James Webb Space Delescope Dead?

[777]

Why does science always end up getting the short straw?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/science/07webb.html?_r=1

The House Appropriations Committee proposed Wednesday to kill the James Webb Space Telescope, the crown jewel of NASA’s astronomy plans for the next two decades.

The telescope, named after a former administrator of NASA, is the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and it was designed to study the first stars and galaxies that emerged in the first hundred million years or so after the Big Bang.
It was supposed to be launched in 2014, but NASA said last year that the project would require at least an additional $1.6 billion and several more years to finish, because of mismanagement.
Just last week, NASA announced that it had finished polishing all the segments of the telescope’s mirror, which is 6.5 meters in diameter, but the agency has still not announced a new plan for testing and launching the telescope.
The announcement of the telescope’s potential demise came as part of a draft budget for NASA and other agencies, including the Commerce and Justice Departments. In all, the committee proposed lopping $1.6 billion off NASA’s current budget, which is $18.4 billion for 2011. The Obama administration had originally requested $18.7 billion for NASA.
Astronomers reacted with immediate dismay, fearing that the death of the Webb telescope could have the same dire impact on American astronomy that killing the Superconducting Supercollider, a giant particle accelerator in Texas, did in 1993 for American physics, sending leadership abroad.
Canceling the Webb telescope would “have a profound impact on astrophysics far into the future, threatening U.S. leadership in space science,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which would run the new telescope. “This is particularly disappointing at a time when the nation is struggling to inspire students to take up science and engineering,” he added.
Tod R. Lauer, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, echoed his view. “This would be an unmitigated disaster for cosmology,” he said. “After two decades of pushing the Hubble to its limits, which has revolutionized astronomy, the next step would be to pack up and give up. The Hubble is just good enough to see what we’re missing at the start of time.”
The Webb telescope, he said, “would bring it home in full living color.”
The Appropriation Committee’s proposal was the opening act in what is likely to be a long political drama, in which the Senate will eventually have a say. The measure is expected to be approved Thursday by the subcommittee in charge of NASA and the other agencies, according to Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.
Next Wednesday the full Appropriations Committee will meet again to consider the final bill.

 

[Dac]

I hope it gets launched, I think I saw something somewhere about NASA fighting tooth and nail to keep this program alive. But, on the flip side this is an EXTREMELY complicated machine, with a tonne of folding/moving parts (for all intents and purposes, its a freakin' transformer). Even if it does get launched, the chances of it actually working seem slim to me at best, and this time NASA won't have a space shuttle they can just send up to fix it.

I hope it does get funding and I hope it does launch without a hitch, but I can see this being cancelled straight up and being the first step in killing NASA outright, or give it the funding, let it go ahead and then fail, and use that as an excuse to kill NASA.

Either way, methinks the people in charge just don't want NASA anymore.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

I hope it gets launched, I think I saw something somewhere about NASA fighting tooth and nail to keep this program alive. But, on the flip side this is an EXTREMELY complicated machine, with a tonne of folding/moving parts (for all intents and purposes, its a freakin' transformer). Even if it does get launched, the chances of it actually working seem slim to me at best, and this time NASA won't have a space shuttle they can just send up to fix it.

Even if they had shuttles, the telescope would orbit 930,000 miles from earth (the moon averages somewhere around 240,000 miles away). I am pretty sure no maintenance trips would be made.

I hope it does get funding and I hope it does launch without a hitch, but I can see this being cancelled straight up and being the first step in killing NASA outright, or give it the funding, let it go ahead and then fail, and use that as an excuse to kill NASA.

Either way, methinks the people in charge just don't want NASA anymore.

Agreed. It would be a great tragedy for this to be canceled.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

777

Why does science always end up getting the short straw?

Science often gets the long-straw so long as it's for developing technology that enables humans to spy on, kill, or in one way or another dominate other human beings.

 

[Yminale]

The level of hypocrisy by House Republicans is amazing (and yes Dem's are just as bad sometimes). The Joint Strike Fighter is even more mismanaged and yet they keep wanting to dump more money into it. Some House members even want to keep the Shuttle flying even though it's a death trap that should have been retired 20 years ago.

Remember the Superconducting Supercollider. With it we could have found that stupid Higgs-Boson already and maybe discover what Dark Matter is but no some idiots overpaid some potted plants and Congress decides to spend millions filling in the hole dug for the supercollider. Then these moron cry about the lack of scientist and engineers in America.

 

[Shatnertage]

^ It was the Higgs-Boson behind it all, wasn't it?

I don't know enough about the science to be able to evaluate it, but it seems an amusing notion.

 

[throwback]

James Webb Space Telescope - $6.5 billion and counting
Gerald Ford-class Aircraft Carrier - $8.0 billion

Why is a space probe costing the taxpayers the same amount as a next generation aircraft carrier?

This isn't mismanagement; this is a major clusterf**k.

 

[Arrqh]

Those numbers without context aren't really evidence of anything. Hubble, for instance, cost about $6 billion in total when all was said and done and despite some obvious issues it was overal a major success and a massive boon for science.

The JWST has been mismanaged, I think pretty much everyone will agree with that. But that $6.5 billion is an investment... either we can try and fix the problems and get the JWST done or we can write off that $6.5 billion (which includes costly, already manufactured components) and never see an ounce of benefit. At which point you might as well have taken that $6.5 billion and thrown it in a trashcan. Additionally, it's not like all the money that would have gone to the JWST is still going into science. Instead this represents a targeted undercutting of NASA which will have a massive impact on it's ability to perform relavent scientific research.

Phil Plait wrote this on his blog the other week, I think it sums it up nicely:

But NASA is the one where the cuts are nothing short of savage. The cuts total $1.64 billion from last year, which is nearly $2 billion less than requested. That’s a cut of 8.8%. A billion of that is due to the Shuttle retiring, but the galling part is that the House is requiring that all funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s successor, be cut entirely. In other words, they are canceling the JWST program.
To be fair, the JWST project has been over budget, behind schedule, and mismanaged for years. It’s sapped money away from other projects as well. But the reason this is so aggravating is that despite all that the pieces are built and currently being assembled. I’m not sure it’s cost-effective to cancel it at this point; better to put a hold on it, audit the whole thing top to bottom, and re-organize as needed.

JWST has been a real problem, but it will also be one of the most spectacular observatories ever built. A six meter mirror in space tuned for infra-red observations, it will see farther and in more detail than any space telescope ever built. It will see galaxies when they were first forming, it will image planets orbiting distant suns, and will map our Universe like never before.

At this point, canceling it means billions of dollars will be thrown away, when the cost to complete it is far less*.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

James Webb Space Telescope - $6.5 billion and counting
Gerald Ford-class Aircraft Carrier - $8.0 billion

Why is a space probe costing the taxpayers the same amount as a next generation aircraft carrier?

This isn't mismanagement; this is a major clusterf**k.

Put in that perspective it shows how little the James Webb costs considering what it is. This is high tech that has to survive nearly one million miles away from earth without maintenance. Of course it will be expensive. Perhaps with better management it would have cost less. But canceling after spending 6.5 billion is worse mismanagement than anyone in charge of the project is responsible for.