NOC Northrop Grumman Corp Holding Co

By Andy Pasztor 

Launch of NASA's troubled James Webb space telescope will be delayed another year to March 2021 and development costs will climb 10% above revised targets announced just three months ago, creating further congressional turmoil for the agency's top astronomy project.

The further slips and an estimated price tag of $8.8 billion were announced Wednesday, including projections that mistakes by production employees of prime contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. will amount to a $600 million hit to the program. The findings were included in the report of an independent review board previously set up by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to study the project and recommend a way forward.

The review reiterated that a series of design, production and quality-control lapses caused the latest difficulties, many of which could have been avoided or solved by "simple fixes that were not implemented," according to Thomas Young, a retired NASA and industry official who headed the outside panel. But despite nagging problems that reappeared years after lawmakers added funding for the high-profile project and NASA managers significantly pushed back the anticipated launch date at least twice before, Mr. Young told reporters his group unanimously agreed the ambitious space telescope should be completed in light of "the compelling science" it promised.

In his remarks Wednesday, Mr. Young said that as recently as March, when NASA delayed the projected launch date to May 2020 from June 2019, "too much optimism had been built into the schedule." He also told reporters "I don't think anybody can tell us today" whether further problems will crop up to prompt additional delays.

Originally slated to be launched in 2007, the space telescope is intended to travel farther into space that any previous observatory to try to study origins of stars and potentially identify other planets capable of supporting life.

Mr. Young said he had 80% confidence that the latest schedule and cost estimates will be met. For James Webb to continue, lawmakers will have to approve the new cost ceiling, which exceeds a firm congressionally imposed cap of $8 billion in place since 2011.

The project's initial price tag was pegged at less than $3.5 billion. Now, NASA's overall budget is expected to remain flat, but the updated cost estimate for development and the first five years of operation of James Webb is projected to balloon to some $9.6 billion. As a result, the agency faces the tough task of finding extra funds for the space telescope in coming years, partly by potentially shifting dollars from other NASA programs.

Before the press conference, a NASA public affairs official said James Bridenstine, the agency's chief, had sent a message to employees expressing his "unwavering support" for the space telescope.

Northrop Grumman, which previously revamped its production procedures and agreed to strict new government oversight requirements, has been criticized because workers installed 16 valves on the satellite's thrusters without relying on detailed instructions and in the process used the wrong cleaning compound.

Resulting leaks required a subcontractor to refurbish the valves, followed by another time-consuming process to replace and retest them. It took about three months to complete the process, one person familiar with the details said.

When workers deployed a sun shield designed to protect the spacecraft's intricate gold, hexagonal-shaped mirrors in space, the operation took twice as long as expected and revealed shortcomings despite earlier successful tests with a one-third-scale replica.

Cables that pull the shield into shape "develop too much slack during the deployment, creating a snagging hazard," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for unmanned missions, said earlier this year.

Several tears also appeared in the shield, because of unexpected stresses stemming from workers' incorrectly attaching hooks and cables to the wrong holes. Several of those fasteners still haven't been retrieved, NASA officials said Wednesday.

In a release, Mr. Bridenstine said the telescope is vital to future astrophysics research -- beyond the current Hubble Space Telescope -- to enable scientists to do amazing things "we've never been able to do before," such as "peer into other galaxies and see light from the very dawn of time." The review board's 30 recommendations already have been implemented or NASA is in the process of devising plans to implement them, agency officials said.

Major company and agency missteps identified in the 60-page report were disclosed previously, but the document provides an unvarnished glimpse of morale problems among production workers, "lapses in individual accountability" affecting the larger workforce and test failures after which mitigation efforts "were not successfully completed." The review board, among other things, faulted "the current management concept and reporting structure" as "complex, confusing and inefficient." Calling the space telescope "the most complex system" NASA's science mission division "has ever built," reviewers said "mission risk inherent in the complexity...cannot be underestimated and should be communicated clearly" inside and outside NASA.

Mr. Young's team of experts also recommended enhancing testing, improving the fidelity of simulators and ensuring continuity of oversight by the same engineers throughout design, fabrication and testing of parts.

Write to Andy Pasztor at andy.pasztor@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 27, 2018 19:21 ET (23:21 GMT)

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