JWST in Crisis

The future of the James Webb Space Telescope is now in serious doubt after a proposed NASA funding bill for 2012 announced: "...also terminates funding for the James Webb Space Telescope, which is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management..."

JWST was conceived as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope and would offer astronomers a powerful infrared telescope capable of probing an epoch that corresponds to the formation of the earliest galaxies. This landmark telescope, like its predecessor, was part of an international venture between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.

Earlier this year the scheduled launch date was pushed back to 2018 due to management issues on the NASA side and clearly the project has been viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a lame duck for some time. The science case for the mission is a strong one, filling in gaps in knowledge on the formation of the earliest objects in the universe as well as peering through more dust clouds in our galaxy to spy on the formation of stars and planets. Yet despite this, and the estimate $3 billion already invested on the NASA side, the mission's future is now far from certain.

While the NASA involvement, largely a commitment to build the mirror assembly and the spacecraft, is behind schedule the Europeans have been developing key elements of the scientific payload. This primarily consists of the NIRSpec instrument and a significant part of the MIRI instrument. The development of these instruments is largely on schedule and would have been ready in time for the original launch window in 2014 - 2015.

With Hubble approach its final years of service, and the Herschel infrared observatory only having a finite mission lifetime, astronomers are looking to a point in the near future where for the first time in over two decades there will be no space based observation at key wavelengths. Although ground based telescopes have advanced considerably in recent years, and many now exceed Hubble in terms of performances, they fail to resonate with the public in the same way.

With a general slowing down of government backed space exploration, particularly in the US and to some extent in Europe, the future not only for JWST, but other missions as well must be in some doubt. Which is a great shame for the name James Webb is linked with a visionary who, as the second administrator of NASA, brought together a series of disjointed programmes and agendas in 1960's America to turn NASA into the structured organisation necessary to place men on the Moon.

When such decisions are made one is always reminded of the quote astronaut Frank Borman gave during Senate hearings into the Apollo 1 fire. When asked what was the cause, Borman replied: "Failure of imagination." In years to come when future generation ask why did we stop exploring space the standard answer will be about the end of cold-war politics and a global financial crisis. In reality, however, mankind will have ceased to imagine the potential from exploring and discovering knowledge about the world and universe around us.