NASA

JWST delay

Space News reports in its latest edition (in an article freely available at SPACE.com) that NASA has decided to deal with the cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program by delaying the mission rather than cutting it. JWST is now set for launch in 2013, two years later than previously planned. It has been clear for months that JWST was facing some serious problems, with a cost overrun reported this year on the order of $1 billion. Delaying the mission doesn’t get rid of the overrun, but stretches the costs out over a longer period, an option more palatable than removing instruments or downsizing the telescope itself, options the astronomical community strongly opposed. However, the delay will have an effect on other programs, including the already-delayed Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Also with noting: the prime contractor for JWST is Northrop Grumman, which is also prime on NPOESS.

NASA also still has to work out launch arrangements for JWST; the agency hopes to save money by getting a “free” launch on an Ariane 5 in exchange for observing time on JWST. The article states that the State Department has yet to sign off on an agreement to allow NASA to formally negotiate with ESA. There had been earlier hints that Lockheed and/or Boeing had been trying to convince NASA and the administration to purchase a domestic launch, although that would be a tough sell given the program’s fiscal problems.

18 comments to JWST delay

  • Harold LaValley

    But what was missed also was that it actually adds to the project overall costs while in storage.

  • Chris Mann

    Plus you’ve got to keep all of that skilled labour on the payroll in the interim.

  • One billion over budget this year – and the scientists still blame VSE for decimating their budgets… With a Hubble repair mission too I wonder how much more science must we cut to pay for it all?

  • Hundreds of smaller research projects have also been cut, not just in science but also in aerospace technology. And for every one that was cut there were at least five good projects that weren’t even funded. The cost of human flights to the Moon and Mars will in large part come out of cuts in far less expensive research projects that would, I believe, produce knowledge and technology of lasting value outside NASA.

    In the case of the Webb, part of the cost growth resulted from Mr. Goldin’s rather offhand descision to increase the apeture from 4 meters to 8 meters. Such a large jump in technology beyond systems with which there is any flight experience inevitably introduces large uncertainties in cost and significant risk.

  • Dan, the whole point of a “focused” effort is to provide focus on achieving a goal. You’ll never achieve the goal if you try to do everything. Maybe the VSE is the wrong goal, but if we do want to achieve a major goal in space, we do need to make hard decisions.

    As someone who believes that human visits to the planets are important — not least because the planetary science we can do is extremely limited without them — I do believe we need a focused effort.

    Maybe there should be a space science agency, or maybe space science should be part of, say, the NSF, but in spite of the efforts of many scientists and politicians to make NASA into a space science agency, that has never been the agency’s real point. (It was more of a general development agency than it has been since Apollo, but science has never been more than a part of its charter.)

    I think the present fifty-fifty split between human space projects, and science and applications, gives too much emphasis to the latter. However, I do value space science and I recognize that it is important to some people, therefore I support that ratio. But I would never condone changing it the other way.

    — Donald

  • Dwayne A. Day

    As usual, there are a lot of ill-informed comments here. I’ll deal with them roughly backwards.

    First, space science, broadly-defined, is approximately 34% of NASA’s budget. That is actually a record high for the agency. Traditionally, it hovered around 20% of the agency’s budget. Dan Goldin was the first administrator to push for it to be more of NASA’s budget and he got it over 30%. (However, it should be noted that these figures include the launch costs and full cost accounting, which the historical figures did not. Nevertheless, space science is doing better now than it ever has, and the science community generally recognizes that.) The space scientists who are complaining are generally the ones who have taken cuts, but overall there are many more people who are benefitting than are suffering, and the science community understands this.

    Second, NASA was, for the most part, an engineering and human spaceflight agency, which was of course about 80% of its budget. However, science has always been a more respectable and more universally accepted justification for spaceflight and so many NASA programs have been justified in terms of their science returns, even when that has been largely inaccurate (such as the International Space Station).

    Third, the JWST cost overruns cannot be blamed easily on Goldin. The astronomy community, not simply Goldin, wanted the big mirror. And nobody has built a space mirror bigger than about 3 meters anyway. The JWST cost overruns can be blamed on just about everybody involved in the project, and just about everybody involved in the project realizes that.

    Fourth, as for science being “cut,” it sort of depends upon your definition of science. The life sciences have essentially been viewed by NASA as NOT part of the science directorate, but as part of the human spaceflight budget. So cutting them is not really alienating the traditional space science community. It does anger the life sciences and the microgravity community, but they have generally not been considered to be part of “space science” at NASA, but as an extension of that other majority shareholder of the budget.

    Similarly, Griffin has promised that there is a firewall between human spaceflight programs and space science and that neither one will raid the other’s funds. The science community generally accepts this (although they wonder how long it will last), and very few people are blaming the Vision for their money problems. When you get right down to doing the accounting, most science programs are suffering a budget squeeze because of _other science programs_ and NOT because of the Vision for Space Exploration. It is a little hard for astronomers to blame the delay in projects like SIM on the Vision, when they have their own cost overruns causing problems.

    Finally, as for the “skilled labor on the payroll” and the delay “adding to the overall cost” of JWST, these are only half-truths (assuming that I understand this correctly). As of earlier this year, JWST was estimated at well over $1 billion over budget. NASA was able to scrub the program and bring it down to about half of that, but then delayed the launch by two years because they did not have the money to cover even that overrun. This then bumped the cost up by another $500 million or so.

    Some of that represents the cost of keeping the people building JWST employed. However, for certain parts of the spacecraft this is not going to be true. For instance, once you build the mirrors and test them, you no longer need all of the mirror manufacturing workforce.

    NASA had hoped to bring the costs back within the original estimate. One way of achieving this was to de-scope the project, such as reducing the mirror size from 8 meters to 6 meters. That was considered unacceptable by the astronomy community (the goal of JWST is to see extremely faint objects and for that you need a mirror of a certain aperture). But ultimately, it proved irrelevant. It turns out that significant portions of the mirrors are already manufactured and reducing the aperture size therefore does not save much money because the majority of that cost is already spent. They have instead decided to make some cuts in things like the testing procedures, such as choosing to not build a large cryo-cooled test chamber and instead to use existing facilities.

  • Doug Lassiter

    Dwayne, you have it almost precisely right. Certain members of the space astronomy community reflexively blame VSE for their funding troubles, but it is precisely overruns, earmarks, and HST (which actually is an earmark) that are the problem.

    Note that Griffin isn’t bound under a firewall, though. The firewall was a congressional construct that is gone. It won’t come back. What Griffin has given is an informal promise of some sort that he’ll abide by the firewall unless things get nasty. But the report language clearly states that money can now flow across what used to be the firewall between science and human space flight. So the space astronomy community is holding it’s breath about things getting nasty.

    As to making hard decisions to achieve major goals in space, that promise was a smart one. NASA has formalized that one of it’s major goals is space science, and that’s how it should be.

    The assumed separation between human space flight and space astronomy (HST-aside!) is detritus from the last decade or so. Putting aside generally dumb ideas like lunar-based telescopes, human and robotic efforts in free-space should enable some pretty fantastic space astronomy facilities that could never be packed into an existing launch shroud. Vision fanatics (e.g. “lunatics”) need to get their heads out of the dirt when they think about astronomy, and astronomers need to stop turning up their noses at human space initiatives.

  • Bill White

    Putting aside generally dumb ideas like lunar-based telescopes. . .

    Obviously this must be a few decades down the road but are lunar liquid mirror telescopes really all that dumb?

  • Dwayne A. Day

    “Obviously this must be a few decades down the road but are lunar liquid mirror telescopes really all that dumb?”

    They cannot really be pointed very far and therefore have a limited field of view, with what would probably be huge development costs. Also, I have my doubts that a giant spinning disk of liquid metal would not attract dust to coat the surface of the mirror.

  • I think the point here is to put it at the lunar North Pole and at look at a very deep field indeed. If you study the most distant region of space yet seen, then I think that’s a unique opportunity. For that kind of observing does pointing really matter? The field of view naturally shifts with the planetary movement.

    Dust is a concern, and I expect there will be efforts to characterize the lunar dust environment and the effect of electrostatically levitated dust on the images. My initial thought was that you could move such dust out the way with optical tweezers or some massively arrayed variation of the same, but I think that’s worrying about step 10 when we’re only at step 2.

  • Dwayne A. Day

    “If you study the most distant region of space yet seen, then I think that’s a unique opportunity.”

    At what cost?

    Such a telescope would cost multiple billions of dollars, at least, for a limited scientific capability. And this mission does not appear at the top of anybody’s astronomy wish list.

  • Where does your cost estimate come from? I could say that every telescope on Earth has a limited scientific capability too. The wish list of a community centers around the things that community does today, not tomorrow. It’s an irony that the astronomical community is notoriously short-sighted when it comes to anything related to manned space.

    I think there is immense scientfic value in a diffraction-limited 50 or 100 meter aperture. There’s no point in building it on Earth, and building it in space is cumbersome in comparison to simply pouring liquid into a large tray on the lunar surface. When I go to the Moon I’d rather set up a liquid mirror telescope than sit around being some token gesture of humanity in space:

    http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0930niac_phase1.html

  • Dwayne A. Day

    “I think there is immense scientfic value in a diffraction-limited 50 or 100 meter aperture.”

    You are free to think whatever you want. But there is an established procedure for how the astronomical community sets its priorities. This proposal will either be accepted or rejected through that procedure.

  • Nemo

    Dwayne Day:

    Such a telescope would cost multiple billions of dollars…

    Kevin Parkin:

    Where does your cost estimate come from?

    Seems a reasonable extrapolation from HST/JWST costs to me, especially considering the penalties involved in landing the telescope (or its components) in the lunar gravity well. CATS isn’t going to be much of a help in this case; JWST’s launch costs are only a small fraction of the total.

    Other than far-side radio astronomy (which could benefit from the moon blocking radio noise from Earth), there’s practically nothing that lunar-based astronomy could do that couldn’t be done better and cheaper by space-based astronomy.

  • Allen Thomson

    > I think there is immense scientfic value in a diffraction-limited 50 or 100 meter aperture. There’s no point in building it on Earth, and building it in space is cumbersome in comparison to simply pouring liquid into a large tray on the lunar surface.

    A large *rotating* tray. 50-100 m of large rotating tray that maintains a smooth paraboloidal surface on the contained Hg or whatever while sitting on the surface of the moon doesn’t sound real easy to me.

    Actually, I’ve long been bemused by the idea of a liquid metal mirror (no particular dimension in mind, but bigger is better) in space. A tray that spins at possibly very low speeds accelerated along its axis by ion engines or other very low-thrust, ah, thrusters.

  • Doug Lassiter

    “simply pouring liquid into a large tray on the lunar surface”

    Well, simple to you maybe! Oh, and by the way, that’s a scrupulously clean, smoothly rotating tray, with a giant overhead structure to capture the focal plane. Now, diffraction-limited baselines of sizes 50+m in free-space are considered technologically realizable by people who understand the ‘biz. Not easy, but we have proven technology that allows that extrapolation without a lot of snickering.

    Lunar observatory afficonados need to resist the temptation to propose if-you-build-it-they-will-come facilities. The way science works is that the community develops a consensus to want something that will achieve a high priority science goal, and that’s never come close to happening with a lunar liquid mirror telescope (as it has for many other observatory concepts.) It is a VERY clever idea indeed, but that doesn’t make it worth doing.

    Far side radio quiet observatory concepts have some proven merit, though we don’t have any plans for major far side development and, once we have such developments, it ain’t gonna be all that quiet over there.

  • “The way science works is that the community develops a consensus to want something that will achieve a high priority science goal, and that’s never come close to happening with a lunar liquid mirror telescope (as it has for many other observatory concepts)”

    I suspect the astronomy community haven’t yet given it a thought. Bear in mind it usually takes a decade or so for a scientific community to embrace any new idea. It takes time for people collectively to take a step back and evaluate things in an objective and long term way.

    There is an excellent paper by Roger Angel entitled A buyer’s guide to telescopes at the best sites. It examines the probable evolution of astronomy over the next 50 years and contains more than an insight or two about how scientific astronomical high priorities fit into the Moon-Mars initiative and vice versa…

  • Doug Lassiter

    “I suspect the astronomy community haven’t yet given it a thought. Bear in mind it usually takes a decade or so for a scientific community to embrace any new idea. It takes time for people collectively to take a step back and evaluate things in an objective and long term way.”

    That’s simplistic, and incorrect. The astronomical community has been thinking about lunar basing of telescopes for forty years. That thinking was in high gear a full twenty years after the last lunar landing. Only in the last decade or so have they objectively sidestepped the idea, now that pointing a telescope in space is relatively easy, and building large structures in space has been compellingly demonstrated. Lunar basing just doesn’t buy much anymore for astronomy. Unless you think that humans and their infrastructure will be down in the dirt and no where else. That’s an unhappy possibility by any measure of success for the Vision.

    “There is an excellent paper by Roger Angel entitled A buyer’s guide to telescopes at the best sites. It examines the probable evolution of astronomy over the next 50 years and contains more than an insight or two about how scientific astronomical high priorities fit into the Moon-Mars initiative and vice versa…”

    There are a number of excellent papers on this subject. Angel does have an insight or two, but they are focused on foundations anchored in bedrock under gravity. You might pay some attention to other ideas, which include human and robotic efforts on behalf of astronomy elsewhere in space. (And there is quite lot of space in between the Moon and Mars.)

    As I said, build-it-and-they-will-come doesn’t work. You might be led to do that if you desperately need it to justify your presence. Consider what happened when Station needed “science” to justify it. Neither Station nor science got much benefit out of that ploy.

    So, are we so bereft of good reasons to develop the Moon that we need to hijack astronomy to justify it? Hmmm. No question that Vision and lunar exploration technology development could offer wonderful new opportunities for astronomy, but we needn’t take a long range view that those opportunities are best harvested on the lunar surface.