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Congress Dumps James Webb Space Telescope

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-telescope-for-you dept.

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."

2 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Science loses again by crashumbc · · Score: 0, Troll

    Still better then what Bush did...

  2. Re:Science loses again by IICV · · Score: 1, Troll

    Defense is about the only part of the Federal budget which has been consistently decreasing over the last 50 years as a percentage of GDP.

    Way to lie with statistics, man. "Decreasing as a percentage of GDP" is an entirely meaningless metric - within that definition, the defense budget could be going up, down or sideways and there's no way of knowing.

    For instance, if both the GDP and the defense budget are increasing, but the GDP is increasing faster, then your statement would still be true and entirely misleading.

    It also doesn't account for the initial retardedly high value of our defense budget; for instance, if defense were 10% of GDP one year and 9% of GDP the next year, your statement would still be true and defense spending would still be ridiculously high.

    It makes me wonder why you didn't just provide a link to the actual, inflation adjusted dollar amounts put in to defense (like here, for instance). Presumably because it shows a rise in real spending on the defense department over the past decade, which kinda contradicts your point?