James Webb Space Telescope, information, updates and discussion Options

[Redstone]

The manufacture of the JWST mirror blanks has now been completed.

Despite this milestone, the fate of JWST is still somewhat precarious, because although the scientific bang from the telescope is expected to be huge, the bucks required have increased to a staggering $4.5 billion. A Space.com article on the squeeze in NASA's space-based astronomy plans gives some background.

The JWST home page can be found here.

The Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs Hubble, also has a site here. As does ESA.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Particularly interesting quotes from the article:

(1) "At the beginning of the millennium, US astronomers thought that their most-wanted project would cost $1 billion...NASA's latest budget puts the project's price tag, including $1 billion for a decade's worhthof operations, at $4.5 billion. That's more than the entire annual research and development budget of the National Science Foundation; it represents more than $1 million for each full member of the American Astronomical Society." Which, I think, makes my point again about the low cost-effectiveness of most space science, and the immense difficulty it would have competing for government funding in any honest competition with other kinds of scientific research.

(2) One part of the problem DOES seem to be NASA HQ's fault. "A delay in the government's decision to move from a US launcher to the Ariane added an estimated $300 million as highly paid engineers were unable to move forward until they knew which rocket they were designing for. The situation is particularly embarrassing given that the cost of delaying the decision ended up being greater than the cost of the launch." Ah, the rationality of government. Still, this is only 1/12 of the total cost rise.

(3) As for the other causes of the cost underestimate: "The Decadal Survey guessed the cost as $1 billion. Studies in the mid-1990s had pegged the price as between $500 million and $1 billion. These were based on the hope -- unfulfilled, as it happened -- that the Webb Telescope might take advantage of advances in building low-cost spaceraft developed by the military."

However: "Garth Illingworth of UC-Santa Cruz, who chaired the 1990 panel [which much more acurately predicted its current cost], chalks the anomalously low estimates from the 1990s up to a 'lack of reality' inherent in the 'faster, better, cheaper' philosophy of Dan Goldin...Reinhard Genzel of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garchning says it was clear at the time that a $500 million estimate for the Webb Telescope was a 'political price'...

"Today, Illingworth inveighs against the 'extraordinarily bad, artificial cost estimates' of the Goldin era. But the 2000 Decadal Survey seems to have been happy to accept them. The world of big science is well used to projects being lowballed -- a process that gets schemes started on the basis of a low-cost estimate, with the implicit hope that by the time the true costs are known inertia and vested interests will make it impossible to pull out. Lowballing is not a practice anyone would like to defend on principle, but histories like the Hubble's show it can work." That is, our old friend the Camel's Nose again -- exactly the same technique NASA used to get Shuttle and Station funded.

(4) Where Hubble is concerned: "[Hubble project scientist Robert] O'Dell recalls that in 1972, Hubble's total price including its first year of operations was projected to be...$1 billion in today's prices. According to Robert Smith, a historian at Canada's Univ. of Alberta who wrote a political history of the telescope...'the development cost of Hubble to date is certainly more than $4 billion.'

"NASA's Eric Smith adds that when new instruments and operating expenses are added, that comes to $9 billion. This doesn't include the cost of four space shuttle servicing missions to Hubble, and a fifth being planned -- the cost of a shuttle launch can be put at about $500 million. All in all, building, launching, using and refurbishing Hubble has probably been the most expensive undertaking ever made in the name of pure science; the mission is still, remarkably, costing over $300 million a year." (And that's ignoring the fact that the true cost of each Shuttle mission, using honest accounting, is over $1 billion!)

(5) Charles Beichman of JPL, a leading light of the cancelled Terrestrial Planet Finder mission...thinks that the Webb Telescope will be 'a fine machine. It will do fantastic science.' In fact, he is on one of the instrument teams. But when he goes to professional meetings, he sees more young astronomers attending sessions on planet-finding than on Hubble or the Webb Telescope." Of course, Beichman couldn't POSSIBLY be a biased witness in this matter. Heavens, no. But I do find it at least plausible that the examination of other solar systems is considered, on balance, more romantic -- and thus more interesting -- by genuine astronomers than cosmology or other fields of space astronomy are, just as it is by the nonscientific public.

Still, as the article says, "anyone who doesn't realize that TPF would be costlier than the Webb Telescope is dreaming." I shudder to think what the real cost of THAT endeavor will end up being -- which is why I have no objection at all to protractedly deferring it until Kepler and/or SIM have given us the initial census of the frequency of potentially habitable planets which we need to make even the most basic decisions as to the design of TPF.

In summary, it is very hard to blame the Webb Telescope problem itself on NASA HQ -- although of course the cuts in space science spending as a whole can be blamed on the hypertrophied (or, to be more accurate, metastasized) manned space program. But where Webb's tendency to hog most of whatever the actual space astronomy budget turns out to be is concerned, I think that space astronomers -- to quote Popeye the Sailor -- "buttered their bread and now they've got to sleep in it."