James Webb Space Telescope Closer To the Axe

astroengine writes "This could be considered 'strike two' for the deeply troubled James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Last week, the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Appropriations Subcommittee made the recommendation that the advanced infrared space telescope be cancelled. On Wednesday, the full House Science, Space and Technology Committee has approved the subcommittee's plan. The project may not be dead yet — the 2012 budget still has to be voted on my the House and Senate — but it sure is looking grim for 'Hubble's replacement.'"

Comments

So Painfully Frustrating

[eldavojohn]

Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?

I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[zoobaby]

Read the report: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=35294

In short, the answer is yes, management is that bad at NASA. I am coming to believe that we need to look at NASA's mission and alter it for the post Cold-War era.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Moryath]

It's quite simple.

Every time the "budget for NASA" is drawn up, it's not the actual NASA budget. If NASA were able to put the money where it was needed, they'd be in a lot better shape.

What Congress does instead is writes a "NASA budget" with a fuck-ton of strings attached. They give a "budget" for various missions, not overall. They cover salaries and the funding of various project bids, which can't be reassigned until Congress writes the next "NASA Budget."

Add to that the fact that NASA projects are usually on the order of a decade long, and most of these Congressional Fuckwits from either party are up for reelection (and a lot get replaced) every couple years, then come in and rewrite the budget and re-earmark things to the states of whatever party's in power to the loss of the states that aren't.

The current, added problem is that the Republicans - the party currently with "power of the purse" - have a hate-on for NASA because NASA was actually DOING the climate research and ongoing studies in response to screams of "global climate change is a myth, there's not enough research." The cuckoo clock wing of the party wants to kill NASA right now because they don't want there to BE enough research, ever.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Anonymous Coward]

Mismanagment at NASA is shocking. I do IT work for several NASA funded earth science programs. They'll award you a 1 year grant and then it takes 13-14 months for the money to show up. Then they bitch about how you didn't spend the money in time. They are swining the budget axe across the board becuase they are re-routing all that money into the new manned space flight program. Whatever they call it now that Constellation is canceled, even though it uses the same vehicles as Constellation. Manned space flight is just a corporate welfare program for Boeing and Lockheed. It's also pork for the districts where the components are built. If you want proof, just look at the requirements: Make it cheaper and safer than the Shuttle, but use the same expensive dangerous components (SSME, SRB, ET) as the shuttle built by the same people. The fact that congress is making this high level engineering decisions for NASA is insane. It's fundamentally broken.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[sycodon]

There are no more "Steely-Eyed Rocket Men" left at NASA. Just bureaucrats with technical degrees.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[flaming error]

> Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA?
From everybody I know who's ever worked with them.... yes.

One of my friends had a five man company that made some esoteric part. NASA liked it, thought they could use it on the ISS. They made a deal. Which included NASA sending two guys to observe those five guys, full time, for eight months. The widgeteers had an aggressive development schedule they had to meet, and they had to do it while being continuously audited by two empty-headed challengeatrons.

Another friend ran a machine shop, and he got a NASA deal and they paid for him to build a second story to house a huge water tank and pressure chamber for testing, then NASA walked away.

Except for a couple pockets of competence like JPL, I think NASA serves mainly as a pork barrel.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Chris Mattern]

Does anyone has some insight as to how this compares to, say the NIH budget and budgetary process? The NIH seems to function slightly better than NASA. Are there significant differences in the way Congress handles the two?

Yes, they're different. NIH grants are handed out by a peer-review board. NASA projects have their funding set by Congress.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[TWX]

If I remember correctly, the space race of the sixties and early seventies cost the US almost 1% of GDP to operate. The program also took lots of risks and resulted in the deaths of three Astronauts. We were competing for what we thought was our very existence against the biggest threat we had ever faced, an enemy who had stated their intent to ideologically turn us into them.

The Shuttle program of the eighties, which had military considerations (hence being a plane, along the lines of the X-20 Dyna-Soar) isn't really efficient at all. It's almost showing us how we have the means to brute-force our way to space. Using the shuttle to launch a satellite means not only is the weight of the satellite as a payload involved, but the weight of the shuttle, its supplies, and the personnel as well. It makes a lot more sense to launch just the satellite in a cowl. As for experiments in space, it probably makes more sense to design a capsule that has the capacity for the crew plus packed results from experiments with a non-returning, non-reentry-capable module that provides temporary habitation and laboratory space. The crew launches with both pieces, conducts experiments in the temporary module, packs the results into the capsule, straps in to the capsule, detaches from the module, deorbits and burns the module (if it's considered a risk in orbit) and then descends in the module. With the shuttle, since the same vehicle body is being reused (though it's probably more accurate to say 'recycled', considering the extensive refurbishing between each and every flight) the weight and design of the vehicle itself precludes a lighter, lower cost approach.

The Russians, while they've certainly had their problems, have had a much more cost-effective method with the Soyuz program, and the Progress modules for supplies delivery also have worked out fairly well. Cheap, designed for one trip, and able to be produced quickly and flown for their purpose without a lot of extra overhead.

Had we not suffered in the seventies with the material loss of Skylab, then in the eighties with Challenger and more recently with Columbia, without much real new achievement, we might have a public more interested in pushing the boundaries of space. But, with the stagnation of manned spaceflight since the seventies, the public just isn't inspired anymore, and I don't blame them. The cargo runs the shuttle has been used for don't do much for me either.

When NASA is faced with the collective ennui of a nation, it can't expect to get a lot of support from representatives, even when the programs are completely unrelated.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Colonel Korn]

Can someone please explain to me why despite the fairly linear rising budget of NASA we are shutting everything down right now? Is mismanagement really that bad at NASA? Is it saddled with debt from past programs?

I don't get it. It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock. "Oh, my parents' generation put people on the moon. Not only did my generation stop putting people and telescopes in space, we also made ground observatories illegal and have re-instituted burning people who claim the Earth is not the center of the universe. Why? Because it was more affordable in the very immediate future."

Maybe NASA is that mismanaged, but your own link includes a graph showing that NASA's budget has been in general decline since 1991: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1a/NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Lunix Nutcase]

That "greatest generation", i.e. the "boomers",

Wrong. The "greatest generation" was the generation who gave birth to the boomers.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[bravecanadian]

Nah, the boomers were not the greatest generation -- their parents were.

You're right about their lifestyle though. The boomers just lived off all the hard work of the greatest generation and piled up all the debts that we now face in the future.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[perryizgr8]

i don't gt it. the budget of nasa in 2011 is 19 billion $. if you adjust for 2007 dollars, this is quite low considering 1991 had 19 billion, and every year in the '60s had considerably more.
as a % of budget, the nasa budget has been close to 1%, and 3-4% during the '60s. in 2011: 19B/3.8T=0.5%. this is the LOWEST ever in nasa's history. how can you expect greater things if you just don't give them money? spacex has done some things for cheap. but those things are just that: cheap. not groundbreaking, not furthering research, just plain cheap ways to do what has been surpassed many times by what nasa has repeatedly done.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[darkmeridian]

I remember from a book discussing the Hubble Space Telescope that a significant political problem that NASA faces is the shifting political winds with regard to space exploration. If NASA put in a request for how much a project would actually cost, then the project would never be funded because of the "why are we spending so much on space when there are people starving in America" crowd. Thus, NASA would put in a low-ball request, which would be stuffed through. The sub-contractors would have to cut corners to meet the low-ball bid. Of course, these cut corners eventually result in huge catastrophes such as a defective main mirror on the space telescope. However, at that point, so much money has been put into the project that asking for a few billion more seems more attractive than losing all the money already spent.

If politicians would fund NASA appropriately, and more importantly, if they could commit to a certain level of funding past the current administration, then things would probably (not certainly) better. But NASA lives in fear that every four years, its budget might be eliminated. The current movement away from NASA-designed lift vehicles would be a good thing in this regard. If private enterprise were providing all the launch vehicles, NASA could spend the money more effectively on space exploration while other agencies such as the NSA, NRO, Air Force, etc. helped subsidize the research on the private launchers.

Just my two cents.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[UnknowingFool]

Yes but it's been asked to plan for one. Planning for one isn't simply putting some engineers in a room with coffee and donuts for a day. Engineers are probably working on discrete problems like sanitation, payload, communications, etc. While they won't have all the details just yet, they are formulating the questions to be answered. For example NASA funded the long term bed rest study to understand microgravity effects which will come into play.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[the gnat]

The NIH seems to function slightly better than NASA. Are there significant differences in the way Congress handles the two? Is the existence of private partners like Big Pharma enough to make the NIH work even with Congress' failings?

The other reply mentioned the main reason - the final funding decisions are largely in the hands of peer reviewers rather than Congressmen. But I'd also add that the NIH sponsors competing projects, which provides added motivation for the grant recipients to get something done as quickly as possible without wasting too much money. (It's basically applying the logic of free-market economics to public sector research.) The influence of Big Pharma is actually pretty minimal, although it can't hurt politically (nearly every PhD scientist working in biotech or pharma was funded by the NIH at some point). It's certainly nothing like the aerospace industry that depends on NASA for a large part of its business.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[spidercoz]

Technical degrees? More like MBAs, the downfall of American society. Which brings up a point: why are "Masters of Business Administration" so fucking terrible at administrating businesses? It's almost like they don't have any real skills or abilities and it's a bullshit degree. Oh wait...

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Uhhhh oh ya!]

Exactly, I would agree that NASA needs to take a look at their management chain but part of the chain they cant do anything about. The government is constantly readjusting their budget and not following through on promised funds. The politicians make the argument that there is work that needs to be done to bring jobs back. Yet despite all these cuts I don't see them doing anything useful, all the funding just heads to the military or bailing out some big business with worse management than NASA.

Now don't get me wrong I am not an anti military guy and I am all for them receiving a large budget but not if it means cutting other important programs to the point where they can not longer function. Military has made huge strides in R&D but it takes decades for it to reach the public. NASA brings the images and information about things light years from earth right to our computers as they discover it. But the government doesn't care about that they know most people wont notice a one or two decade gap in any new information about the universe outside earth.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[ColdWetDog]

I think it's more along the lines of the Winston Churchill aphorism:

"You can always depend on the Americans to do the right thing. After they have exhausted all other possibilities".

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[0123456]

This was part of the problem so frustrating about the space shuttle program. Originally, the shuttles were supposed to fly a LOT more missions and do a lot more. For one example: the fuel boosters were originally designed to be carried into space as reusable modules to add to a space station. Politics killed that part.

If I remember correctly, the Nixon administration told NASA how big a budget they could expect to have in the future and told them to design a program within that budget that they could push to Congress. NASA came back with a far more expensive program and acted surprised when they didn't get enough money.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Wyatt Earp]

Don't blame Bush for NASA's failing and Congress's inability to fund it properly, Republicans generally support NASA stronger than Democrats because states with heavy NASA presence generally vote Republican (Florida, Texas) and NASA goes hand in hand with military spending.

If you look at NASA spending and NASA foes in Congress its almost always cut by Democrats even during the Apollo era. Walter Mondale was the biggest foe of Apollo and personally made it his mission to cut funding to NASA

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch4.htm

"This item involves a fundamental and profound decision about the future direction of the manned space flight era. This is, in fact, the next moon-type program. I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying. What are our values? What do we think is more important?"

"Mondale then offered his amendment again, as he sought to delete the $110 million for the Shuttle/station as an appropriation."

Once Johnson got the Presidency, NASA started being defunded, then it goes up under Reagan, Bush, down and up and down under Clinton and up under Bush.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NASA_budget_linegraph_BH.PNG

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[SecurityGuy]

They're not, actually. A frightening amount of the nonsense that got us into this mess is precisely what they teach you NOT to do in business school. Unfortunately, organizations are often run by people with huge egos who are motivated solely by power and wealth. These qualities serve you well in getting to the top of an organization. They don't predispose you to listen to people who actually know things, whether those people have MBAs or PhDs, or whatever degree in a technical discipline you happen to favor.

Honestly, most of the nutty things I see done in business are done by people in leadership positions who don't have MBAs.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[tlhIngan]

Get rid of NASA as it exists, switch to missions where the humans stay on Earth, and let the rest of the world spend their money on manned entertainment (it's not "exploration").

You do realize what the first "A" in NASA stands for, right? Aeronautics - NASA actually performs a lot of R&D on stuff that moves through the air. Space is a big part of their budget because it's so expensive, so their aeronautical research divisions tend to go unnoticed.

NASA started as NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics), and it's still a huge (and quite important) part of NASA's work. It's just the work they do isn't as flashy.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[darkmeridian]

You're missing the point: contemporary technology made it possible to make a better mirror. In fact, the backup mirror was perfect. The "small" error in the main mirror caused only 15% of the entering light to be focused properly. That's a huge consequence. Furthermore, the Hubble main mirror was only 94-inches in diameter. The largest earth-based telescopes have mirrors that are over four times wider.

The mistake in the main mirror and the failure to catch it was the result of cost-cutting.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Jane Q. Public]

"Get rid of NASA as it exists, switch to missions where the humans stay on Earth, and let the rest of the world spend their money on manned entertainment (it's not 'exploration')."

No. Leave NASA alone to do what it is good at: robotics. Leave manned spaceflight to people who actually have balls and brains, like Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Burt Rutan. (Burt has officially retired; we are sorry to see him go but what a run he had! No less than 4 of the craft he designed are in the Smithsonian.)

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[ArcherB]

And still the government was running a deficit.

I believe I covered that here:
The surplus was actually bad for Bush and Congress at that time because it's really hard to say "no" to funding for anything when there is a surplus and deficit spending went through the roof.

In reality, the economy was running full throttle on the back of the crazed housing/lending bubble which everyone knew was unsustainable at the time.

Someone tried to do something about that.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.
--John McCain

HERE is a NYTimes article on the bill. Why did the bill fail? It never even made it to the floor. Democrats blocked it in committee.

''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.

So, if you are blaming the recession on the housing bubble, it appears that it was not only the fault of Congress, which is my primary point, but that Democrats in Congress are the problem, which was my secondary point.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[Dragonslicer]

FYI, it is the US Senate's responsibility to propose and pass a budget.

Not that I would be exceptionally surprised if this were now true, since even the president proposes a budget, but constitutionally, the House of Representatives has authority over government spending.

Re:So Painfully Frustrating

[hey!]

Nothing surprising in that. Think of what the world would be like if nobody rationalized doing things they knew very well were a bad idea. A world in which smart people never did anything stupid.

I heard a quite interesting theory about the change in the business culture in the US during the 1980s. In the 50s and 60s, the business culture was influenced by people who had fought in WW2. Those men had a sense of solidarity with the people working for them and a duty towards them. They had sense that the guys on the front line were doing something important. The story even cited one such CEO in the 70s who turned down a raise because it would have been bad for employee morale. In adjusted dollars he was making less than a tenth of what an average CEO in his position would make today.

I have no idea whether that theory is valid; I suspect to the degree it is true, it is probably an oversimplification. But still, that is the kind of person you want in the CEO's chair if you are an employee or an investor planning to hold the stock for the long term.

Solution.

[softWare3ngineer]

Tell congress that they can turn it around and use it as a spy satellite. Then attach it to the defense budget.

Re:Cut bait

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? 5 days of worth of sustaining the wars funds the James Webb Telescope.

NASA's eulogy

[MrKaos]

This is the true cost of the Iraq War. Such a shame.

Re:NASA's eulogy

[perryizgr8]

this is correct. the troll mod shows the degradation of the american society. the same people who once rallied behind their president and went for zero to moon in nine years can't even put a man in leo right now, and can't replace their old telescope.

Re:NASA's eulogy

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Why is this modded Troll? If you look at NASA's funding historically you would see that during NASA's golden age, the Apollo program, funding levels for NASA were closer in the ball park to funding levels for the current Iraq war. When there is only so much money to go around, you can buy guns, butter, or science: pick one.

I thought it was nearly built?

[SeeManRun]

If the thing is half built or more, then why cancel it. That is a real waste of money. You don't half do things, you find things that are yet to be started and cut those!

Re:I thought it was nearly built?

[Rolgar]

Fund it the old way, with private money. Business people who have acquired tens of millions or more money tend to know how to hold people accountable. If you give some benevolent millionaires and billionaires the opportunity to invest, with the understanding that they'll receive plenty of recognition, or the ability to auction the access time scientists want to buy (money they can get when they request funding for their research), you might be surprised at how quickly they will pony up the money, and how quickly they will turn this project around by figuring out who knows what they are doing, and who needs to be gotten rid of, and make the priority getting this thing into space instead of whatever the bureaucratic incentives are within NASA and the government. If the telescope time were able to bring in $2 million per day, that would bring in $700 million a year. After paying for scientists, communications, paying back the investment, you could see 600 million a year in profits, maybe with the understanding that once they've doubled their money, the ownership of the telescope reverts to a foundation that lowers the price but keeps it high enough to fund development of the next great space telescope.

I think that sounds a lot better than tossing the whole thing on the scrap heap.

Don't cancel it

[C_Kode]

Don't cancel it, just go through the project management and fire everyone who was mismanaging it causing it to go so far over-budget.

It probably had illegal crap involved such and kick-backs and over-charging. This is one reason why letting private companies develop these types of projects rather than government do it is usually so much cheaper. I think the same thing happen to the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) down in Waxahachie, Texas when the budgeted $4.4B practically tripled to over $12B

Re:Don't cancel it

[Soft]

Don't cancel it, just go through the project management and fire everyone who was mismanaging it causing it to go so far over-budget.

AFAICT, the reason why it's going so high over budget is that the budget itself was massively low-balled to begin with, so that the project would have a chance of being approved. In other words: lie about the true costs, they'll have to give you more later, when it's too high-profile to cancel.

The "mismanagement" here is that it wasn't spotted earlier. You can fire them, but you'll still have to either double the budget or cancel it all...

Write Congress Now

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Now's the time to put your money where your mouth is Slashdotters. Time and again we bemoan on this site that our politicians (in the U.S.) piss our tax dollars away on pork-ridden bills and unnecessary defense spending at the expense of science. Now is the time to let Congress know just how important we nerds find science like the JWST to be. There are at least two open letters to Congress written by folks on the internet. They can be found here and here.

You can find your Congress-critter's mailing and contact information here and here.

It won't take you more than 10 minutes to print on of those letters, fold it up, stamp it, and mail it to your representative or senator. We 'dotters bring down entire websites when we care enough about an issue to RTFA. Now is the time to bring Congress's mailroom to a standstill by declaring, in one unified voice, "You won't ransack our science research anymore!"

If we can afford two wars in the Middle East, Medicaire, Medicaide, and tax cuts for the rich assholes who are driving this country into the ground, then we can afford to build this telescope, not just for America, but for the continued progress and exploration of humanity in general.

Re:Read the writing on the wall

[ArcherB]

No one will openly say it, but the U.S. doesn't have the money for space projects anymore. No politician wants to be the first to say it (because Americans don't like to hear anything besides "We're Number One!!!!"), so they're just quietly defunding everything.

No, the US has plenty of money for space projects. The problem is priorities and compromise. We'd rather fund someone to NOT work for two years than fund a space agency. We would rather fund farmers to NOT grow something than fund a space agency. We would rather emulate the health care system of nations that have neither a military nor a space program but pay higher taxes and think that we can still have all three without paying more in taxes. And the problem with compromise is that Democrats will say, "Fine, we'll allow unemployment benefits expire after 1.5 years" and Republicans say, "OK, then we'll cut NASA". Eventually, we are left with nothing but military and welfare programs that neither side wants to cut and no one can think of common sense approaches like, I don't know, make welfare recipients work for the military.