Paying for Webb Overruns and Delays
Will Tight Budgets Sink NASA Flagships?, Science (subscription required for full access)
“One big question that needs to be answered relatively soon is where NASA will find the money to complete the Webb telescope by 2018, provided Congress does not terminate the project. NASA officials have declared the $8.7 billion instrument an agency-wide priority and would like to take half of the addition $2 billion needed over the next 5 years from within the Science Mission Directorate. (The rest would come from other parts of the $18.5 billion agency.) That plan is causing consternation among researchers outside astrophysics, who say that it is unfair for the planetary, earth science, and heliophysics programs to support an over-budget astronomy mission. “JWST has been held up as the most important thing to be done, at all cost,” says Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. “But it is not scientifically responsible to undermine other programs to cover JWST.”