WASHINGTON -- The NASA-led mega-project that is the International Space Station (ISS) has become an out-of-control effort, one that needs an immediate managerial overhaul to assure its productivity and retain its promise of being a world-class orbiting laboratory.

Those are the marching orders for members of a newly formed ISS Management and Cost Evaluation (ICME) Task Force. Meeting at NASA Headquarters on August 20-21, the members of the austere group, including Nobel Prize winners, as well as military and civilian experts from scientific, high-tech, financial, and managerial circles began grappling with a myriad of thorny and head-spinning issues.

Recent revelations point to a $4.8 billion growth in NASA's part of the program. That raises the cost to complete the ISS to a projected $30.1 billion. The escalating number is one that NASA itself, Congress, and other budget-watchers fear will grow. Furthermore, it is now estimated that the outpost will cost on the order of $1.5 billion a year to operate.

Meanwhile, overhead, some 300,000 pounds of ISS hardware now orbits Earth, built by Russia, America, Europe, Japan and Canada. Spacewalkers have chalked up about 135 hours of "outside time", with over 860 hours of spacewalking duties still ahead in order to finish building the ISS.

The White House has sent a signal of worry about the overall health of the ISS project. The Bush Administration has forced NASA to take a hard look at killing portions of the orbiting outpost, a prospect that would likely curb the scientific output of the facility.

International partners in the project have raised concern that the United States may not meet treaty-like obligations to finish the job at hand.

The newly appointed ICME Task Force group is an independent task force, but created by NASA Administrator, Daniel Goldin. The group is taking a focused look at the budget and management challenges facing the ISS effort.

Group members dutifully took notes as NASA managers explained budget authority, obligated funds, billed and unbilled work, program operating plans, cost baselines, liens and threats, offsetting receipts and collections, as well as top-down, bottom-up reviews and uncosted carryovers.

Task force chair, Thomas Young, said the ISS program is being run using methods from the "Dark Ages of program management."

"In this day and time we are enormously better than that," Young said.

"Our NASA people need help," Goldin told the task force.

"We have not been able to accurately predict how much this program is going to cost," Goldin said. While noting that the ISS team is comprised of hardworking and good people, he said that they are working with deficiencies in the management system.

"The object is not to come in as a bunch of gun slingers and criticize. The object is to help these folks figure out how to get a much better cost estimating systemhow to do a much better joband more efficiently manage costs," Goldin said. "They need your help to see things differently," he said.

Goldin said that the loss of the Challenger orbiter in 1986 was an overriding experience that now permeates NASA's human space flight programs. "It caused people to be more overly cautions, which is good. But on the other hand, the question is how much does it have to cost?," he said.

"You just can't equate money with safety. You have to get at the culture. You have to poke and probe," Goldin said. "Every penny we spend on bureaucracy, and every penny we spend on apparent safety -- not real safety -- it's a penny, a quarter, or a dollar that comes out of science," he said.

Regarding the news that cost-growth now plagues NASA's work on the ISS, Goldin said that early warning is very important.

"If you know in advance and have a problem coming, you can resolve it. We got a real big surprise and didn't have an early warning system," Goldin said.

"The purpose of the station is not just to build it", the NASA chief said. "The purpose of the station is to do research."

Goldin said there is a balance that must be struck in building the ISS. On the one hand is safety and science, along with commitments to the international partners. On the other hand, how much does the station cost and what's reasonable and the right thing to do, he said.

Admittedly, Goldin said that the answers are going to be painful and difficult for many to accept. "But in life we have to live with priorities," he said.

"Our people don't want to have a shuttle and station space agency. We want to go to Mars. We want to go to the asteroids. We want to look at the origin and destiny of our universe. We want to see if life is ubiquitous," Goldin said.