An IG audit has called on NASA to improve control of the “numerous items of historical significance, large and small, that played a vital role in the agency’s achievements,” finding that a significant amount of such property “has been lost, misplaced, or taken by former employees and contractors due to the agency’s lack of adequate procedures.”
“Reclaiming this historic property has proven challenging because of the significant effort required to find the property as well as the agency’s reluctance at times to assert an ownership claim over the items,” a report said.
It said that for example an Air Force historian noticed what he thought was a prototype of the Lunar Rover Vehicle in a residential neighborhood in Alabama and reported it to agency management, which in turn reported it to the IG. The IG then “requested NASA assert ownership of the rover and, if appropriate, make plans to accept it as a donation; however, after waiting more than 4 months for a decision from the agency, the individual sold the rover to a scrap metal company. NASA officials subsequently offered to buy the rover, but the scrap yard owner refused and, realizing its historical value, sold the vehicle at auction for an undisclosed sum.”
In addition, efforts to recover historic property “have been thwarted by NASA’s poor record keeping and a lack of established processes for timely coordination of recovery efforts,” it said citing that as a reason the agency lost possession of an Apollo 11 lunar collection bag that contained lunar dust particles.
It said that NASA has not adequately defined the roles and responsibilities of agency officials responsible for identifying and managing such assets and that procedures to manage such items “are often in conflict with other procedures, are vague, and do not adequately describe the processes intended to identify and preserve the assets.”
In contrast, the IG said, the agency has “strong internal controls” for managing historic real property, some of which it continues to uses and some of which it leases out under the National Historic Preservation Act.