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NASA's Big Telescope Avoids Death-by-Budget-Cut
coondoggie writes "NASA's most ambitious and highly over-budget space projects, the James Webb Space Telescope has apparently been spared the budgetary axe. The US Senate Committee on Appropriations has approved about $530 million of NASA's $17.9 billion budget to 'enable a 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.'"
If only they renamed it to the "enduring freedom" telescope it would be much easier to get budget approval.
If I may be permitted, I'd just like to say
FUCKING AWESOME!!!!
Very good news indeed. Thank goodness Congress has gone completely mental and there are still a few people with vision and curiosity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It might be more accurate to just say they are going to throw away another $530 million before they get around to killing it.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
While the money has been allocated the total NASA budget has not been increased, in fact it has gone down. That means that the money for it is coming from somewhere. This could easily damage other important programs. Until we know exactly where things are going to come from this is a cause for concern. In general, all the sciences are being hit hard right now. The situation seems somewhat similar to Russian roulette with the programs which don't get bullets getting budgets.
So they were forced to cut the entire manned space program and from all that money that was saved there not a tiny fragment can be spent on finishing an already half-built space telescope? Does all the money really have to be given to wealthy corporations instead of science?
it'll be antique. That is unless anyone has anything better. Which seems unlikely. Why not put it back on the front burner?
All your database are belong to U.S.
For starters, IANAA (I am not an astronomer) but I AM dating one, who is currently applying for prize fellowships/looking for post-doc positions. She explained that cancellation of JWST would effectively nullify the careers of many recent and soon to graduate astronomers, and put a ~50 year hold on the progression of astronomy.
Going into a bit of detail on this point, she explained that Hubble's Ultra Deep Field exposures revealed extremely well formed galaxies, meaning that even the faintest objects were not indicative of how galaxies looked/formed shortly after the Big Bang. JWST will be able to take even longer, higher resolution exposures that will reveal even fainter, more distant objects, hopefully leading Comologists to their holy grail of directly observing galaxy formation as it appeared shortly after the appearance of the cosmos.
Without JWST, cosmologists basically were going to have to twiddle their thumbs (ok, run simulations/develop further theories) until the next deep space observatory came online in ~30-50 years.
When the economy is severely hit and many of the citizens of the nation are in search of their livelihood, I think, Nasa's experiments are cutting the budget that is more required for the citizens of the nation. We do not want to see US decline i.e. happening of the rich countries of Europe. http://www.infosphaira.com/contact.html
vishal dogra
Folks, I work at Goddard. I don't work on JWST, but I have many colleagues who do. JWST is a "defective by design" project that probably will never fly, or, if it does, will simply create a large piece of space junk out at L2--where we don't have the ability to send a servicing mission.
It's been over budget since day zero, and the program management has chronically misestimated funding and development time requirements. For example, there is a subsystem called the microshutters that supposed to be used to block light in the optical path on a pixel-by-pixel basis. The program management assumed that it would develop the technology and reduce it to practice for around $100,000,000. TI spent more than 10X that amount developing a similar but simpler system that does not have to stand up the shock and vibration requirement of a space launch. That subsystem is perhaps 4X over budget, years late, and still not working successfully--and it is far from the only problem system on the satellite.
With the money saved by killing JWST we could fly a dozen or so Explorer class missions that would provide real astrophysics and astronomy data sooner than JWST. JWST has sucked the assets and staffing out of too many good project already. Please, Congress, kill the damn thing.
530M is a budgetary drop in the bucket compared to how much we spend on military shit. 530 million over 7 years (2018 launch).. that's like 45 Tomahawk missiles that we won't be able to buy each year for the next 7 years! (1.45m each estimated) OH NO!! The terrorists are winning..
I'm stunned that congress was able to remove it's head from it's own a$$ long enough to make a decent decision on this.
The Senate didn't specify where the money will actual come from. Maybe they can recover the 535 million buck from the Solyndra loan.
i guess NASA forgot to mention that the NSA gets to use it 50% of the time to "look at women err-women's uhh bikinis f-for manufacturing defects. yes, manufacturing defects". not exactly what what i meant when i said we need more government oversight but I'm cool with it if i get some copies of the recordings.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Any Americans can say if this is more or less guaranteed or some morons will appeal and find a new way to cull it?
The JWST seems to be the only "might discover something that changes everything" project left.
Who was offered the opportunity to final-check the Hubble mirror, but declined, as I was busy with an entire SpaceLab, and already knew it to be flawed, and didn't want to be the one guy who had to tell them their $810mil mirror was not focusable, I just hope they get this right before flinging it. If we are to survive as a country doing science, this had better be right. We must do this. Screw the manned-flight crap. We must need do science. We can follow along for the rides later.
That Hubble also went WAY over budget, not to mention the incurred cost of sending a shuttle up not once but twice to fix and upgrade it. But it has delivered some seriously stunning photos. My favorite is the deep field they did, with the telescope pointed at what appeared to be an empty patch of space only to find it loaded with galaxies. So even if the JWST is over budget, I'm sure we'll see even more stunning pictures and be able to explain more about the universe.
Moon shots and Hubble had similar financial overruns. I watched Armstrong live, but was just as awestruck by Hubble's deep field pics and Sagan's blue dot.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
From over here NASA funding looks like it's created one real disaster (Space shuttle deaths by pork) and is responsible for a long list of minor failures. Spectacular success occurs almost every time on projects small enough to get under the dollar figure that shows up on the pork radar but large projects get carved up with the primary objective of sharing the money among those represented by the loudest voices. Since the primary objective then changes to getting taxpayers money into the correct pockets the actual projects either succeed but bleed cash or get wound up when the pork barrellers have been too greedy to get away with stealing so much so quickly.
I really do not understand why Congress is allowed to vote on these budget items at all (apart from corruption of course). Controlling the entire NASA budget is one thing and makes sense but voting on specific items resulted in the horse trading and other bullshit that required the design change that killed Astronauts. Despite Feynman turning a carefully constructed whitewash into an exposure of that flawed process NASA is still suffering from it fifteen years later. It's a sign of the major talents of the people at NASA that they have managed to get so much done despite being little more than a front for blatant pork barrelling.
"Death-by-Budget-Cut" since 1987, at least:
http://www.google.com/search?q="Death-by-Budget-Cut"&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=iceweasel-a#q="Death-by-Budget-Cut"&hl=en&source=lnt&tbs=tl:1&sa=X
Well, at least the phrase itself.
Can't work out how that happened, but it's great news.
Despite Feynman turning a carefully constructed whitewash into an exposure of that flawed process NASA is still suffering from it fifteen years later.
The Rogers Commission Report was 1986 -- so it's 25 years. :/
NASA's most ambitious and highly over-budget space projects, the James Webb Space Telescope has apparently been spared the budgetary axe.
What are the other ones? Seriously, do the editors do their job?
Yes a typo I didn't notice until after posting, but the entire thing looks a lot like something I could have written here ten years ago anyway :(
I wonder if NASA will ever get to be NASA first instead of a pork distribution network first.