(scroll down for the highlights in regards to NASA)
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.
(To start off, I'll point out that this is not yet the law of the land. JWST may yet survive if these recommendations are not adopted.)
As someone in the field, I am of differing minds about this:
On the one hand, JWST was going to be a cool mission, it's been highly ranked and anticipated for years, and NASA has positioned it as the successor to Hubble. Not to mention, it's in the process of being built right now...
On the other hand, JWST has indeed gone massively overbudget, and quite a few missions (some I had a personal interest in) have been cancelled, unofficially-but-probably because they needed the money to make JWST happen.
My impression of the way things have been for the last few years is that someone high up in the powers that be decided that JWST Must Happen, and thus everything else had to make way - the 10 year plan decided on last year by the astronomical division of the National Science Foundation (Decadal Review 2010) basically put off everything it actually liked until next decade, except JWST. The astronomical community has sacrificed a LOT so that JWST might live (and basically ante'd up all our money on this one thing), which means, depending on what side of the coin you're on, you're either upset that even those sacrifices didn't work, or glad to see the monster that ate your baby finally die.
There are a few problems with JWST that are not common knowledge (although many of you guys may know them...)
- JWST was not really a Hubble successor. It was an infrared telescope, more along the lines of Spitzer or Herschel, except much more powerful than either.
- As consequences of the above purpose, JWST was going to be cryogenically cooled and put at one of Earth's Lagrange points. That means no servicing missions or upgrades (with current technology), which I always thought was one of the best features of Hubble...
- The design (apparently) has tons of moving parts. Every single moving part is a point of failure, wherein If the sunshield didn't unfold, or the lens cap didn't come off as it should, congratulations: you've potentially got a multibillion-dollar asteroid. It might not be fatal, more like Hubble's astigmatic mirror, Galileo's broken main antenna, or Voyager 2's stuck scan platform, but every moving part makes it worse, and a more dangerous basket to put all your eggs in.
- Finally, and most irritatingly, JWST has a very limited lifespan. Because it's designed to look into mid-IR wavelengths, it has to be cryogenically cooled, and the coolant runs out in ~5 years. It's not like Hubble or the Mars rovers where it can keep trucking until it breaks, or fixed when it does. Now, Spitzer is still doing science as Warm Spitzer, which is to say without its farthest-infrared channels, now overwhelmed by the warmth of the spacecraft, but I don't know if JWST has anything that will still be functional after the cryogen runs out. Considering that the far-infrared channels were its raison d'etre I doubt it could do much other missions couldn't.
Consider that a limit on the amount of science JWST can do, and its usefulness to the community as a whole (because a lot of the time is already spoken for).
So, I've got some bad blood toward JWST and won't be all that sad if it goes. JWST was never, as far as I know, asked to downsize. The Shuttle was downsized, Hubble was downsized, the spacestation was scaled back, Spitzer was downsized, SIM was downsized... JWST has apparently been sold as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. I don't know if that's because of the science they wanted, or that someone in charge decided JWST Had To Happen and thus didn't pay close attention to what they were asking for...
All the same, it bothers me that even the people who decided JWST Has To Happen can't make it happen. In that climate, what chance does any other cool science mission have? And will Congress now decide NASA doesn't need any money? There are no more planned manned space missions, and this was the great unmanned mission... what does NASA do now? I'd love to see them reinstate all the missions they cancelled so that JWST might live (many of which were at the point of being built) but I don't somehow see that happening.
On that note I'm also a bit tired of seeing mission after mission slowly get to the point of being built and then get cancelled. Are we ever going to get any cool toys, or just blow all the money on blueprints and feasibility studies? Congress needs to come up with a plan for NASA (or let NASA come up with a plan for NASA) and then let them work on it for more than a year before they mandate a new direction. I'm not even asking for more money to get things done faster!
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Such value, yet unspecified, is of same order of the whole NASA science program. Considered that JWST has been expected with enthusiasm, what that sound strange is the "poor management" around it. Maybe if the Congress were to ask to the "poor managers" about its further overbudget, they does replied that "we don't know", then the Congress terminating founding.