Sure, but when we’re talking about NASA the context is quite different from random software “engineering” projects, or even random traditional engineering projects. For NASA cost overruns don’t usually seem to lead to cases of sunk cost fallacy, and their infamous late-90s attempt at “better, faster, cheaper” rather ended up demonstrating how you can have any two of those three, and arguably, in the case of “never done before” flagship projects, only one of them.

It is still true though that many times bad planning and management has been at least a partial cause of cost/schedule overrund at NASA, and they’ve received well-justified criticism for it from both internal and external auditors.

The phoenix project is going entirely according to plan, from the point of view of IBM/PeopleSoft.