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

Science loses again

[Anonymous Coward]

War and Destruction... untouchable
Knowledge and Progress... Short list for cuts

Not surprised the least

Re:Science loses again

[bmo]

It's too bad you posted as AC, because it's true.

And it's funny how the people who cut this will take pride in how our country is on the so-called cutting-edge of technology and science.

We're on the fast track to becoming a banana republic.

--
BMO

Re:Science loses again

[larry bagina]

Barack "I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011" Obama?

Re:Science loses again

[Fluffeh]

From the appropriations document:

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – 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:

        $3.65 billion for Space Exploration which is $152 million below last year. This includes funding above the request for NASA to meet Congressionally mandated program deadlines for the newly authorized crew vehicle and launch system.
        $4.1 billion for Space Operations which is $1.4 billion below last year’s level. The legislation will continue the closeout of the Space Shuttle program for a savings of $1 billion.
        $4.5 billion for NASA Science programs, which is $431 million below last year’s level. The bill also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.

Meanwhile, in the same document:

Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog

(Bolding is mine)

Stop a space telescope, cut back NASA funds while retiring a space shuttle... increase patent office funding... This is just a normal day in the office chaps...

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 ...

Re:Science loses again

[Solandri]

Defense spending is hardly untouchable. 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. It's ticked up a bit since 9/11, but is still lower than during Reagan's build-up in the 1980s, and nowhere near as high as during the Vietnam War.

The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.

Re:Science loses again

[Shihar]

I don't disagree that there is other shit that needs cutting. Do we REALLY need a military that can stomp two of any other conventional armies on their own land at once? I personally think not. Self defense the ability to act WITH others in the world community is more than enough for me. I don't think the US needs a military designed to fight China and Russia on their own shores, considering that the only possible end game to that kind of 'victory' are a few thousand nuclear missiles up the arse.

That said... the Jame's Webb telescope, while being an awesome piece of potential science, is a poster child for being a catastrofuck of poor planning and budgeting. They are going to miss both their launch data AND the cost by at least a 4X factor. Maybe canceling a few of these messes will convince people not to write rosy prediction of cost and time. Firing all of the management involves, killing the project, and proposing a realistic budget and timing is hardly the worst fate that cold befall NASA.

Now if only we could fire all of the congressmen shit heads who propose their own unrealistic budgets on absurd timetables...

Re:Science loses again

[TheGratefulNet]

the leader's job is to LEAD.

see any of that?

I don't. I see same-old same-old. he is NOT standing up for his so-called principles.

you can say its the system but if the president can't accomplish his goals, I blame HIM. backroom deals, etc - just make it happen.

but he does not. he's useless. /dev/null would be as effective.

Re:Science loses again

[hawguy]

Except that:

Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) – The bill provides $2.7 billion for the PTO – the full requested level. This funding is equal to the estimated amount of fees to be collected by the PTO during fiscal year 2012, and is an increase of $588 million or 28% above last year’s level. The bill also includes language that allows PTO to keep and use any fees in excess of the estimated collected amount, subject to standard Congressional approval, and includes language requiring PTO to report on efforts to reduce the patent application backlog

(Bolding is mine).

The USPTO funds itself from fees it collects.

Re:Science loses again

[Anonymous Coward]

...No shit they paid it back. They bought treasury bonds with the money loaned to them at discount interest rates and sat on them until the treasury yields balanced their books. It was just a hand out by any other name. They repaid the loans with devalued capital, after using that money during a liquidity crunch to hostile takeover their competitors who didn't qualify for a government handout.

If you convert the loan to gold at the time it was made and then make the same conversion when it was repaid you'll see that the tax payer was robbed of nearly 200 billion dollars, the majority of which sailed off in to the sunset as golden parachutes and bonuses for the people who crashed the american economy.

The insult to injury here is that the Treasury department begged congress for unconditional trust and then turned right around and engaged in the largest example of graft in recorded human history - Carting wheelbarrows full of money out the back door in the form of secret purchases of toxic mortgages at 500% of their market value. The beneficiary? The treasury secretary's former employer Goldman Sachs and the new banking cartels: JP Morgan and Bank of America.

These assholes caused the crisis and in return were handed majority ownership of the entire american real estate market on the backs of the people who they cheated out of house and home.

Treason fails to communicate the gravity/magnitude of the events which you are so eager to forget. Why so forgiving? I suspect because holding a grudge would cause your illusion of democracy to dissolve if it meant that your favorite sock puppet was no less corrupt than his predecessor? Cognitive dissonance is a bitch ain't she?

Re:Science loses again

[dachshund]

The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.

Healthcare cost growth is a huge long-term problem, and it's one we're going to need to address. But it has precisely nothing to do with what we spend in 2012, 2013, 2014, etc.

Military spending, on the other hand, really is great issue to address in the yearly budget. We can decide in 2011 how many overseas wars we should be fighting over the next fiscal year. We can decide in 2012 how much we want to spend in 2013, and so on.

As best I can tell, the reason we spend so much time discussing "entitlements" is because politicians don't want to discuss issues that we can address today. So instead we have a stupid and fruitless conversation about problems that we're not facing yet. The inevitable outcome is that nobody wants to put their neck on the line to cut these programs, and all the serious decisions fly under the radar.

Which, when you think about it, is the entire point.

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. Oh sure, do what smart things we can do now to make healthcare costs grow less quickly. But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.

If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.

Re:Science loses again

[FleaPlus]

You don't even need to look outside NASA to see ridiculous spending to compare to. The same House appropriations bill with the $431M JWST cut includes $2B for the Space Launch System (SLS) and $1B for the Orion/MPCV capsule. The SLS is basically Congress's mandate to NASA to build a heavy-lift rocket out of Shuttle-legacy components capable of competing with SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The $2B is only for the first year of SLS funding, for a rocket which isn't expected to have its first launch until 2017 or later. Mind that this is for a rocket that NASA didn't even want in the first place.

Re:Science loses again

[The Master Control P]

You realize the illusion of prosperity under the Bush administration was the same as the illusion of prosperity in the Roaring 20s right?

They're basically clones of each other... a false prosperity, supported by a bubble of circle-jerking investors, in which none of the "wealth" goes to the workers [during the 20s, income for the average American rose one percent and for the rich rose something like 50%], and in the end the bubble finally reaches a maximum inflation, jitters a bit, and implodes. Sound familiar?

If there is any causal connection, it's that the change in House control was the pin that pricked the bubble - the first investor to panic then brings the whole lie crashing down. Do you blame those who exposed the lie, or those who inflated it, created it, and enabled it?

Re:Science loses again

[artor3]

Liar. Stop regurgitating talking points and think. What caused all the job losses? The recession, obviously. What caused the recession? Rampant greed and absentee regulators. It was a long time brewing. Beyond that, the causes are irrelevant. What is relevant is that once the Democrats were in charge, which happened on Jan 2009, things quickly improved.

And the Democrats were not in control of the government in 2007. They had Congress, but Bush had the veto pen. They could not begin undoing his damage until 2009. Stop regurgitating the lies that Fox has poisoned you with, and think for your self.

Re:Science loses again

[jklovanc]

I think the issue is that if one can not protect the sovereignty of a country then its science is a moot point. The country will soon be owned or destroyed by someone else.

War/Destruction and Knowledge/Progress are not mutually exclusive. Look at the advances in aircraft during WW2. We went from biplanes to jet planes in a scant ten years. More recently Kevlar and composites that are used in manufacturing were originally researched for military use.

Re:Science loses again

[raddan]

That's because the the graph hardly shows military spending in decline. I'd say that it's level. Of course, that's proportional to GDP which means in reality, it's increased a LOT.

But the fun doesn't stop there. The graph ends in 2001. Hmm, can't think of any large military expenditures between 2001 and 2011...

Put a recent CBO graph up there, and we can talk. Of course, he's right about entitlement spending. My personal take on this is that the US has to decide between policing the world and caring for its own citizens, because it can't do both.

Re:Science loses again

[Billly Gates]

The problem is the republicans wont budge. They are the ones who all of the sudden decided agaisnt' raising the ceiling. For reference the ceiling has been raised almost 50 times in order to keep up with inflation. With the recovery act this year the number is much much higher than normal and the republicans are seizing on it. ... correction the Tea Party is seizing it. When Bush expanded government the Tea Party didn't even exist. When somone with a D next to their name comes into office all of the sudden this grass movement appears. Give me a break. Half the bailout was designed by Paulson under Bush, not Obama.

Either way the intended effect is done and we are going to create an artificial austerity measure on purpose rather than necessity to make sure another R is in the White House next year regardless of America's bond rating going into the toilet and another 3,000 point crash. Sigh

For the record I am in favor of some of this deficit reduction and think government is too large. I just hate the slimy politics of this with lies and deceptions. Please republicans raise the darn taxes if you are going to walk the walk on the upper class and save 3.8 trillion. It makes me mad as the Tea Party is not dictating Obama's policies as well as the Republicans do not want to lose their seats to this small minority crowd who is active in the primaries.

Re:Science loses again

[Savantissimo]

It's ridiculous to measure military spending as a percent of GDP. The necessary expenses do not scale with GDP. We aren't facing any real military threats; the BS "terrorism" scare was just a marketing campaign to keep the gravy train rolling. We don't need the expenditures of the cold war today, yet we're spending much more in level dollar terms. We could cut $200B out of the DoD budget tomorrow and still be spending more than in the late 90s or the 70s. The accumulated interest on old military expenditures and increase in the veterans affairs budget due to idiotic wars of choice almost doubles the official budget, to over $1.1trillion a year, even before counting DHS, State Dept., DoE, etc. We're borrowing all that money, including the interest payments. Social Security and Medicare, on the other hand, pay for themselves, and have money left over to lend to the rest of the government. They'd have more but the rich don't pay Social Security tax on most of their income, and Medicare is forbidden from negotiating volume discounts with the pharmaceutical companies.

We're going to spend $2.8 billion this year on the V-22 Osprey, which is a complete dog, unreliable, unmaintainable, dangerous. We're going to spend over $10 billion this year on idiotic, unworkable, destabilizing ballistic missile defense schemes. We're going to spend more on fucking air-conditioning for the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos than the entire NASA budget. And it's worse than completely useless- it soaks up engineering talent, manufacturing capacity and materials and produces nothing of value - it actually destroys value at home and abroad by killing and maiming people and destroying property. It's fucking psychotic.

Re:Science loses again

[Rich0]

But when the costs themselves become unmanageable, let the voters and representatives of that time deal with it. Their problem, their decision. Cutting Medicare only requires one Congressional vote, it's not magic.

If they can afford Medicare as it is now, good for them. If they can't, they'll have no choice but to cut it. That'll be unpopular, but in that case it'll also be necessary which means it'll happen.

Well, if I'm not going to get Medicare in 30 years, why not just cut it today so that I can stop paying all those taxes for the next 30 years? If it will work for me to pay taxes for the next 30 years and not collect a dime, then it will work fine for the previous generation to do the same. Besides, we don't need to cut it so much as we need to reform it (raise retirement age, only spend money where we have clinically proven results, etc).

On the other hand, US foreign policy today will impact the kind of world I live in 30 years from now. I don't see a need to be as engaged overseas as we have been, but the fact is that an army is actually one of those things that the Federal Government was created for in the first place.

Budget problems

[Trillan]

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.

Re:Budget problems

[mosb1000]

The panel noted that the project was in good shape technically, but that NASA had not budgeted enough for the project initially. In other words, it would have cost less if they'd put more in up front and completed it on schedule. This is why you shouldn't let penny-pinchers be in charge of cost estimates (or anything, for that matter). If they weren't willing to commit sufficient funds to the project, they shouldn't have done it at all.

Re:Budget problems

[Idarubicin]

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.

This isn't exactly a surprise. The only way NASA can get funding is to promise the moon (usually figuratively, though occasionally literally) on an implausible shoestring budget, and then hope that the real costs later on don't cause management to scupper an already-in-progress high-profile project. This is a pretty common strategy in government funded technology and research projects, and it's something that's as old as NASA.

The Mercury program came in at roughly double its original estimated price.

The Air Force anticipated in 1958 that a lunar program would cost $1.5 billion and be complete by the end of 1965. In 1961, NASA's experts said they could do the job by 1967, at a cost of $7 billion. By the time Neil Armstrong took his one small step, it was 1969, and the program had rung up a price tag of about $25 billion (in 1960s dollars).

Looking at the last space telescope project, the Hubble was originally budgeted at $400 million. It cost $2.5 billion by launch time, and total program costs to date run to between $4.5 and $6 billion.

This problem isn't unique to NASA. Technology development programs in the military offer some particularly good examples. Lockheed completed their contract for the F-22 Raptor more than two years and ten billion dollars behind schedule--but they still received more than $800 million in performance awards for their work.

Re:Budget problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets compare that to the F-22 "Raptor".... supposed to cost about $80 million per plane, the "fly away cost" per plane on last delivery was about $165 million. Years late for initial delivery, the total program cost was over $65 billion......

Oh, and as of this writing, ALL OF THEM ARE GROUNDED due to problems with their oxygen generators..... not a single plane is flying right now.

That is a load of crap, foisted on the American taxpayer by the defense-industrial complex.

Re:Budget problems

[0123456]

Without Shuttle, Hubble as it was launched would be known as an expensive boondoggle and no longer be operational.

Without the shuttle we could have launched a new Hubble every few years, because that would have cost less than the maintenance missions.

Re:Budget problems

[garyebickford]

Boy, been there, done that, burned the t-shirt. As a VP R&D in a startup a long time ago (early 1990s) I once spent two months with my software manager doing a complete system plan for a complete rewrite, rearchitecture and platform change (including converting from several languages to C), down to the function level, with good estimates of the time it would take to do every piece of it. This was a product with several hundred thousand lines of code in FORTRAN, Pascal, Assembler of various sorts, maybe some C, and microcode for a custom image processor. It came down to six engineers and about two years. We got approval for that project plan at the board meeting.

Then one of the engineers mentioned to the head of sales that he thought we would 'have an image on the screen' (meaning we would have figured out how to write a toy/test program to paint a window) in about two months.

Within a few days, the sales guy had promised delivery of two systems in ... you guessed it ... two months, to GE. Oh, and by the way - the company didn't have the cash flow to hire more engineers, so we only had two guys available to the project. As it happened, I quit a week or so later for other reasons. According to what I was told later, by conspiring with the users at GE who agreed to receive the boxes, they managed to ship two completely non-functioning systems to GE, and spent the next two years 'fixing' it while the folks at GE got more and more pissed. I think GE finally sued them. After numerous equally dicey escapades, the company got forced into bankruptcy.

Re:Budget problems

[robot256]

Exactly right. I was involved in one of the instruments on JWST, and we had no end of trouble because half the engineering work was done before they had even done the research to see if it would work at all. After they did figure out how to make it work, it turned out the engineering was done to essentially nonsense specs. That took a lot of jury-rigging and overtime to deliver, just one of many examples I'm sure.

Absurd

[eln]

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.

Re:Absurd

[NiceGeek]

If you think the Repubs are going to do any of that, you're dreaming. They're busy pandering.

Re:Absurd

[artor3]

They don't "forget" to raise taxes. The Republicans have instituted a very well-crafted and carefully executed plan for the past decade or so. They pass a massive tax cut to wipe out the surplus. They then drive us deep into debt with wars and the unfunded Medicare expansion. Next, they use that debt as an excuse to eliminate Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. Then they take the savings, and insist the way to grow the economy is with more tax cuts. See where this is going?

The end result is a society with no safety net to support the ~250 million serfs, who must therefore work for whatever wages their lords are willing to pay, and die in the streets when they are no longer of use. Meanwhile, those lords pay no taxes. The government, with no revenue, cannot regulate the lords to keep them from further abusing their serfs. We're on a fast track to return to the Gilded Age. This is not an accident.

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.

Hah

[beadfulthings]

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.

Re:One thing I've noticed about large organization

[sqrt(2)]

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"

Re:Where has the wonder gone?

[ridgecritter]

Our sense of wonder was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Goldman-Sachs, and AIG.

Re:Can we start a kickstarter?

[Jiro]

I hear that if you vote for Obama in 2008, we will no longer have to deal with Bush's wars. Try it, maybe it'll work. He is promising change, after all.