JWST needs to be cut, killed and destroyed. It is not only overbloated, but also steals money from other missions – and this is inexcusable. If only these folks that lied about mission could answer for this failure… Yeah, I can dream. For example, no one answered for Shuttle – most horrible and grotesque overbudgeted monstrosty ever sold KNOWINGLY on promises that was completely false. So why anyone from smaller mission would fear any consequences of lies? Fish rots from head, indeed.

I find hilarious and horrible how many people here repeats sunk cost fallacy, including Phil himself. On supposedly scientific blog, no less.

The problems I see with JWST are manifold:

1.) It’s hideously expensive, because someone in NASA’s upper echelons decided it Had To Happen, and thus its success or failure was never seriously considered until the budget started growing completely out of control.

No, it’s hideously expensive because it’s never been done before and the budget projections were just informed guesses. And, hey, guess what? Issues arose that had to be resolved which no-one had anticipated, and this took time and hence money.

Whoever decided to pitch it as the successor to Hubble was a very smart person. I also wonder if it was started by NASA’s upper management wanting to make Hubble 2, and THEN asking scientists what they wanted for the super-duper new space satellite, rather than having scientists approach NASA with a specific goal in mind.

I’m not sure if this is even relevant.

2.) It’s in the IR only. Apparently it once included UV and optical capabilities like Hubble, but those were cut.

But the IR remains a portion of the spectrum in which so many discoveries are waiting to be made. Hubble is limited in how far it can look because of the deep-deep-redshift at extreme distances. IR imaging will give far more information about really, really deep-sky objects.

2a.) JWST is really the successor to Spitzer (or Herschel).
2b.) There are MANY IR observatories up at the moment, because IR is the current flavor of the month.

But its capabilities will be far greater than those of Spitzer or Herschel and (IIUC) JWST will observe at more different wavelengths. And it is a successor to Hubble inasmuch as it will be the flagship space-based telescope, with the main aim of uncovering information about the evolution of the universe (remember that Hubble’s main task when it was launched was to nail down an accurate figure for the Hubble constant).

If you want UV, it’s Galex or nothing. UV apparently went out with the IUE satellite.

Didn’t Hubble observe in the UV also?

Besides, UV will provide more information about stuff we already know is there, but it does not have any prospect of informing us about really distant stuff, which is what we need to be able to understand the early evolution of the universe.

Chasing the same ball is bad in soccer, and it’s also bad for cross-discipline synergies (if you can call IR vs X-ray vs radio “cross-discipline”) in astronomy.

Your analogy fails. JWST is several steps better than any IR predecessor.

2c.) BECAUSE of the IR wavelengths it uses, JWST will have a limited lifespan. When the cryogen runs out, it might be able to continue operating in its bluest wavelengths like Warm Spitzer is doing, but… its prime reason for existing will be over.

Hang on a sec . . . I was under the impression that JWST is to keep itself cool with a whopping reflective sunshade, not a tank of He (l). Or maybe it uses both. Either way, the sunshade should make it last longer than any previous IR space telescope.

3.) It’s not going to orbit the Earth. This also has to do with the IR wavelengths it uses, but I’m making a separate point out of it because: There will be no cryogen resupply. There will be no replacing equipment if it breaks or someone builds a better one. The spacecraft has to unfurl itself because the mirror is too big to fit into a rocket! If that fails, we lose $8.7 billion right there. Galileo space probe, anyone?

I suspect that the team building the spacecraft is well aware of the possible failure modes, and has solutions in place to address them. Maybe this is one of the reasons that it has overrrun its original budget projections. Besides, the same issues apply to any other space telescope (apart from cryogen resupply, which would almost certainly be hideously dangerous to do in orbit anyway). Repair of satellites was what Shuttle was best at (insofar as jobs that could not be done by any other rocket system are concerned).

4.) Because of the limited duration of the mission, the chances of a junior scientist like me actually getting time on it are low. (Archival data will be plentiful, but there’s less control over what you get) Hubble isn’t easy at all, but at least it’s been around for 21 years and will continue for a while yet: there’s a greater chance to distribute the impact. The best way I can think of is getting some JWST fellowship.

This may be true, but with the Shuittle no longer available to repair space-based telescopes, the same point applies to anything else NASA might launch.

The sad thing is, there ARE some missions that have to be enormous to be useful at all- LISA comes to mind. I have no real idea how gravity waves work or how they have to build the detectors, but I know enough to accept the idea that IF they ever want to detect gravity waves, they WILL have to spend a lot of money on the equipment.

But LISA will face all the same shortcomings as you point out for JWST (except cryogen supply), and it would be even more blue-sky technology than JWST, so would require a larger development budget and more development time than even JWST. At least with JWST, the challenges are known and can be overcome, so it has a pretty good chance of working if it ever gets launched. LISA would be much more of a shot in the dark.

Additionally, we know with a high degree of confidence that there are distant objects that we cannot currently observe but that JWST gives us a good chance of observing. And we can also be fairly confident that observation of these objects will give us new information about the early universe.

We do not currently know if gravitational waves even exist, so what happens if LISA gets launched and returns no data at all? Sure, it will give us a maximum limit for the amplitude of gravitational waves, but it won’t rule out their existence for certain, although it would represent a strong hint that they probably don’t exist.

JWST does not exactly inspire that kind of acceptance. Maybe I need to read up more.

Maybe you should consider it in the context of what Hubble was intended to achieve, and what JWST is intended to achieve, and compare that against what an alternative mission might achieve should one be launched.

There are two memes that the JWST folk are trying to ingrain into the community: 1) If we get cut, you’re never seeing that money, so don’t ask us to be cut! 2) “If only we had as much money as we wanted, when we wanted, it would be cheaper, and we’d launch in 2015!” (Hell, you can still find web sites of JWST people quoting a 2013 date…) I believe #1 up to a point – but these latest increases are explicitly being talked about as coming out of the hide of the rest of NASA.

And it’s not really clear that, even given unlimited resources, a 2015 launch would be achievable. It really would leave no room for mistakes and revision. For example, it would assume, say, that the detectors that you just built merely needed to be tested and integrated, and weren’t degrading on the ground and need to be refurbished… (Which is exactly what happened with the current batch of detectors.)

Saving that $900 M extra expense and launching in 2015, aside from presuming no mistakes happen,would mean that JWST would need about $1B/year for the next 3 years. There just isn’t the money in NASA to do that. It would gut the rest of space science.

And please, let us stop saying that this is peanuts compared to defense. Sure, finishing JWST is “only” two weeks of Iraq & Afghanistan or so. But the more relevant comparison is that the $5 B overrun is a substantial fraction of the yearly NSF budget. It’s 17% of the yearly NIH budget. It’s a Chandra plus a Fermi plus a Kepler. It’s a lot of freaking money.

Again, what’s our line in the sand where we’d say this was too much? $9B? $10B? 2020 launch? 2022 launch? It’s a legitimate question to ask *now*, while there is still a chance to do something about it.

Let’s review the history of how we got here. In the 2000 decadal report, JWST lowballed its cost. *Everybody* knew they were lowballing. But the community went along with it, and there were no mechanisms then to review costs in the decadal. It got ranked #1 with a presumed price of something south of $2B. Hell, I’d buy a JWST for $2B, but thing is, we all knew that wasn’t going to be the case. But as the saying goes, it’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, and that’s what people were banking on.

It was much, much harder to build than promised. And it was really badly managed. Both of those combined swelled the price further – to $6.5 B or so. That’s 3-4X what was promised!

Would it have been put #1 in the decadal report of 2000 if it was quoted as $6.5B? No, absolutely not.

Finally, the time delay to 2018 is adding maybe another $1B or so. (The remaining $1+B is probably largely the 5 years of operating costs.)

To date, JWST has spent $3.5B. Under the most optimistic scenario of it gets unlimited funds as quickly as it can take them, it takes another $3B to finish, and it launches in 2015 (presuming *nothing*, absotlutely *nothing* goes wrong). Or under the proposed scenario, it takes $4B more to complete, and launches in 2018. So, one has only gotten 47%-54% of the way there. You can’t really blame that on Congress. You blame the community for willful ignorance & the managers for screwing up.

The question is, do we go for forward and have faith that the remaining 46%-53% goes much better than the past 11 years? It is not an unreasonable question to ask, sooner rather than later.

@94 – NASA & the US has really burned bridges with the international community. The 2010 decadal was truly schizophrenic. They strongly recommended international cooperation as the best way forward in the future. But to show their dedication to this concept, they put IXO as #4, effectively killing it, and out of whole cloth invented WFIRST, which is in direct competition with the European EUCLID. Yeah, JWST has some international cooperation on it, but canceling it wouldn’t do any more damage than the substantial damage already done by the past decadal report.

So why is NASA doing the same with the JWST? Seriously, why does the JWST has to be a US only project? Just go out and ask for international help, call it an international project. It is not only Americans who want to see the JWST out there in space, it is everybody on this planet who has some interest in science. Put away your pride US. It is costing us very, very good science.

When it comes to any issue of public spending, government involvement, or global warming, the comments on BA look like a Fark.com thread…lots of strong, fact-free opinions, lots of poorly researched anti-government whining, a great sudden surge of “skepticism”, selectively applied only to any and all government enterprises, and several dozen pairs of badly sewn, old, smelly, size 20 libertarian clown shoes.

“Here in California there’s at least a weekly news story about state tax money being spent on some idiocy, or just simply unaccounted for. Things like a cash strapped school building a theater worthy of Broadway, the construction contracts going to people who are buddies of the local school board and politicians, or another school with a newly completed building that gets torn down before even opening and rebuilt on another part of the campus due to some administrator’s whim. And then the Progressives and their ilk stand around all butthurt and baffled people don’t want to cough up more cash. Ideology = religion. “We’re here to save you! Why do you reject us!”

This stuff is going on all all day every day. If you don’t see it that’s your problem and your fault.”

Citations, please? Or are you just another one of millions of conservatives who are nothing but worthless liars, intent on destrotying everything that public projects can achieve on the holy altar of the free market, even in areas where the free market fails spectacularly? Talk about ideology! Please show me ONE school building that was built, and then torn down and rebuilt on NOTHING BUT THE WHIM OF A SINGLE ADMINISTRATOR. Even if you can find one honest example (which I doubt) please explain how one bad decision is somehow an indictment of ALL government, as you seem to be very dishonestly implying here.

Also, I happen to work at a high school that is now, for a variety of reasons, short of cash, in a district that keeps laying off teachers and cancelling art programs while looking for no other solutions. I work in the theater that is on campus. It is a beautiful fully modern theater, and cost about 10 million dollars to build. The district has great performing arts programs, and at least one school in ther district needed to have a good theater, which also serves as a professional quality community theater as many public and private college campuses have. This was achieved through a public/private partnership, where the bulk of the money came from private donors over a collection period of almost ten years. The school district, (or horrible, evil, tyrannical government if you prefer) chipped in the unused land on a corner of the campus and a small amount of the funding, less than what it would have cost to build even a modest building, and now owns & helps maintain the theater, in concert with a non-profit org. As a result, our community has a fully modern, yes, Broadway worthy theater at a bare minimum cost to the taxpayers. It functions as a venue for school plays and talent shows, local theater groups, speaking engagements, memorial services, public events of all kinds and we also, like colleges, bring in educational programs and high-quality touring shows. Because concerned and enthusiastic INDIVIDUALS were willing to work WITH local government, instread of being nothing but disgusting lying crybabies like you, our community has a wonderful resource, and a vibrant, community-wide, continuing arts program that simply would not have happened without both private and public resources and involvement.

THIS is what progressives do, and jerks like you will always lie, lie, and lie some more to destroy it all, just because of your irrational fear of anything that is accomplished with communal resources instead of relying solely on your mythical magic bootstraps.

Get bent, Superman- you’re useless and irrelevant, and so is your dishonest dogma.

“2c.) BECAUSE of the IR wavelengths it uses, JWST will have a limited lifespan. When the cryogen runs out, it might be able to continue operating in its bluest wavelengths like Warm Spitzer is doing, but… its prime reason for existing will be over.”

This is in fact completely wrong. JWST has no cryogens – it’s passively cooled.

And it’s not infrared in the far-infrared sense of Spitzer – just slightly-longer-than-visible infrared – and operates much warmer than Spitzer does. It really is fair to describe it as much more like HST – many-megapixel detectors with a decently wide field and diffraction-limited modes, imaging spectrographs, coronagraphs – than like Spitzer, which has far-IR detectors with a tiny field of view, limited resolution, etc.