Statement by John Grunsfeld, NASA
“The project has done an excellent job of managing its budget reserves, and this ability to efficiently address problems as they come up has enabled Webb to remain on schedule for its 2018 launch.”
Statement by Cristina Chaplain, GAO
“The proximity of all the elements and major subsystem schedules to the critical path means that a delay on any of the elements or major subsystems may reduce the overall project schedule reserve further, which could put the overall project schedule at risk. As a result, the project has less flexibility to choose which issues to mitigate. While the project has been able to reorganize work when necessary to mitigate schedule slips thus far, with further progression into subsequent integration and testing periods, flexibility will be diminished because work during integration and testing tends to be more serial, as the initiation of work is often dependent on the successful and timely completion of the prior work. This is particularly the case with JWST given its complexity.”
– Hearing Charter
– Statements: Rep. Lamar Smith, Rep. Steven Palazzo, John Mather, Jeffrey Grant, John Grunsfeld, and Cristina Chaplain

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

12 replies on “Hearing on Webb Space Telescope”

  1. Do you think anyone will ask the question of why so many of the managers who were responsible for this budget fiasco are still running the program?

    1. “Well, I, uh, don’t think it’s quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.” — Gen. Buck Turgidson

    1. Well if you use “not in this life time” as a measure of schedule, then it is easy to say on schedule!

  3. It will be really stressful for the company launching this thing on the Ariane 5 after it cost 20 years of effort and 9 billion dollars. :-0

    If that is one of those days when the bear eats you, it will not be good publicity for your product.

    2. It will be really stressful for the company launching this thing on the
      Ariane 5 after it cost 20 years of effort and 9 billion dollars.

      Arianespace is treating it like any other Ariane 5 launch. Rack it, stack it, shoot it.

      1. I am not so sure that I could be blase about something like this. I imagine I would throw up about 10 times in the hours leading to the launch.

  4. It is never easy to to hard things. At least this one can produce some really exciting science, much better than the white elephants SLS and ISS.

Comments are closed.