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

[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

[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

[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.

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: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.

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:Where has the wonder gone?

[ridgecritter]

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