NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope (nytimes.com)

In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.

Comments

Re:Remove all the private contractors

[Eravnrekaree]

Part of the problem with NASAs cost is congressional mandates as pork barell to districts with the plants. Shelby comes to mind. If NASA were more independent of congress perhaps their engineers could exert more discipline on their suppliers and select based on best value?

Re:Time for a special project

[wooferhound]

Would you rather spend another 9 billion on a new one, or a billion finishing this one?

This project has grown Too Big To Fail . . .

Canned and replaced by what?

[kbahey]

Our atmosphere is opaque to infrared. So any infrared astronomy has to be done from space. Hubble can only do partial infrared (specifically near-infrared), not the rest of the infrared spectrum.

Infrared is needed because it can peer through dust clouds. See this image of Eagle Nebula in visible vs. near infrared by Hubble to see the difference.

JWST works mainly in infrared, near and far. Moreover, it has much more aperture than Hubble (~ 2.4 meters vs 6.5 meters).

All this means that JWST can see back in time when the first stars that shined in the cosmos, and shed light on how the Big Bang progressed. Important stuff, and no instrument compares to its capabilities.