story out of NASA is next-level. In a new report, NASA Inspector General George A. Scott says the estimate to build a launch tower to accommodate a larger Space Launch System rocket has ballooned from $383 million to a likely final cost of $2.7 billion, reports Space.com. This comes after contractor Bechtel blew past its original 2023 completion date while "barely beginning to cut metal" for the project, per Ars Technica. The new completion date is now September 2027.
At this rate, the Mobile Launcher-2 tower, which will be a little taller than a football field, will cost twice the amount it took to build the Burj Khalifa—the world's tallest structure—standing seven times the height, notes Eric Berger of Ars Technica. The tower's purpose is crucial to Artemis IV, NASA's series of exploratory moon missions. NASA plans to install the first lunar space station during Artemis IV, which requires a larger rocket that Boeing is developing called the Block 1B. This rocket has the capacity to propel 84,000 pounds to the moon, and is set to include the station's International Habitation module. The goal is to set up astronauts to live and work in the space station, dubbed Gateway, paving the way for an eventual mission to Mars.
The report says Bechtel greatly underestimated the labor needed to build ML-2, and ended up clocking 850,000 overtime hours in under two years to attempt to stay on schedule (double their original allocations for overtime). What's more, NASA's contract with Bechtel doesn't give them much leverage in getting them to build the tower faster or cheaper. The Artemis IV mission was scheduled to launch in 2028, but "we project the ML-2 will not be ready to support a launch until spring 2029," the report states. (NASA says a mission to Jupiter is a go for October.)
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