Congress Dumps James Webb Space Telescope

Teancum writes "On the list of items on the upcoming federal budget for 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives has announced they are going to cancel the continued development of the James Webb Space Telescope. While this debate is certainly still very much a preliminary draft, the road ahead for this project is now very much uncertain. In this time of budget cuts, it seems unlikely that this project is going to survive at this time. It certainly will be an uphill battle for fans of this telescope if they want to keep it alive."

Comments

Mixed Feelings

[notKevinJohn]

As someone who works on several NASA science mission directorate missions, I have to say I have mixed feelings about this. James Webb was going to be an amazing successor to Hubble, and would have been very popular with the general public as well as with scientists. However, it is way way over budget, and eating the budgets of other worthy science missions, and maybe there is something to be said for cutting missions who can't keep on budget. I was really looking forward to James Webb though, even if it was the 800lb gorilla of the science mission directorate.

Re:Science loses again

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yep. Other winners in this budget include the International Trade Administration, FBI, DEA, and the Bureau of Prisons. Other losers include NSF, NIST, NOAA, the Economic Development Administration, and programs to aid state and local law enforcement. You can draw your own conclusions about what set of priorities that reflects ...