GAO report blasts NASA spending.

This week auditors found that on nine projects alone NASA is nearly $1.1 billion over-cost estimates that were set in the last two years. Still, the new stimulas package gives NASA $1 billion for climate-watching satellites and exploration, among other things. In a statement, NASA said its missions "are one-of-a-kind and complex, which always makes estimating challenging. ... We do believe NASA is a good investment of federal funds and strive to provide the best value."
A second GAO report used NASA as one of its leading poster children for bad practices in estimating costs. The space agency has a budget of about $18 billion, needs "a more disciplined approach" to its projects, the GAO (Government Accounting Office) said.

The auditors did not mention the total cost and cost increases of these nine projects. That grand
total is $7,815,200,000.00. Plus the complete loss due to equipment failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory on February 24, 2009, this satellitte was launched to study global warming. The loss of this satellite was $311 million. The next project Glory, slated to track global warming is scheduled to launch in June, 2009. Do not be surprised if this mission also fails to either equipment failure or technology problems on the satellite. All the projects and missions that have been scheduled by NASA to track global warming in the past ten years have not succeeded. The reason is that they will expose themselves and the other forty five space agencies as the real culprits that are causing global warming, climatic weather disasters and ozone depletion. The auditors claimed that NASA was a good investment (over $7.8 billion dollars). This same investment could have saved both Social Security and Medicare programs.