A strange and glowing object is circling the Earth. It seems that the person responsible for the loss of a $100,000 orbiting NASA tool bag is an astronaut who lost it during a routine spacewalk. The bag contained two grease guns, a scraper, a trash bag and some wipes.

NASA officials said that the bag cost so much money because space flight is really expensive. Yet, this expense will draw important careful inspection from the new Administration of Barack Obama, the newly elected president of the United States.

NASA has been long known for its incapacity of spending its money properly so Obama’s NASA transition team asked the space agency some 74 questions about the basic spending and cost overruns. The space agency has been filing a “high-risk” list for 20 years because their cost overruns have sometimes reached billions of dollars.

According to the Government Accountability Office, this kind of list applies only for programs which interfere with the effective government and cost billions of dollars every year. NASA agency has been on the list since late 1990.

Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator who was thought to be a possible replacement for Michael Griffin, the current NASA administrator, said that their space program is really going on in an inefficient way and without sufficient explanation for the cost performance. He said that NASA’s science program cost over $5 billion in the last five years.

For example, when NASA started to build the International Space Station in 1988, the orbiting complex reached costs of $23 billion if it had been completed until 1996. Today it costs more than $100 billion and isn’t finished yet.