Well, last year Congress told NASA $8-billion is all you can ever get for the JWST. $4-billion of that is already sunk. The whole world of scientists and philosophers (even including confirmed NASA/man-in-space scoffers and skeptics such as myself) eagerly awaits the JWST results. The program should be worth as much to astrophysical science and cosmological philosophy as at least ten Hubbles. If NASA burns through the next $4-billion allocation and crawls back to Congress saying, “Gee fellas, with inflation and all, and unanticipated new technical discoveries bearing on final design, we will need another $3-billion to get JWST up and running,” will Congress sternly answer with, “Just write off that first $8-billion, we already warned you, there is just no more money for the JWST.” I’m guessing NASA and Congress are caught up and married together in the prior investment trap, and regardless of scale of cost overruns there is no way the program will cancel. But the public will wind up paying over $16-billion before the first dim pictures of creation come in.

Actually, total program costs for the original 8-meter mirror proposal would have only run a couple of billion more, and NASA would have had a much better argument for a SLS system. Some astronomical experts have suggested the original proposal 8-meter version could have directly imaged planets orbiting nearby stars. One of the main reasons JWST so expensive is because it’s a one-of program. I say if we need one, we need at least six; the next five after the first one should come in at only 10% of the costs of the first one. It’s pathetically absurd that the world’s leading astrophysicists will have to book every ten-minutes of scope-time 24-months in advance.

Hubble Space Telescope is in low Earth Orbit. Orbital decay will probably kill it around 2025, and no latter than 2030. At L-2 orbit the JWST will not suffer any orbital decay, and in principle could be designed to serve Earth for a century or more. If we consider costs amortized over 100-years, the annual costs for six JWSTs would seem reasonable. Robotic development may be near the point of where the entire JWST concept should be re-examined with a view toward AI robotic person space assembly and observatory operation, maintenance, and upgrades as needed, on L-2 orbit. If a robot person is going to assemble it at L-2 orbit, it can be designed to have a much larger “mirror,” say in the 30-meter range, which would gather 25-times as many photons as the present design.

The concept of having a smart robot observatory attendant/operator/mechanic seems a rational prerequisite to launching $15-billion worth of astronomical apparatus to the L-2 point. Think of our sad experience with Hubble. The whole program expenditure would have been completely wasted had not the several expensive and hazardous manned shuttle missions delivered mechanics in spacesuits to replace Hubble’s lenses, gyros, batteries, etc. All together Hubble costs exceeded $10-billion. If something goes wrong with JWST at L-2, an on-station AI robot crew could receive and install replacement parts, which would cost a small fraction of sending human mechanics in spacesuits. While I’m eager to get results from JWST, I’m happy to wait until NASA gets its space observatory robot persons perfected.

My biggest concern about SpaceX is how wed it currently is to NASA. It is a far leaner and better constructed space company than NASA but so much of its agenda is tied to the latter’s objectives. Elon Musk has a vision to go to Mars well before NASA, but I wish his vision was focused on developing robotic technology to go with the muscle he is putting into his rocketry.

NASA, if it finds itself competing more and more with private enterprise, may finally stop being the boondoggle. The SLS could easily be a joint venture in which NASA puts out a competition for solutions and assigns money to those that come up with a credible specification. It has started going down this path but not with SLS or would it appear, Orion.

The James Webb Space Telescope should not be a victim of NASA’s inability to find budget for such an important tool for scientific discovery. Let’s hope it doesn’t become one.

One of the few NASA projects that seem significantly significant (and probably worthy of public support, though of no prompt benefit to Earth’s economy) is the James Webb Space Telescope. Read about NASA’s screwing of the taxpayer at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

“Because the runaway budget diverted funding from other research, the science journal Nature described the James Webb as “the telescope that ate astronomy”.”

Give NASA the SLS and notice a decade latter as “Nature” will likely describe it as the “Rocket that ate the whole world.”