When you're asking for 104 billion dollars...

When you're asking for 104 billion dollars...

... the very first thing you should do is make sure your accounting is perfect. Florida Today reports that:

"...NASA has accomplished just three of 45 recommendations made by the GAO to repair its fiscal management, and has partially completed 13 others.

Unless the problems are resolved, it's certain NASA's moon plan will experience huge cost overruns, just as the International Space Station is at least $15.2 billion over budget.

For that reason, NASA shouldn't expect to get public and political support for the moon plan until it can account for every taxpayer dime."

And from SpaceDaily:

"The lack of reliable, day-to-day information continues to threaten NASA's ability to manage its programs, oversee its contractors and effectively allocate its budget across its numerous projects and programs," said Gregory Kutz of the GAO.

If NASA doesn't pull its collective head out of ... a dark place ... then the agency is liable to wind up in the sights of the Porkbuster movement.

Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter that NASA lost in 1999? A 125 million dollar spacecraft wasted because someone in NASA couldn't convert between English and Metric units. And now it turns out that they can't even do their own accounting, having failed four GAO audits in the last five years.

Mathematics is essential to launching or designing rockets. What good is a space agency that can't do math?

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