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.'"

Comments

Mismanaged, but Essential

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:More Good Money After Bad!

[mojo-raisin]

Reading NASA's website, it sounds like the microshutters have already been developed and shipped

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/microshutters.html
and
http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/7594/1/75940N_1?isAuthorized=no

"The assemblies have passed a series of critical reviews, which include programmable 2-D addressing, life tests, optical contrast tests, and environmental tests, required by the design specifications of JWST."

The bleeding edge

[TapeCutter]

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.