“They’re not going to ravage the astrophysics budget,” said Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and chair of the NASA advisory council astrophysics subcommittee, told Wired.com. “That is wonderful news.”

The James Webb Space Telescope, named for the NASA administrator who oversaw the Apollo missions, will be the largest telescope ever launched into space. With a 21-foot-wide mirror (three times the diameter of Hubble’s), it promises to peer back to the birth of the first stars and galaxies, and will lay the foundation for much of the next generation of astrophysics research.

“It’s the cornerstone of all the rest of astrophysics in the next decade,” said Debra Elmegreen, an astronomer at Vassar College and the president of the American Astronomical Society.

But an independent review panel charged with investigating budget overruns released a report Nov. 10 announcing that, in the best-case scenario, the telescope will cost $1.5 billion more than its current $5 billion price tag. Even with the extra funds, the telescope’s launch date will slip from June 2014 to Sept. 2015.

The telescope will need an extra $250 million per year in 2011 and 2012 in order to make that 2015 launch date, the report said. If those funds are not available, the launch date will be pushed back, and the price tag will balloon further.

The new price tag imperiled other projects in NASA’s Astrophysics Science Division, which until this month had managed JWST.

Historically, when NASA projects exceeded their budgets, the first place to look for extra funds was within the bloated project’s home division.

“That was the context in which I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is Hurricane Katrina for astrophysics,’” Boss said.

The Astrophysics Division is expected to receive about $1.1 billion a year from 2011 to 2015, and pays for all the astronomy satellites currently in operation, including Hubble, plus all the researchers who analyze the data those satellites collect.

Particularly at risk were major projects suggested in the 2010 astronomy decadal survey, a community-wide effort to identify priorities for the next 10 years of research, which announced its intentions in an Aug. 13 report. The report’s top priorities, like the $1.6 billion WFIRST satellite that is designed to look for dark energy, may need to be delayed, cut back or canceled.

The next place to look would be the other science divisions, which manage Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science, and then elsewhere in the space agency.

But according to Boss, an (unnamed) official at NASA headquarters assured him the Astrophysics Division is safe. The agency has already moved administration of JWST from the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, into its own division at NASA headquarters.

“It essentially raises a firewall between JWST and what’s left of the astrophysics division,” Boss said. “I don’t think anything is going to come out of astrophysics, at least nothing major that anyone is willing to talk about. That’s very hopeful sounding.”

The new division will be headed by Richard Howard, NASA’s deputy chief technologist, NASA announced Nov. 10. Howard’s first order of business will be creating a new budget for JWST by Feb. 2011.

Boss says it sounds like the other science divisions shouldn’t be too worried, either.

“It does sound like JWST is going to have to solve its own problems within its own budget,” he said.

Where the money will actually come from is still unclear. If the NASA science divisions remain untouched, the James Webb team will probably need to ask Congress for more money, which, in the current financial climate, it is unlikely to receive.

Alternatively, the telescope could limp along on its current $400 million per-year budget. Trying to finish the telescope using only the current budget will mean the launch would be pushed even further back, which will mean more budget increases.

“They’ll have to spend more, and the launch will be delayed, as usual,” Boss said. “The total cost will go up. But at least they won’t have to add any more money per year to it.”

The other option is to cancel James Webb entirely, says Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and a former associate administrator in charge of the NASA Science Mission Directorate.

“If you kill the project, guaranteed, people across the country will learn that they’d better not put the agency in such a position,” he said. “I think it’s an option for serious consideration. It doesn’t slaughter the innocent to reward the guilty, and it opens up a lot of new funding for astrophysics projects in this decade.”

Although others in the astronomical community are frustrated with the cost overruns, an overgrown JWST that leeches funds from the rest of astronomy is better than no JWST at all.

“Canceling it would be disastrous for astronomy,” said Elmegreen, who served on the decadal survey committee. The entire astronomy program for the next decade was designed with James Webb in mind, she pointed out. Several planned survey telescopes, including WFIRST and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, were designed to work in conjunction with the JWST.

“The bottom of our program drops out without Webb,” she said. “I think it’s worse to abandon it at this point.”

At a staff meeting at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said the agency has no plans to cancel the telescope.

“My personal feeling, it is incredibly important, not just to the astrophysics community, but to the world, that we make JWST successful,” he said. “So while everything’s on the table, you know, the cancellation of JWST is not something that’s sitting in my head.”

“We will very likely have to find the money inside NASA, but that has not been determined yet,” he added. “We haven’t asked anybody for additional money.”

There is precedent for sequestering space telescopes that run over budget into a new NASA division: The same exact thing happened with Hubble.

“Nobody now doubts the value of Hubble,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is responsible for the research done with Hubble and ultimately with JWST.

Hubble only has between five and seven years left, Mountain pointed out. If JWST isn’t ready to replace it, the blow to astronomy could go beyond just lost data. It could cost us the next generation of astronomers.

“James Webb is the next Hubble for a whole generation of astronomers and people. Hubble is their parents’ telescope,” Mountain said. “You can imagine a kid saying, ‘Where’s my Hubble?’ James Webb is supposed to be that.”

Nothing will be certain until the next national budget is released in February.

“The agency just doesn’t have a good set of choices on this,” Stern said. “There are bad choices, and worse choices. Which ones are worse depend on where you sit.”

Image: NASA

See Also:

• First Mirrors Polished for Next-Gen Space Telescope
• Humans Aren’t Going to Mars — or Anywhere Else — Without More Money
• Dark Energy and Exoplanets Top List of Astronomy Priorities
• Obama Gives NASA More Money, Cuts Manned Trip to Moon
• NASA Pushes Back End of Shuttle Era to 2011

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Authors: Lisa Grossman

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