(The Center Square) – NASA has not provided a single total cost estimate for its Moon-to-Mars effort, a federal auditor told The Center Square, because the agency does not maintain one.
The Center Square asked NASA for that figure on June 25, again on July 1 and again on Oct. 1. The agency has not provided one.
Asked whether NASA maintains a single top-line estimate for the program, William Russell, a Government Accountability Office director who manages the watchdog's NASA audits, said it does not.
"No, that's not how they do it, and that's along the lines of what we're looking for," Russell told The Center Square.
NASA tracks costs project by project, Russell said, and publishes life-cycle estimates for individual pieces of hardware. What it does not produce is a figure that pulls them together. Visibility also drops once a project leaves development and moves into operations. Orion, the crew capsule, completed development after the Artemis II flight in April.
"The costs become more opaque after it leaves development," Russell told The Center Square. "You can try to add up what you know about the individual projects, but it's hard to track. If someone asked, how much did it cost to do Artemis Three or Artemis Four, it's difficult to put a number on that."
NASA targets the first Artemis lunar landing for 2028, on Artemis IV.
NASA's inspector general reached the same conclusion about the agency's accounting. There "are no comprehensive cost estimates that account for all components and aspects of each Artemis mission," the watchdog wrote in its annual report on the agency's top management challenges, released in January.
The inspector general previously estimated the scale of the effort. "In 2021, we estimated NASA would spend $93 billion on the Artemis effort by FY 2025," the January report said. "Now at the conclusion of FY 2025, years of additional and substantial funding will be required before NASA achieves its next successful lunar landing."
That 2021 projection works out to about $720 for each of the nation's 129.2 million households, a figure the Census Bureau reported for 2020 through 2024. NASA has not published a final accounting of what it actually spent over that period.
NASA has told the inspector general it does not intend to adopt flight-specific cost estimates for Artemis missions.
In a written response dated Jan. 2, Administrator Jared Isaacman said that approach "does not reflect the Agency's integrated program design or cost accounting practices, which capture individual element costs during Phase E, Operations and Sustainment."
"Applying a flight-by-flight benchmark would misrepresent the program's structure and management decisions previously communicated by the Agency," Isaacman wrote.
NASA did not cite that position in response to questions from The Center Square. The agency responded Thursday with a statement that contained no cost figures and no timeline.
"NASA appreciates the GAO's work and the recent letter highlighting high-priority open recommendations for the agency," NASA spokesperson Rachel Kraft said.
The agency has made "significant progress streamlining its mission priorities, tightening decision-making, and strengthened core technical capabilities," she said, and is "simplifying policies and processes so teams can focus on delivering missions, not navigating paperwork."
"We take the GAO's recommendations seriously and appreciate the opportunity to revisit them," Kraft said.
NASA has not implemented any priority recommendation since GAO's August 2025 letter, the watchdog wrote to Isaacman on Aug. 12. NASA has 46 open GAO recommendations, four of them designated priority.
The agency implemented 72% of recommendations GAO made five years ago, against 77% government-wide. GAO highlighted three areas warranting timely and focused attention: monitoring program costs, managing cybersecurity risks and using federal contracting metrics. Two of them, program costs and cybersecurity, are on GAO's High Risk List. On the third, GAO recommended in July 2021 that NASA adopt a balanced set of performance metrics to manage procurement, which the watchdog said would "position NASA to make more informed management decisions and potentially save millions of dollars."
At the mission level, GAO wrote, NASA "has not taken steps to create a life-cycle cost estimate for the Artemis III mission, which was planned to be the program's first lunar landing, as we recommended in December 2019." GAO tied that to the landing now set for 2028. "A life-cycle cost estimate would provide transparency into the cost of the programs necessary to execute the mission," the letter said.
"While they have individual costs for particular parts of the mission, pulling it together to see how much does it cost to pull off the mission, so that you can compare that over time," Russell said. "That level of transparency, providing that to Congress, is what we're looking for."
A separate GAO report issued July 23 found that cumulative cost overruns across NASA's 18 major projects in development grew from $4.4 billion to nearly $4.7 billion between 2025 and 2026, with Orion accounting for almost three-quarters of the cumulative total. Cumulative schedule delays across the portfolio reached 14 years.
The four Artemis systems NASA canceled or repurposed this year saw their combined current contract value grow from nearly $2.8 billion to $5.9 billion, according to a June inspector general memorandum. That is about $46 for each American household, though contract value is not the same as money NASA has actually paid. Boeing held the contract for the Exploration Upper Stage, Bechtel National for Mobile Launcher 2, Dynetics for the Universal Stage Adapter and Northrop Grumman for the Gateway Habitation and Logistics Outpost.
NASA has given the watchdog a deadline on at least one item. Russell said NASA plans to better track and report Space Launch System costs by the end of calendar year 2026.
Tracking is also unresolved for hardware NASA is moving from its canceled Gateway station to the lunar surface base, Russell said. GAO wants those costs captured against the new effort.
"Versus just coming up with a different number for the moon base," he said. "We're just waiting to see how that works out."
Northrop Grumman's Gateway Habitation and Logistics Outpost was under a contract that grew from $187 million in 2019 to $1.9 billion by the time NASA issued a stop work order in April, according to the June memorandum. The inspector general reported NASA was still evaluating whether the module could be repurposed for the lunar surface.
NASA described the lunar base in March as a roughly $20 billion effort over seven years. That figure covers the base alone, not the broader Moon-to-Mars program, and NASA has not updated it.
GAO has designated NASA acquisition management a high-risk area for more than 30 years.
The agency's funding for fiscal 2027 remains unsettled. A Senate authorization bill scored by the Congressional Budget Office on July 8 would authorize about $25.3 billion. Authorization bills authorize appropriations but do not provide funding. The Senate Commerce Committee approved the measure in March, but it has not advanced since.
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