Author: Dennis Overbye / Source: New York Times
In a blow to NASA’s prestige and its budget, America’s next great space telescope has been postponed again.
NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete.
A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.
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The board, headed by Tom Young, a former agency manager and aerospace executive, was appointed last spring after parts fell off the telescope during a shake test at its primary contractor, Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles.
In remarks at a press briefing Wednesday, Mr. Young ticked off some of the factors that had led to the crisis, including human errors, excessive optimism and the complexity of the spacecraft.
He said in a statement that moving ahead with the Webb telescope was important for advancements in astronomy, but added: “Ensuring every element of Webb functions properly before it gets to space is critical to its success.”
The telescope, named after former NASA Administrator James Webb, is the agency’s long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It is a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency.
More than twice as big as the Hubble, the Webb will be the largest and most powerful telescope ever built for space, but its development has been plagued with headaches and delays.
Eight years ago, amid budget overruns that threatened the solvency of NASA’s other projects and earned Webb the sobriquet “the telescope that ate astronomy” from Nature magazine, Congress almost canceled the program. Instead, lawmakers ordered a strict budget cap of $8 billion to develop the telescope. Delays already added nearly $800 million.
The new report means that NASA will surely need another $837 million and exceed that cap. Congress will have to reauthorize the telescope at a cost yet to be determined to other missions. Among the missions that could be threatened, astronomers say, is an ambitious space telescope called WFirst to study dark energy and hunt exoplanets.
The Webb review comes as the House Science Committee, under Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, has been studying how well NASA estimates costs and manages big projects. The answer is, not so well. Testifying before the committee, NASA’s Inspector General Paul Martin criticized the…
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