The EELV program currently faces uncertainties in the reliability of the vehicles used to launch military and other government spacecraft as well as its budget for future years and in the merger of its two principal suppliers. Taken together, these unknowns require careful monitoring and oversight to ensure a fairly long track record of launch successes can continue.

• Though the program has had 21 successful operational launches, no single configuration from either family of launch vehicles has been launched enough times to demonstrate production process reliability. The ULA transition may also influence the demonstration of vehicle reliability because ULA plans to relocate production activities and may alter manufacturing processes.

• The consolidation of Boeing and Lockheed into ULA—a massive undertaking that seeks to combine two distinct corporate cultures, and consolidate launch infrastructure and business operations from five locations across the country to two—poses a variety of other cost, schedule, and performance uncertainties and risks.

• DOD does not know whether its EELV program budget is sufficient to manage the program in the short term because the Air Force reduced the EELV program budget to incorporate anticipated savings from the ULA transition, even though savings estimates were based on preliminary data.

PDF report and highlights of the findings are attached to this posting.