Mind you when there are folks wanting to stand for President who think that the Earth was created in 6006BC and man co-existed with dinosaurs, what hope is there? I just hope that Russia, ESA, JAXA, India and China continue their visions for the human future in space.

“Nothing at all. It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.”

However, astronomy and astrophysics do have a hold on the imaginations of the citizenry in a way physics and chemistry never will. Which is a large part of the reason why, in the past 50 years, we’ve been willing to put the US taxpayer’s money into it. At some point in their lives, *everyone* looks up at the sky and wonders what is going on out there. The entire field is, simply put, inspiring (making it both an honor and a duty to work in it). If the US wishes to remain the kind of country that attracts top quality talent in ALL fields of human endeavor, we’re going to need a certain amount of inspiration — not because it makes money for us directly, but because of the knock-on effects. As Harold Urey noted about an earlier civilization: “Athens built the Acropolis. Corinth was a commercial city, interested in purely materialistic things. Today we admire Athens, visit it, preserve the old temples, yet we hardly ever set foot in Corinth.”

Do the citizens of the US want to be the kind of country that only looks back on our former greatness, or looks forward to new achievements? That is the question before us, and I for one am willing to submit to taxes at the level seen during the Clinton administration in order to have a positive response. I just don’t know where the rest of my fellow citizens lie on this question.

I would state just as firmly that I cannot conceive of a fully socialized system that could deliver the kind of practical implementations such basic knowledge has enabled as what we have today. It is inconceivable to me that human altruism is sufficient to take the place of markets. Some degree of profit motive is demonstrably worth the costs incurred by the corrupting powers of human greed, if those powers can be kept in check. With proper regulation, the two halves of the scientific enterprise can and do complement each other. This is a model that has WORKED for us throughout the past two centuries, at least. The signs I can see of it breaking down is the increasing power of corporations coupled with the short-term demands of alarmingly powerful institutional investors. If anything, too much privatization is ruining this very successful model, and the evidence of this ruin is everywhere, if these libertarian zealots could be bothered to look.

I cannot fathom how such economic dogmatism is persuasive, as disconnected from any real-world evidence of human endeavor as it is. And this nonsense isn’t about God or the fate of our immortal souls, either. It’s about nothing more than money, and what some regard as, apparently, a God-Given Right to have no mortal compel them to part with even a little of it. Far more than televangelists and creationists, these people make me fear for humanity.

1) The overall level of funding for those four subgroups of NASA’s budget has been approximately $4.5B since 2008,

2) Robbing Peter to pay Paul – Earth and Planetary sciences have assumed a larger share at the expense of astrophysics.

Also, $4.5B at 2.5% inflation for four years would require $5.1B to be ‘constant’ so if anything is to be said here beyond the internal distribution of funds it is that Congress/NASA have not given inflation increases. But clearly astrophysics has been out of favor now for at least four years and under both Dem and Rep House leadership.

I’m feeding you with peanuts while you’re contributing important discoveries to the public domain. Go ahead, quit tomorrow. Take your talents to the private sector. I dare you.

it is breathtakingly dishonest how you ‘free market’ types take it for granted that we (scientists) share all of our hard-earned knowledge with everyone while you (non-discovering moneymakers) routinely turn this knowledge into money and make us beg for the peanuts you feed us with.

no more knowledge for the public domain if the public is types like yourself.

In the House budget astrophysics is given $683M, the same as in the President’s request where JWST was funded separately. So under the House budget the rest of astrophysics would be starving just as it was when JWST was sucking the money. If they really cancel JWST, couldn’t they even give some of the money back to be used for other projects? And once astrophysics funding is reduced to significantly <$1B, I'm afraid it'll be hard to get it back to a higher level where it was even before JWST.

Just to underscore — the “crisis” for the community isn’t that JWST was removed from the Astrophysics Division or that the budget for the Division appears low. The crisis is that Congress (well, one subcommittee at least) wants to terminate JWST.

Now, there is one way this crisis could metamorphosize into another one. This is that Congress directs NASA to do JWST, but without providing funds. Then the crisis becomes someone elses, probably other science accounts. The Congressional protectors of JWST toast their success, and Administrator Bolden is left to decide who exactly gets screwed (most likely the other science accounts). However this turns out, the uber crisis is that JWST has rendered the astronomical community and NASA non-credible in managing flagship science missions. That is, in the long term, really the fallen fortune of the astrophysics community,

Innovation is a benefit, research is a cost. Assuming the Library of Alexandria never burns down again, anytime a discovery is made it’s added to the pool of collective knowledge. And it’s fairly cheap to exploit someone else’s discovery despite modern IP law. (e.g. We’re not paying the family of the inventor of the wheel to use his discovery.)

I said we as a nation have been bearing the cost of research a long time, and now countries like China have had spectacular catch up growth using our hard earned discoveries. We can turn the tables and let China pay the costs of basic science research and we can reap the benefits at nearly no cost to our government.

I have first-hand knowledge of how the astronomical community “let” us get into this situation on JWST.

First, leaders in the astronomical community went along with the ridiculous cost estimates and the waste because they felt that any bad news for JWST would jeopardize the mission and there was no way that the budget could be used to fund other missions anyway (notice that they are still saying we should save the mission because of this same logic). Also, as pointed out in an earlier post, anybody not towing the party line would have been escorted out of the community (gotta love “objective” science and competition of ideas – not!).

I heard the same sentiment over and over and over during the past 10 years of the project. Also, one of the official astronomy “watchdogs” over the mission, AURA/STScI, repeatedly told their employees to look the other way as GSFC squandered project money by having everyone and their mother charge the JWST project code in a series of endless engineering meetings on designs that were going to have to be redone by the real builders down the road (the contractors). We were told, “this is the way great missions get built, if you can’t stand to see sausage get made, then go do something else. Oh, and by the way, GSFC are the ones who write us that $50M check every year, so best be quiet.” I wouldn’t be surprised if JWST were to be a total technical failure if it did get launched, as all the “oversight” has been bought with cold hard cash.

This reminds me of the bankers who were given their perp-walk in the financial meltdown, all the while explaining, “Well, everybody was doing this, so it must be ok.”

OK, this community is biased towards science and funding it. What is your bias? The best comment I ever heard about economists was that “you can take all the economists in the world, place them head to toe, and they wouldn’t reach a conclusion.”

Your statements are filled with qualifiers like ‘probably’. Also there are numerous inflammatory words like ‘sinkhole’, ‘frivolous’ and ‘petty’.

You use China as an argument, suggesting that they benefit off western research. Then you suggest we turn the tables by using their research. So which is it? Is research an economic benefit, or isn’t it? Or it is only an economic benefit when China does it, because that buttresses your flimsy argument?

A little history is in order here and China is on the table. The Chinese imperial state, prior to the Communist era, was weakened by many factors. One of those factors was that China didn’t place a high value on technology and fell far behind western powers. As a result China lost control of it’s world and future for roughly a century. Much the same thing happened in Japan.

Fundamental economic theory states that businesses, technolgies and business models have a stereotypic growth curve. High growth, maturity, and then decline. Stating that these businesses, technologies and business models “would happen anyway” completely misses the issue of timing. A business lead time of 1-5 years on competitors is golden in the marketplace, yet you overlook this entirely.

So you are left with just one refuge. Perhaps there is a failure to transition research & development to commercial success? While this was a big concern several decades ago, and will never completely go away as a concern, take a look around. In the academic world (as one example), universities have jumped on this big time. Business incubators, spinoff companies, patent portfolios, venture capital funding, there is a whole support system to commercialize R&D. There is serious money in making this happen and despite the high failure rates, the successes make it worthwhile.

The Chinese themselves wouldn’t willingly repeat the path of their own history. Why would we chose to do so?

Of course, the discussion has moved, as it inevitably does, to the usual claims that public funding for some-or-other field of basic science is at best an extravagance, and at worst a form of theft, if it can’t show some kind of immediate and tangible economic value. Actually, such appropriations, in the minds of some, amount to a grave violation of basic human rights and Our Freedoms even if they do have tangible economic value.

Let’s hear it for liberty.

I any case and to get back on-topic, I do think canceling JWST would be terrible, and would be one more symptom of American decline.