NASA’s Office of Inspector General listed 100 open audit recommendations in its October 2026 status report, covering spacecraft safety, communications infrastructure, scientific-data management, procurement, and agency operations. The open recommendations report records their status as of October 15, 2026, and connects each action to its originating audit and responsible NASA office.
The total represents recommendations from earlier audits. An open recommendation can involve work already underway: the inspector general explains that closure requires full implementation. The register is a dated snapshot, so subsequent corrective actions can change individual entries. Its purpose is to show which actions still required completion at the reporting cutoff.
Crew Safety and Exploration Hardware
One entry originates in a November 2019 audit of NASA’s management of crew transportation to the International Space Station. It calls for correcting identified safety-critical technical issues, including parachute and propulsion testing, before crewed test flights. The October register preserves that original recommendation and identifies it as open at the cutoff; it does not provide a new flight-readiness assessment.
A separate recommendation from a July 2020 Orion audit addresses production sequencing. It calls for aligning production schedules for Artemis IV and V with the successful demonstration of Artemis II to reduce rework-related delays. The underlying management issue is the relationship between flight testing and manufacturing: findings from a demonstration can affect hardware already being built for later missions.
The register also retains a recommendation from a November 2021 audit of low Earth orbit operations. That action concerns identifying and mitigating risks associated with cracks and leaks in the International Space Station’s Service Module Transfer Tunnel before agreeing to a station life extension. The entry describes the corrective action originally requested, rather than supplying a fresh engineering analysis of the leaks.
Communications Capacity and Scientific Data
Three listed recommendations come from the July 2023 audit of NASA’s Deep Space Network. They address more efficient scheduling, completion of remaining antennas and transmitters under the network’s enhancement project, and international agreements and clearances for remaining 80-kilowatt transmitters.
The scheduling recommendation proposes an accessible list of network users ranked by priority and updated in real time. This is a specific coordination measure for allocating communications resources among missions. The hardware recommendations separately address construction, installation permissions, and oversight at project sites.
These entries show how an audit can produce several distinct implementation tasks for one system. New Space Economy’s review of NASA audit reports provides background on the network-capacity issues examined in the original audit.
Scientific-data infrastructure appears elsewhere in the register. A recommendation from a March 2020 audit asks NASA to independently assess the long-term financial sustainability of moving data services to the cloud while continuing to operate its existing Distributed Active Archive Centers. The requested analysis covers the combined costs of migration, cloud operations, and the continuing archive network.
Other data-related actions concern completing an inventory of agency geospatial information and coordinating scientific-data retention requirements with the National Archives and Records Administration. Recommendations involving high-end computing address cybersecurity oversight, identification of computing assets, and documentation of data classifications and export-control categories.
Procurement, Facilities, and Program Management
The October report includes actions aimed at bringing property-management expertise into exploration programs earlier. An August 2025 audit recommendation calls for logistics representatives to support programs and projects from the start of contracts. Another asks NASA to review Artemis contracts whose contractor-held property management has not been delegated to the Defense Contract Management Agency, examining whether existing delegations could consolidate administration.
Facilities recommendations address how NASA records and responds to weather-related vulnerabilities. They call for entering relevant findings from center resilience assessments into the agency’s infrastructure risk database and incorporating those assessments into center master plans. These actions connect site-level assessments with agency planning and investment decisions.
The register also includes a recommendation to investigate alternative supply-chain management strategies for extravehicular activity spacesuits. In science management, a Dragonfly-related entry asks NASA to communicate changes in the expected scope and cadence of future New Frontiers missions to the research community.
Each row supplies an audit date, report identifier, recommendation number, requested action, and responsible office. Those fields make the document usable for following a particular corrective action from its original audit through later status reports. NASA’s monthly recommendation downloads provide the subsequent records needed to establish whether that action remains open or has been completed.
