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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."
War and Destruction... untouchable
Knowledge and Progress... Short list for cuts
Not surprised the least
This was a way cool project that could have led us towards life in the distant cosmos! Maybe its because were in for a much bigger revelation... (FINGERS CROSSED, and by revelation I don't mean that in a religious sense)... More than likely though their probably just rerouting the funding to war crime projects....
Fuck you, Fuck you couch, and fuck your telescope. No-one messes with congress and gets away with it.
From Wikipedia:
"In June 2011, it was reported that the Webb telescope will cost at least four times more than originally proposed, and launch at least seven years late. Initial budget estimates were that the observatory would cost $1.6 billion and launch in 2011. NASA has now scheduled the telescope for a 2018 launch, though outside analysts suggest the flight could slip past 2020. The latest estimated price tag for the telescope is now $6.8 billion."
Although a loss for science, this would seem to be more accurately blamed on poor management and budgeting. Perhaps a smaller, better managed project will rise from the ashes.
Seriously, I wonder how much money we can get donated to keep this going. in retrospect, I'd gladly have paid what i could for the Hubble, and the repair/upgrade missions, out of my own pocket.
Cutting this project will do basically nothing to help the deficit situation. Until they start seriously talking about slashing defense spending, drastically reforming Medicare and Social Security, AND raising taxes, it's obvious they're just playing politics with no intention of doing anything to fix the problem. They could cut this and everything else in the discretionary non-defense budget and still run a huge deficit.
In the future, when people look back at our age, they will see things as Hubble, and (hopefully) the James Webb telescope as some of the true wonders of our time. INNA (I am not American), but where has the USA's sense of wonder gone?. Truely, the USA needs to invest in things like this great telescope. They can afford not to build another (half a?) stealth fighter, surely.
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.
What do we need with a space telescope or space exploration program anyway? Our children are being groomed to be the poorly fed, poorly housed, poorly educated drones of the likes of of the Koch Brothers--or worse, cannon fodder in the next forever war undertaken to line the pockets of the defense contractors. Other countries will gladly assume the exploration of frontiers and the advancement of knowledge while our kids get to learn about creation science.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
It's the superconducting supercollider all over again (just with fewer Texans shooting it.) Disappointing in the extreme.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
This This Astronomy Cast podcast episode does a great job of explaining why infrared astronomy is important, and the role that the JWST will (would have?) played in discovery.
...because we're (indirectly) building this instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78)
Military Industrial Complex FTW!
You mean the long-timers that developed Hubble, the Shuttle program, ISS, and (mostly) successful Mars rovers?
If anything, NASA gets worse with each new generation. As I saw on reddit once, "If you watch NASA backwards, it's about a space agency that has no spaceflight capability, then does low-orbit flights, then lands on moon"
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Instead of funding aids research, perhaps Billy can write a check for the telescope instead.
I've worked at NASA (and LockMart, and a few other places not on the T.O.). You're so very wrong. If your assessment is from your experience, you've been unlucky in your work venues and I wish you better luck in future. If your assessment isn't from experience, then you need to get out more.
I wish I had mod points.
See Mammon a Jesus coined term for this problem. I only invoke him out of an interest in truly sad irony.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
No offense to US citizens everywhere, but the government you currently find yourselves serving is hideously destructive to it's own existence, and by extension, all of you as well. Unfortunately, it's also capable of sinking the rest of the world with it as well...
Wait, wait....Money itself is just a tool. Just like a hammer. It in itself is neither good or evil, it just it. Money isn't the problem, it's the attitude that drives it's destructive power.
to the WalMart-Exxon-Verizon Space Telescope. That way it'll have all the funding it needs.
Everyone needs to calm down and learn how politics works. This is a "give-away" the republicans threw in the mix... the price-tag is relatively small, but public interest is high. So when they haggle, the democrats can claim they saved the program. The democrats constituents will think its a big win while the republicans constituents could care less. How many times did congress/NASA propose cutting funding to Hubble? I lost count myself.
How about cutting things from the budget that will ACTUALLY HELP SOLVE THE PROBLEM.
Cutting the space telescope (with its tiny budget) wont make any difference.
If you want to fix the US economy and the US debt problem, cut where it will help. Cut the billions and billions of dollars spent on subsidies to the airlines, the big agribusiness companies, the coal industry, the oil industry, the media companies, the defence industry etc.
It is true that within budget cutting they are being stupid (political) about it and probably more interesting in the number of programs they can claim they killed because that makes a nice talking point.
The REALITY is that all this spending could continue at this level if we funded it. We have less economy to produce the revenue and that is a HUGE reason for the recent shortfalls -- its not merely wasteful spending (which is a big factor) but the other HUGE issue is going largely ignored. The banksters caused this economic mess which blew a ton of money besides the bailout they also received (and have since payed back although it caused a lot of inflation but that is another issue.) The military complex and the recent wars for oil also have big financial interests (yup, the banksters again.) Then we have the foolish bush tax cuts which were trickle down all over again with slightly different wording and cost about the same as the wars (so we have double the debt instead.) Today we are still hearing the 30 year old trickle down BS but wrapped in terms of job creation by trickle down (which is the same thing as before but talking about jobs instead of prosperity. So, we've come down a peg in that JOBS are what we want now when in the 80s we wanted more prosperity.)
Another thing people forget is Obama put the military into the budget. Bush did not have it in the budget (100% pure debt.) This makes the numbers much higher under Obama than Bush because it is finally part of the "math". As far as the economy getting better-- as too much money is robbed from the actual economy the ability to rebuild it becomes diminished. Oddly, even republicans are bitching about fixing the economy -- as if they concede the government plays a major role but without them flatly admitting it.
What is going on and will continue to go on until the collapse in about a decade is an auctioning off of as much of our assets as possible. There isn't much a small group can do about it, it will take collective action and that won't happen until the masses can't ignore it and learn a little bit.... at that time it will be too late to regain what was lost. The comeback after the fall is going to be long and hard -- don't think it'll ever get back to the 90s because that is impossible. If we didn't go astray all this time we'd still peak because the world is catching up and a big part of our "edge" was having them behind us (which is where our incentive to screw the world came from; the public doesn't like that so we didn't overtly do it.)
It is quite likely our collateral for our huge debt is medicare and social security so those two will gutted in an emergency foreclosure... like the greeks are dealing with (loosely like that.) will we have riots when they gut it? i don't think so.
We get distracted. hate union workers because they get too much or government workers... who just don't fall down as quickly as the rest do and that is why they are still at older levels of compensation and benefits; its not that they are getting too much (they are getting less actually) its that everybody on the outside is getting MUCH LESS. I remember the autoworker hate, they had many old clever contracts which adjusted for inflation and kept health benefits-- if the economy actually prospered they'd be at the same relative position 40 years ago but instead everybody else came down. Immigrants are another very human scapegoat in such situations. Its served quite well since the 80s and it continues - blame them... (not to ignore the real impacts they do have but it doesn't match the hype.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Defense? That's one of the very few legitimate functions of government.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Unfortunately very little of the $700 billion military budget last year went towards defending this country from foreign enemies.
Right. When people say "money is the root of all evil" they tend to leave out the first few words of the phrase. Originally, it was "the love of money is the root of all evil". Without those first three words, it really doesn't make much sense.
What NASA is missing is a goal and the political will to stock with it for more than one election cycle.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It's your choice - feed people who won't get off their ass to work or have nice toys like this telescope.
I love how being f@#$ed over by bankers, corps and lobbiests == being lazy. Who's against banking reform.. because we can't have the poor defaulting, while the banks are bailed out...
It's understandable that you posted as AC. I wouldn't sign my name to that drivel either.
1) THis is the HOUSE's bill, not CONgress. This is the side of CONgress that is under control by neo-cons and tea* (more of the former). It still has to go through the Senate which is under Dems control.
2) The bill attempts to pretty much kill earth Sciences esp. that devoted to Climate Change.
3) The bill attempts to pretty much kill Private Space efforts esp. CCDEV (which is about launching humans into space).
4) The bill attempts to pretty much kill interplanetary space efforts.
So, what will there be?
THe SLS. They want all of the money to flow to the Communist Jobs bill called SLS, otherwise, known as Senate Launch System. Needless to say that this bill will die as it sits. But it shows where neo-cons/tea* are coming from. They prefer putting money into their friends pockets, rather than allowing true competition to exists. The USA will be damned if they control CONgress and WH ever again.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If they'd eliminate the "war" on drugs, I daresay they could save some money in the DOJ budget by reducing the DEA and Federal prison system budgets, and they'd gain tax revenue by taxing recreational drugs.
For all you that are concern about cutting this program, we are confident that job-creating entrepreneurs will continue to fund this effort. Given that markets have dried here on Earth, venture capitalist will used this telescope to search for new markets in other star systems. We can help this further if we cut taxes to zero on those making $250,000 or more. Don't listen to the other side, the founding fathers never wanted the federal government to fund space programs. They clearly stated that sole purpose of the American government is to defend this nation by perpetual warfare and not promoting scientific development. Also remember, the federal budget is exactly like your home budget. If the federal government does not spend money, then we will never have a deficit and the free market will rain gold in your pockets. Thank you and God bless America.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Hmm, I don't know, I'm working with an electrical engineer "close to retirement" with plenty of previous big project / corporate experience, and the guy is a joy to work with and there's a shitload of stuff I'm learning from him. Of course it's just an anecdote. Even the "bureaucracy" aspects of his experience are useful. We seriously needed some insight into product lifecycle management, and the guy just came knowing all this, knowing what worked well and what was a pain in the butt, etc., all from front-line experience in a corporate environment. YMMV...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Whoever tagged this story "obama" either doesn't realize that the House is controlled by Republicans, not Obama (the Democratic president) - or they're just another lying Republican blaming their party's worst behavior on someone else, usually a Democrat and especially a Democratic president.
Republicans. Not Obama.
And they seem to have missed this in TFA:
NASA is funded at $16.8 billion in the bill, which is $1.6 billion below last year’s level and $1.9 billion below the President’s request. This funding includes:
So Obama requested a $300M increase in NASA funding.
It's your choice - feed people who won't get off their ass to work or have nice toys like this telescope.
Or, another choice - cheap gas where gas taxes don't pay the real cost of highway maintenance, or nice toys like this telescope ($40B for highways, versus $16B for NASA's entire budget.
You may not like the choices, but that's the plain unvarnished truth.
There are many many possible choices and tradeoffs.
People fixate on the human space program too much. NASA has had an almost constant string of fantastic science missions since Apollo.
No one wants to pay to put people into LEO, hell people were bored of the Moon landings after a couple of missions.
Look, I really REALLY love NASA's unmanned science programs and would think it would be a crying shame if they cut the JWST at this point but what is wrong with the budgeting process if they get it off by a factor of four? (so I've heard). Should they first launch a small prototype test mission to evaluate the technologies or something? Or were they putting the wrong people in charge of budgeting? Are they scientists who may be brilliant in their fields but not skilled at project forecasting or bureaucrats who might be looking to please their political masters? I never did like the idea that the telescope was named after a NASA administrator rather than a famous DEAD astronomer, it seemed a bit too self-serving. Maybe this is expensive poetic justice; instead I guess they could've named it the Carl Sagan Space Telescope to look at "billions and billions" of stars.
Anyway, it would be a shame to see this cancelled after they've spent so much and even finished the mirrors. (I know, sunk-costs fallacy). Of course if they taxed the rich (top execs got 23% more in the last YEAR while average income has stayed flat for the last DECADE) appropriately we would be more likely to afford things like the JWST cost overruns or not.
the us is behaving like a person who is running a wildly successful scam on everyone and just wants to grab as much much money as they can before the whole thing collapses, future long-term benefit be dammed.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Redshift 13 or so is where the galaxy formation action is so JWST is a successor to HST in terms of chasing the universe into the red. Do you really want all the trouble of a cold mirror for a UV telescope? Better to go for surface quality I think.
Just rename it the Ronald Reagan Space Telescope and poof the House of Reps will support it
Its not the years, its the mileage
US defaults in less than a month anyway
This is blinging
It looks like a couple of decades of cuts to education funding have taken their toll going by some of the posts here and expectations of magic or similar bullshit. It doesn't have to be that way because you can find things out on your own and improve your own education.
It's going to take a long time for the USA to climb out of the hole it is in no matter who is in charge.
Just.. WTF? So much money spent, and now (about to be) flushed down the drain? So much things we would have learnt, and now will not.
Publicly available science output of NASA (and others) has been a big positive impact on the world, to offset all the bomb dropping, meddling and invasion stunts US has pulled since WW2. I hope they reconsider, because this aspect of positive global PR value is bigger than many USians think. Space is something which can really bring the peoples of Earth together, at least for now, because it's something unreachable and can't yield real resources - there's not much money at stake. At this rate, I'll soon be actually rooting for China to take the lead in science and technology.
projects just because "science" is part of it?
Congress is going after the telescope because the project is turning into or already is a boondoggle.
War and Destruction are not the top budget concerns, they are far down the list below Welfare and other Entitlements that elected officials use to directly buy votes so they can stay in office. Right below Welfare and Entitlements are tax breaks and special development rules for the big businesses which fund the campaigns. Then you might find your wars and such.
Still I will agree with science being near the bottom, but how many votes does it generate?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
We could cut our military spending in half and still be the world's top spender. Shit, we could cut 90% and we'd still be in the top five.
To save it, rename it the Ronald Reagan Space Telescope,
Make love, not reality television.
The administration in power is not somehow magically responsible for the economy. On slashdot, of all places, we should know better. Can we stop parroting the commentators who pretend the economy is a game of tug-of-war between administrations? *Nobody* wants the economy to collapse.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Unfortunately for the USPTO, congress took 100 million when the 2011 budget finally passed.
http://www.postgrant.com/2011/04/uspto-budget-cuts-affect-patent-operations.html
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Just wondering because the original 5 - Insightful post has already been debunked many times that he posted bad data. All the posts that show otherwise have mysteriously been down ranked or marked troll?
There's a pretty simple way to deal with Medicare spending in the future (note: it's not "entitlements" --- Social Security does not share Medicare's cost growth). Basically, leave it to the future
That's an unbelievably irresponsible attitude.
Medicare's unfunded liabilites are $89 TRILLION (source: 2009 Social Security and Medicare Trustees Reports). In other words, $89 trillion in future obligations, for which we currently have no idea where the money will come. If that doesn't qualify as an existential threat to the United States, I don't know what does. This number should terrorize you much more than al Qaeda ever did. It does me.
When this hits the fan, no one can say they hadn't been warned -- this coming disaster is a "known known."
The only way out is a massive reform of the program, and soon. Yes, Paul Ryan's plan qualifies. Hope you're not a partisan who automatically rejects any idea thought up by a Republican.
When Lyndon Johnson created the Medicare program, he was seduced by cost projections that were orders of magnitude too small. Love him or hate him, the man didn't have a death wish for his country's economy, so it's safe to say that he wouldn't have touched the Medicare idea with a 10 foot pole if he had known the true costs of the beast it would grow into.
"Leaving it to the future" will make the unfunded liability grow larger, faster (and obviously, to reach $89 trillion it has already undergone massive exponential growth). You don't have kids or grandkids, do you? If you do, your cavalier attitude about saddling them with unthinkable burdens is akin to child abuse.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP.
It's not entirely ridiculous. Comparing certain categories of spending against a total budget lets you know whether that category is becoming more affordable.
Over the past few decades, technology and productivity gains have made just about everything more affordable. Example: when a typical family dropped $2000 on an Apple ][e in 1983, that was perhaps 7% of their annual income, but when a typical family spends $1000 on a MacBook in 2011, it's only perhaps 1% of their annual income. Similarly, the fraction of family budgets spent on staples like milk and bread has been dropping. The net result of all this is more funds left over for luxuries that previous generations could rarely afford. That, in a nutshell, is progress.
Now scale the concept up to the national budget. Expressing it as a percent of GDP shows that defense, too, has become more affordable. (You can argue that we should have taken a bigger "peace dividend" when the cold war ended, and I might agree with you on that, but that's not the point. The point is, calculating the percent of GDP devoted to defense is not entirely ridiculous.)
So. We've seen that defense, like most other things, has become more affordable. Just about the only thing that hasn't become more affordable over the years is the non-defense portion of government. And that, my friend, is a huge problem. Here's the part of my post that will elicit derision from some readers: creeping socialism is to blame. But really... if you can think of anywhere else to place the blame for the indisputable fact that non-defense government spending, both in absolute terms and as a percent of GDP, is out of control, I'm all ears.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Yes, most programs overpromise to some extent. However, "but mom, everybody's doing it!" is hardly a defense.
I hate to see JWST go, but there's a potential silver lining to this. Here's how I hope it goes down: if the worst offenders, like JWST, get the axe, it will cause the surviving programs to become cost-conscious, lest they suffer the same fate. In the end, our science dollars will have accomplished more than if all programs had received an unconditional blank check. Not really a paradox if you think about it.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.