Can someone help a Danish person understand these cuts? I dislike the current government of USA, but it's not like I can't see the motivation behind wanting Greenland and all the other things they do. Reductions on USA space supremacy is the one area I really can't see a reason behind. Like who benefits from this? In the grander scheme of the entire USA budget these cuts aren't going to be meaningful, if anything, it seems like a waste to not utilize something you've already spend the majority of it's life time cost to get up there.
Hopefully it will lead to a situation where the freed time will be rented out. I mean, xuntian won't be capable of replacing James Webb since it's meant to complement rather than rival.
Is it part of the anti-science? Do they hope they can contract stuff out to the private sector? Or what?
There is no motivation, no plan; it's simple apathy that does this. This is an administration staffed, by design, by incompetent people overseeing public agencies they have no familiarity with. Their shared zeitgeist is "government is the Enemy and must be destroyed". In this sociology, it's an act of disloyalty to be seen to understand, to advocate for and side with, a government institution and its public service.
Loyalty to US science research (like any other US government work) is at odds with loyalty to MAGA: it's a zero-sum question, you're with us or against us. Isaacman failed this test—was too enthusiastic about space science.
It's not apathy, it is weaponized incompetence. It was a contributing factor to Chernobyl. It is funny how the US is so opposed to communism, but copies the mistakes of the soviet union.
Replace 'worked in a shoe factory' with 'were a reality TV star', 'was a fox news agitprop host', or similar for any of the current US leadership in the scene from Chernobyl and it fits like a glove.
> Another factor is funding cuts to both telescopes contained in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 — especially JWST, which would see its operating budget cut by 25 percent relative to planned 2024 operations, from $187 million to $140 million.
Quite a lot of the US right-wing is of the opinion that, basically, science is bad and shouldn't happen, or at the very least that only ideologically correct science should happen (for instance see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-mischaracterizes-study-as-... - while part of the story there is that, unsurprisingly, a Musk thing is really incompetent, they were _trying_ to do an ideological purge).
NASA is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of NASA's science is related to climate and weather, and a large part of the US right is still doggedly pretending that global warming isn't happening.
Yes. Despite what others are saying, the people making these decisions are not stupid. This is part of a decades-long, coordinated plan to sow distrust in experts, so people will vote against their own interests to ensure the wealthy & powerful remain so.
It's plainly true that spending several billion preventing climate change now, will prevent having to spend several trillion dollars later. There is no debate about that. But the people with the billions now do not want to give it up, so they have spent decades destroying trust in experts, so people will be tricked into voting for their children to spend trillions later, so that the current billionaires don't have to spend anything now.
It's the same thing pushing anti-vaccine views, even though people getting needlessly sick is obviously bad for the economy. Don't trust your doctor, "do your own research" because you know better than the experts, etc etc. It's all part of getting people to vote against their own interests. A stupid population is easier for the powerful to maintain control over than an educated one.
The people making these decisions are incompetent and unintelligent. But they are also very ambitious and motivated to exact their skewed world view on people.
I actually think it's dangerous to view these people as intelligent, because I really think they believe the things they say. Perhaps, yes, it started out as a way to increase the oligarchy, but I think these people are so far gone that they can't understand any difference now.
Does it make them money? No? Is it something that will make the conservative base unhappy if we eliminate it? No? Then eliminate it.
Greenland is about shipping lanes and minerals.
the greenland thing is a joke, they don't actually want it or care at all, they just want to seem strong and assertive. things are not done for logical or personally-beneficial reasons here.
Dumb, rich Americans don't know how government works and don't understand what anything is for, even if it's critical for their survival or for the survival of millions of others, or crucial for future economic investment and prosperity. They just want to Retire All Government Employees (RAGE) because this is a utopian libertarian belief that "government is bad" and "costs money for no benefit". That, somehow, everything would be "perfect without government". They feel they are entitled to change everything according to their (uninformed) ideas because they are special and important by being rich. It's way past neoliberal austerity by reckless leadership making massive changes without being careful.
They've never heard of the problems with utopias or throwing out babies with the bathwater.
Science benefits globally, not locally, and the current US government considers such positive externalities to have no importance. Arguments from prestige also get no traction.
Given the US fiscal situation, the benefit is perceived to be the reduction in cost.
There has been a presumption that science is locally important, but this presumption is being questioned, and needs to be better defended.
Other such globalist endeavors, like being world policeman, are also being questioned.
The US "fiscal situation" is a creation of the same sabotage-driven administration. Extreme tax cuts, deferred maintenance, and a bone-chilling police state apparatus is a sure fire way to destroy your economy.
Trump’s administration - stacked with figures who openly parrot Kremlin talking points - doesn’t need to fly a Russian flag to serve Moscow’s interests. Undermining NASA, cutting science funding, and hobbling strategic assets like the James Webb isn’t just budget theatre - it’s part of a broader effort to erode US soft power, fracture alliances, and retreat from global leadership. The US got pwned by Russia and security services are stuck in a paper bag.
There has always been a significant section of the US public that's anti-science, and would have posed a strong obstruction to funding any of the space achievements of the 20th century - if not for the fact that the Soviet Union demonstrated space supremacy first. Because of that, space research and technology was made palatable to this demographic by making it a "let's show them commies" thing.
The momentum from that kept things going for a while after the Soviet Union fell, but the inertia has been running out and anti-science sentiment has been raising to the surface in its full form again. The sad truth is that it will most likely be at least another decade to swing things around again, if it's possible at all.
Trump proved to the Republican party that a politician only needs one thing to win: engagement. What's the most engaging policy? Bullshit.
Bullshit gives you free advertising. Bullshit makes all of your political rivals fight you, which makes them look bad. Better yet, your political rivals get busy fighting the bullshit itself, leaving you free to shovel more. There is no such thing as winning a fight in politics: you only win the vote.
Most voters in the US are convinced that there is nothing more to politics than bullshit anyway. This division is rooted in our two-party system. Because of first-past-the-post voting, this is a mathematical inevitability: every vote is a vote against whoever you dislike more strongly. Remember: dislike is not generated by valid criticism as well as it is generated by bullshit engagement. Politics in the US is a team sport, and nothing more.
There is an incredible amount of waste in the US government (both state and federal), almost by design. Departments get fixed budgets for the year. If they don't spend it, their budget for the next year is reduced by that amount. This obviously leads to all kind of perverse incentives to waste resources.
The second factor is politics. The progressive party in the US is trying so hard to be the "good guy" vs Big Bad Trump. Much of this is manufactured outrage, expertly crafted to win elections. ( However, some of it is true. There's some quote out there that the best lies have some grain of truth in them).
So when any conservative actor makes an effort to reign in egregious waste, the opposing party uses their best tactic: claiming victimhood. It's never the waste that is reigned in, no. The cuts always go directly to the most disparaged, "under-served" weakest segment of whatever population they can apply it to. In fact, this party doesn't even acknowledge that there is gov waste at all, or that any of it is borne by the taxpayers, thanks to MMT.
tl;dr there are incredibly wealthy political factions that want Trump out. Any move he makes will be amplified and mischaracterized to maximize outrage and retaliation. You cannot trust the media anymore, sadly.
Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with. The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO. SpaceX, with 8,000 employees and a fraction of government space budgets, now controls 95%+ of all orbit launches worldwide. They outcompete entire continents.
There is no risk structure within government research, and NASA's results of the past few decades shows this. No one paid the price for the SLS being so overpriced, delayed, etc.
> Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with.
I'd agree that's generally true when a profit motive is identifiable.
Absent that, if left to the private sector, the research simply doesn't get done at all.
> The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO
You have an incredibly narrow view of what space "research" involves. It's not just about putting payloads in LEO. Were it up to the private sector, the HST wouldn't exist at all.
Whether that's good or bad is a philosophical discussion, but personally, I believe science should be about more than just what is profitable.
(and that's ignoring that, as others have pointed out, SpaceX stands on the shoulders of government-funded giants)
The reality is there's room for both government-funded and private research, and to imply otherwise... well, let's just say we're living in a time of extremely narrow, black-and-white, polarized thinking, and this is an excellent example.
What you're missing is that SpaceX could do this because NASA had already done all the difficult research. SpaceX is so successful because it does what private industry does really well: start with something that has already been proven possible and make little improvements on the fringes to streamline and profit from it.
What SpaceX has done is very valuable - let's make no mistake about that. But without decades of NASA experience and subsequent hand-holding with SpaceX engineers, SpaceX wouldn't exist.
NASA is a vehicle for pure scientific research, which is something private industry is absolutely terrible at. Let's be real: as much bluster as Elon has about going to Mars, it's going to take an organization like NASA to do it first before a private company like SpaceX ever attempts to do so.
If SpaceX had to distribute their spending like NASA across states/senators/political influence, I doubt they would be anywhere near were they are today. I wouldn’t call this a failure of public science/research/development per se. It‘s a failure of democracy, but maybe it’s also a feature?
As I understand, NASA ain't the only party involved with James Webb Telescope - there is ESA and CSA (Europe/Canada) involved here. So... do they get the opportunity to take over those particular operations?
ESA already has at least three other major projects (the Venus probe, the much-delayed LISA, and something else) wherein NASA is, or at least was going to be, a junior partner, so if ESA has to pick up the slack on any joint projects, it'll probably prioritise those.
(LISA is a particularly ridiculous case. It was pitched in _1997_ as a joint ESA/NASA mission, was finally picked up in the noughties, NASA pulled out in 2011 due to budget cuts, LISA was cut down and then cancelled in favour of JUICE (which itself was a redesign of _another_ joint mission that NASA pulled out of), then LISA was brought back a few years later, with NASA as a junior partner, and an MoA was finally signed last year. Now the NASA side has apparently been cut, though the ESA side is continuing, and who knows, maybe eventually it'll be launched...)
Honestly, ESA should probably consider just stopping doing joint missions with NASA; NASA is just too vulnerable to political interference.
IIRC Carl Sagan saw a spacecraft which had a potentially long life had it not run out of fuel. If he knew it was a Mercedes-level of money in advance, he would have raised it out of pocket.
Yeah, as non American, only indirect way I can contribute to NASA is to buy some official merch, but I would not mind throwing some $ to sustain/extend some ongoing programs operation costs.
Throwing money at government agencies is an exercise in futility. Trust us Americans, we do it every year in the form of taxes, and things aren't getting better.
It's not just a Republican talking point. The hem and haw of taxes from left to right, (just enough to keep the same two parties taking turns every election) for the past 50 years leaves both parties complicit.
Cutting taxes on a broken tax system that disproportionately taxes poor and middle class citizens does absolutely nothing positive for the vast majority of the electorate in the long term. Neither does the reciprocal raising of taxes once the other side jumps in the drivers seat.
Also, please refrain from suggesting posters are "parroting" arguments. It's an argument that doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion, and isn't in the spirit of HN guidelines.
> focus on feeding and housing our fellow countrymen, shouldn't have our money diverted to such things
This has to be parody. JWST isn’t being cut to feed and house anyone. It’s being cut to give folks like me a tax break, so I can finish renovating my deck and buying artwork, and my neighbour so he can build a ski villa in Selkirk.
Please don't comment like this on HN. If it's an important topic, it's important to get your point across without all that rage and bile. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This is the core of the problem. Political posts should be prohibited on here, because each one of these discussions turns into political battle. It wasn't nearly this bad a decade ago. Now there is just no seeing eye to eye with anyone. It's full on "my tribe vs their tribe. My tribe better!". This place would be a lot better for everyone with a "computers or GTFO" rule.
We can't prohibit political posts here as nobody can agree where the line is between political and non-political. We tried having a politics-free week once and it led to a meltdown, and that is perhaps a lesson that the more you try and suppress something, the more it finds a way to resurge.
It's fine for political stories to be discussed here when they really do contain "significant new information" and provide a foundation for people to converse curiously. But that requires people to come here with a sincere intention to be curious and respectful and to observe the guidelines. Of course many don't, and our role as moderators is to remind people of the expectations. But as long as enough people do bring the right spirit, HN can still be a better place than elsewhere for discussing difficult topics.
Ideally yes. But if you're going to have a government with forced taxation, it should at least take care of the fucking people before it starts spending billions of dollars on non-essential activities.
> it should at least take care of the fucking people before it starts spending billions of dollars on non-essential activities
Let’s put aside that none of the current cuts have anything to do with helping the needy.
Societies that focus on subsistence subsist. Societies that focus on thriving thrive. ROI is a real thing. Just taking care of people, paradoxically, short changes those folks in the long run. The most productive thing a government can do is long-term investments. JWST—and the skilled labour that goes into it—is one such investment.
(Another is education, which unfortunately is required to understand how investing for the long run works.)
This is dumb that it's even an issue. But in lieu of an administration change, could they "rent" them out? Like rich institutions could either pay for what they were already planning to do or they could request a different mission/objective.
There's far less interest in this than you'd expect. The Arecibo Telescope [1] was as famous as they come and was the largest single aperture telescope (> 300m) until 2016 when China surpassed it with FAST, which is just real life having some artistic foreshadowing. Opened in 1963, it was iconic and show up in various major movies like James Bond Goldeneye, Species, and contact. Yet it was nonetheless left to rot for a lack of interest in paying the low millions of dollars it'd cost to maintain it, all the while we spend trillions of dollars on wars half-way around the world.
Aricebo did not produce the same kind of imagination inspiring images that Hubble or JWST do. Aricebo lost out on it was too nerdy in its science where the visible spectrum platforms can also reach a more artsy demographic.
It's a $10 billion piece of hardware parked 930,000 miles away.
> Reid said STScI does not yet have a specific plan to deal with JWST’s budget shortfalls, but it will almost certainly involve reducing staff.
> “It’s fewer people, really,” Neill Reid, multi-mission project scientist at STScI, told Astronomy. “[JWST has] got 17 different modes. Each of those modes needs people to support it, to calibrate it, to keep it going. So, if you cut the funding, you have fewer people. And you can’t ask people to do twice as much work. So what will happen is that there will be potentially fewer modes available. There will be less user support.”
That's an interesting question! Can you tell us what research you've done to try to answer it? It's public funds, so there's probably some documentation for what jobs were created to support the telescope.
We dislike it as much as you that it seems so difficult to have a sober discussion about political topics here these days, but it's probably more related to the state of the world, and particularly the prevailing style of politics and media we're living with. We'd love it if HN could be better than other discussion platforms, but try as we might, we can't help but be affected by what's going on in the rest of the world.
Rather than condemning the whole community like this, which is against the guidelines, it would be more helpful to highlight the important parts of the article that you think others are missing.
> Another factor is funding cuts to both telescopes contained in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 — especially JWST, which would see its operating budget cut by 25 percent relative to planned 2024 operations, from $187 million to $140 million.
These figures are not proof of an anti-science administration (I’m not disputing that the administration is anti-science, just disputing that this budget is evidence of that)
If you compare Biden’s FY2022 budget estimates to this budget, it matches almost exactly (Webb 175M, Hubble 85M)
what the hell are you talking about? The budget cut for Webb (i.e. the new satellite) literally from the article you are reading is 187M to 140M. If Biden's FY2022 budget was 172M, that's 189M 2026 (from inflation), so this remains a 25% cut.
We have multiple single humans with net worths over a thousand times their budget. The only thing that's staggering is what's getting priority over these monumental scientific achievements.
This comment makes me wonder, why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun? That's definitely what I would do. Besides, it must be a way funnier than buying Twitter.
Anyone who has billions of dollars to spend is obviously treating their wealth like some sort of highscore and don't give a shit about anybody or anything else, otherwise they would have been spending their money once they were already in the 100 million dollar level because they are already so far beyond any needs or material desires for them or their next 6 generations of family.
The more you have, the more you can invest. Investing is a form of helping. Also, you can use the profits from your investments to give direct aid and donations, as well as create nonprofit organizations to fund. All of this can be gamed for appearances’ sake as well. It’s a hall of mirrors. If everything is politics, what they do is as suspect as what they don’t do.
You can’t pour from an empty cup. The more you have, the more you have to work with, and the more you can help others.
This is what the parable of the talents is meant to demonstrate, for example.
> "why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun?"
They do! You can look up why the Simonyi Telescope, or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, bear those names. (Two examples from memory; there's many others). (edit: Or the Allen Array, for Microsoft fans)
The world's largest telescope of the mid (20th) century was a Rockefeller donation. Several of its peers were Carnegie's.
Observational astronomy was, for much of history, a useless hobby for kings and idle rich. It's a very recent thing that democratic societies decide to fund this kind of no-applications research through public institutions—and to do so on the megaproject scale. There are no precedents in human history for JWST.
Both Bezos and Musk have grand visions for space and humanity which they're pursuing in their own way.
The space based telescopes are useful and valuable projects that I think should be supported, but they also offer sharply diminishing returns paired with sharply rising costs. JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did at twice the cost (comparing at-launch to at-launch), and the successor to JWST will advance our knowledge far less than the JWST is at probably again some multiple of cost of JWST.
By contrast Musk seeks to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and Bezos wants to create an industrial ecosystem in space, not to just exploit resources in space but to move e.g. highly polluting industries into space. These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
In our economic and political system, I also think this is the more logical way forward. Government is no longer particularly good at long term projects and these sort of visions may come to fruition in a decade, or it may take a century. Left to government, the programs would 100% end up getting scrapped sooner or later. Either by fiscal rhetoric claiming they're wasting money, or by emotional appeal rhetoric claiming that it's unreasonable to indulge in space fantasies when a kid is starving in Africa.
>"Hubble... produced a record 1,073 peer-reviewed publications last year... JWST is performing better than NASA expected, has produced around 1,200 papers since beginning operations in 2022...
Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years. It will take JWST many years to catch up to Hubble, and Hubble still has atleast another 8 years left in it. If you divide the cost of each telescope by the number of papers tied to it, the cost of the knowledge Hubble advanced humanity by will be many times cheaper than JWST, and that doesn't look like it will change given JWST may operate for 10-20 years.
Just looking at the number of papers gives a very wrong impression. You can have hundreds of papers that change very little, and a single one that changes a whole field.
JWST has already generated lots of counter-evidence for theories we were sure about based on Hubble. If your comparison doesn't even pay attention to this simple fact, how is it worth anything?
I think the Hubble claim is easy to demonstrate because one can simply look at Hubble's greatest achievement - it proved that the universe's expansion is accelerating, in direct contradiction to what was believed prior. It made lots of other revolutionary discoveries, but none of it matters because nothing JWST has, or likely will, uncover comes anywhere near to this degree of relevance.
And that's not a fault of JWST - it's just the nature of diminishing returns when what you're doing is just expanding the capabilities of something that was already highly capable.
On the other issue I don't understand how you can think humanity would never become multiplanetary, outside of expecting an imminent self annihilation. And that is certainly a possibility, but certainly not something one could argue as a high probability event anytime in the foreseeable future.
JWT may well overturn our current theories of early galaxy and black hole formation with potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of the Big Bang. So your statement is both premature and over confident
What you're describing would not be a revolutionary discovery, it would be evolutionary. Hubble discovering the universe's expansion was accelerating is something basically nobody expected, because it's completely ridiculous. I mean think about the absurdity of that for a second, instead of just taking it for granted.
But of course it's true. The announcement was largely met with skepticism. But after it held up, it led directly to the contemporary hypothesis of dark energy and created a general frantic hand-waving not about the earliest moments of the universe, for which we will never have any certainty whatsoever, but about what's happening at this very moment!
For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery effectively resolving dark energy/matter, which would sort of be the equal but opposite of what Hubble achieved. Of course the odds of it doing anything like this are near 0. On the other hand the odds of the universe's expansion accelerating were also near 0.
That, if it was not clear, is why I simultaneously support development of such telescopes and similar technology, but also am extremely skeptical that they'll provide anything of major value. Because in 99.9% of cases, they won't. But that 0.1% is worth looking for nonetheless, because you never know how large a leap it may enable.
> For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery
Yeah, I dunno, you've a pretty subjective valuation of these discoveries that I don't think is shared by many in the scientific community. Feel free to post links if I'm wrong.
What I've said is most certainly the norm. If you want discussion - nasaspaceflight forums are essentially the hacker news equivalent of space stuff. In general people are happy to have a new telescope which will provide some new data, but nobody is expecting much of it.
And what I said regarding Hubble was not subjective in the least. The observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating was huge. JWST cannot realistically be expected to match this, simply because such discoveries are unexpected by their very nature, and phenomenally rare on top of that.
I often wonder about this too. Fund nuclear fusion to a level that it can succeed. Or fund newspapers that do truly independent journalism. It seems a lot of these things would be perfectly in reach for quite a few billionaires. Musk could probably pay for a Mars mission out of his own pocket.
If one considers the leisure that the time’s thinkers were afforded with estates and enterprises underneath them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sum total of the photoelectric investigations came to billions inflation adjusted.
This is one of the most harmful attitudes to come out of otherwise smart people in Silicon Valley. Dismissing any effort that does not bear immediate, tangible fruit, failing to follow a chain of causality to long term benefits and discounting the intellect of people working on such efforts.
For example, a similar attitude would have dismissed J.J. Thompson's work on cathode rays and electrons in the late 1800's, and would have seen his intellect directed to steam engines and steel work. That would have seen a delay in the very technology ecosystem that enabled the parent to post their comment.
Root cause of that attitude is the 3 month metrics reporting required by Wall St.
It is arbit and the largest corps that do research fully understand it can generate these counter productive attitudes generating deadline based superficial progress.
Which is why they try to keep their R&D people separate but it is never long lasting cause its all built on top of contradictions.
You want to build something long lasting look at how the Vatican survives not at how corporations/nations/empires survive. But getting science orgs to be that open minded is very tricky given all the baggage the Church has accumulated.
Interesting doesn’t necessarily mean important. There are an infinite number of potential scientific endeavors, I don’t think it’s unseemly to suggest that a field’s likeliness to improve humanity’s quality of life should be a factor in determining funding.
I think any advances in basic science is worthwhile. You can’t predict when or how it will become useful. Quantum mechanics or relativity were probably pretty useless for a few decades after their discovery.
Sure, but we don't have unlimited time and money. Prioritization is obviously a necessity, and therefore I think the OP's point stands. Considering potential tangible rewards shouldn't be seen as a taboo factor in that calculation.
Sure. But we also need a certain base level of research that has zero potential rewards we can imagine now but pushes the boundaries of our knowledge further out. Because a few decades or even centuries later it will become useful.
Evolution is search. These projects create demand for high tech manufacturing, this alone is a net positive. The money isn't burned in a pit, it is spent employing people.
Because these are some of the most complicated and technically advanced pieces of technology that we have ever created.
To communicate with them we have a worldwide array of massive satellite dishes (Deep Space Network) which needs to be operated part of the cost is operating that. Then there is the scientist using the data. These are some of the greatest scientists in the world they are getting paid well enough. Then there is the engineers which make sure the spacecraft operates correctly which are expensive good engineers are expensive.and obviously all the other costs associated with it like facility, technology electricity etc.
I think like they said, it's people. The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly), but it sounds complicated. For all our tech, the bottom line is it requires humans to calibrate this thing and keep it that way (or one of 17 different ways) depending on the science that needs done.
> The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly)
It's explained in the user documentation[1]. You did read the documentation right?
For example[2]:
JWST Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has 5 observing modes: imaging, coronagraphy, grism wide field slitless spectroscopy, time-series imaging, and grism time series.
You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly.
The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”.
The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable.
While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”.
It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.
Can someone help a Danish person understand these cuts? I dislike the current government of USA, but it's not like I can't see the motivation behind wanting Greenland and all the other things they do. Reductions on USA space supremacy is the one area I really can't see a reason behind. Like who benefits from this? In the grander scheme of the entire USA budget these cuts aren't going to be meaningful, if anything, it seems like a waste to not utilize something you've already spend the majority of it's life time cost to get up there.
Hopefully it will lead to a situation where the freed time will be rented out. I mean, xuntian won't be capable of replacing James Webb since it's meant to complement rather than rival.
Is it part of the anti-science? Do they hope they can contract stuff out to the private sector? Or what?
There is no motivation, no plan; it's simple apathy that does this. This is an administration staffed, by design, by incompetent people overseeing public agencies they have no familiarity with. Their shared zeitgeist is "government is the Enemy and must be destroyed". In this sociology, it's an act of disloyalty to be seen to understand, to advocate for and side with, a government institution and its public service.
Loyalty to US science research (like any other US government work) is at odds with loyalty to MAGA: it's a zero-sum question, you're with us or against us. Isaacman failed this test—was too enthusiastic about space science.
> Their shared zeitgeist is "government is the Enemy and must be destroyed"
Except for ICE, which is getting many billions of dollars.
They've been at this for a while, but we had a long way to fall. Still do, but we're speeding up, that's for sure.
> My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub - Grover Norquist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
It's not apathy, it is weaponized incompetence. It was a contributing factor to Chernobyl. It is funny how the US is so opposed to communism, but copies the mistakes of the soviet union.
Replace 'worked in a shoe factory' with 'were a reality TV star', 'was a fox news agitprop host', or similar for any of the current US leadership in the scene from Chernobyl and it fits like a glove.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idb_qsAAe1c
[flagged]
The headline, subhead, and article text all point to budget as the primary issue. It highlights drastic cuts in Trump's budget:
"JWST ... would see its operating budget cut by 25 percent relative to planned 2024 operations, from $187 million to $140 million."
Also please note that HN guidelines specifically not to insinuate that other posters may not have read the article.
Did you?
> Another factor is funding cuts to both telescopes contained in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 — especially JWST, which would see its operating budget cut by 25 percent relative to planned 2024 operations, from $187 million to $140 million.
Quite a lot of the US right-wing is of the opinion that, basically, science is bad and shouldn't happen, or at the very least that only ideologically correct science should happen (for instance see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-mischaracterizes-study-as-... - while part of the story there is that, unsurprisingly, a Musk thing is really incompetent, they were _trying_ to do an ideological purge).
NASA is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of NASA's science is related to climate and weather, and a large part of the US right is still doggedly pretending that global warming isn't happening.
Yes. Despite what others are saying, the people making these decisions are not stupid. This is part of a decades-long, coordinated plan to sow distrust in experts, so people will vote against their own interests to ensure the wealthy & powerful remain so.
It's plainly true that spending several billion preventing climate change now, will prevent having to spend several trillion dollars later. There is no debate about that. But the people with the billions now do not want to give it up, so they have spent decades destroying trust in experts, so people will be tricked into voting for their children to spend trillions later, so that the current billionaires don't have to spend anything now.
It's the same thing pushing anti-vaccine views, even though people getting needlessly sick is obviously bad for the economy. Don't trust your doctor, "do your own research" because you know better than the experts, etc etc. It's all part of getting people to vote against their own interests. A stupid population is easier for the powerful to maintain control over than an educated one.
„You keep am stupid, I keep them poor“, said the king to the bishop.
The people making these decisions are incompetent and unintelligent. But they are also very ambitious and motivated to exact their skewed world view on people.
I actually think it's dangerous to view these people as intelligent, because I really think they believe the things they say. Perhaps, yes, it started out as a way to increase the oligarchy, but I think these people are so far gone that they can't understand any difference now.
Does it make them money? No? Is it something that will make the conservative base unhappy if we eliminate it? No? Then eliminate it. Greenland is about shipping lanes and minerals.
the greenland thing is a joke, they don't actually want it or care at all, they just want to seem strong and assertive. things are not done for logical or personally-beneficial reasons here.
I'm sure those reasons come into play as well but hell even I'd want the US to go for Greenland if it was actually available.
Dumb, rich Americans don't know how government works and don't understand what anything is for, even if it's critical for their survival or for the survival of millions of others, or crucial for future economic investment and prosperity. They just want to Retire All Government Employees (RAGE) because this is a utopian libertarian belief that "government is bad" and "costs money for no benefit". That, somehow, everything would be "perfect without government". They feel they are entitled to change everything according to their (uninformed) ideas because they are special and important by being rich. It's way past neoliberal austerity by reckless leadership making massive changes without being careful.
They've never heard of the problems with utopias or throwing out babies with the bathwater.
Science benefits globally, not locally, and the current US government considers such positive externalities to have no importance. Arguments from prestige also get no traction.
Given the US fiscal situation, the benefit is perceived to be the reduction in cost.
There has been a presumption that science is locally important, but this presumption is being questioned, and needs to be better defended.
Other such globalist endeavors, like being world policeman, are also being questioned.
The US "fiscal situation" is a creation of the same sabotage-driven administration. Extreme tax cuts, deferred maintenance, and a bone-chilling police state apparatus is a sure fire way to destroy your economy.
It's been a bipartisan effort, spanning decades. But that's all beside the point for the comment you are responding to.
Trump’s administration - stacked with figures who openly parrot Kremlin talking points - doesn’t need to fly a Russian flag to serve Moscow’s interests. Undermining NASA, cutting science funding, and hobbling strategic assets like the James Webb isn’t just budget theatre - it’s part of a broader effort to erode US soft power, fracture alliances, and retreat from global leadership. The US got pwned by Russia and security services are stuck in a paper bag.
There has always been a significant section of the US public that's anti-science, and would have posed a strong obstruction to funding any of the space achievements of the 20th century - if not for the fact that the Soviet Union demonstrated space supremacy first. Because of that, space research and technology was made palatable to this demographic by making it a "let's show them commies" thing.
The momentum from that kept things going for a while after the Soviet Union fell, but the inertia has been running out and anti-science sentiment has been raising to the surface in its full form again. The sad truth is that it will most likely be at least another decade to swing things around again, if it's possible at all.
None of this is supposed to make sense.
Trump proved to the Republican party that a politician only needs one thing to win: engagement. What's the most engaging policy? Bullshit.
Bullshit gives you free advertising. Bullshit makes all of your political rivals fight you, which makes them look bad. Better yet, your political rivals get busy fighting the bullshit itself, leaving you free to shovel more. There is no such thing as winning a fight in politics: you only win the vote.
Most voters in the US are convinced that there is nothing more to politics than bullshit anyway. This division is rooted in our two-party system. Because of first-past-the-post voting, this is a mathematical inevitability: every vote is a vote against whoever you dislike more strongly. Remember: dislike is not generated by valid criticism as well as it is generated by bullshit engagement. Politics in the US is a team sport, and nothing more.
There is an incredible amount of waste in the US government (both state and federal), almost by design. Departments get fixed budgets for the year. If they don't spend it, their budget for the next year is reduced by that amount. This obviously leads to all kind of perverse incentives to waste resources.
The second factor is politics. The progressive party in the US is trying so hard to be the "good guy" vs Big Bad Trump. Much of this is manufactured outrage, expertly crafted to win elections. ( However, some of it is true. There's some quote out there that the best lies have some grain of truth in them).
So when any conservative actor makes an effort to reign in egregious waste, the opposing party uses their best tactic: claiming victimhood. It's never the waste that is reigned in, no. The cuts always go directly to the most disparaged, "under-served" weakest segment of whatever population they can apply it to. In fact, this party doesn't even acknowledge that there is gov waste at all, or that any of it is borne by the taxpayers, thanks to MMT.
tl;dr there are incredibly wealthy political factions that want Trump out. Any move he makes will be amplified and mischaracterized to maximize outrage and retaliation. You cannot trust the media anymore, sadly.
100% of our tax revenue goes to welfare. All other spending is deficit financed. Politicians are limited in what they can cut.
Money is fungible. How can you assign some expenditures to revenue, and others to debt?
Sure. "We have no money is why."
Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with. The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO. SpaceX, with 8,000 employees and a fraction of government space budgets, now controls 95%+ of all orbit launches worldwide. They outcompete entire continents.
There is no risk structure within government research, and NASA's results of the past few decades shows this. No one paid the price for the SLS being so overpriced, delayed, etc.
> Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with.
I'd agree that's generally true when a profit motive is identifiable.
Absent that, if left to the private sector, the research simply doesn't get done at all.
> The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO
You have an incredibly narrow view of what space "research" involves. It's not just about putting payloads in LEO. Were it up to the private sector, the HST wouldn't exist at all.
Whether that's good or bad is a philosophical discussion, but personally, I believe science should be about more than just what is profitable.
(and that's ignoring that, as others have pointed out, SpaceX stands on the shoulders of government-funded giants)
The reality is there's room for both government-funded and private research, and to imply otherwise... well, let's just say we're living in a time of extremely narrow, black-and-white, polarized thinking, and this is an excellent example.
What you're missing is that SpaceX could do this because NASA had already done all the difficult research. SpaceX is so successful because it does what private industry does really well: start with something that has already been proven possible and make little improvements on the fringes to streamline and profit from it.
What SpaceX has done is very valuable - let's make no mistake about that. But without decades of NASA experience and subsequent hand-holding with SpaceX engineers, SpaceX wouldn't exist.
NASA is a vehicle for pure scientific research, which is something private industry is absolutely terrible at. Let's be real: as much bluster as Elon has about going to Mars, it's going to take an organization like NASA to do it first before a private company like SpaceX ever attempts to do so.
If SpaceX had to distribute their spending like NASA across states/senators/political influence, I doubt they would be anywhere near were they are today. I wouldn’t call this a failure of public science/research/development per se. It‘s a failure of democracy, but maybe it’s also a feature?
> Conservative ideology views government research as inefficient compared to private sector research, something I generally agree with.
This ignores political goals (Moon landing, DARPA, state funding of education) - what does space exploration look like in the 50s, 60s ?
As I understand, NASA ain't the only party involved with James Webb Telescope - there is ESA and CSA (Europe/Canada) involved here. So... do they get the opportunity to take over those particular operations?
ESA already has at least three other major projects (the Venus probe, the much-delayed LISA, and something else) wherein NASA is, or at least was going to be, a junior partner, so if ESA has to pick up the slack on any joint projects, it'll probably prioritise those.
(LISA is a particularly ridiculous case. It was pitched in _1997_ as a joint ESA/NASA mission, was finally picked up in the noughties, NASA pulled out in 2011 due to budget cuts, LISA was cut down and then cancelled in favour of JUICE (which itself was a redesign of _another_ joint mission that NASA pulled out of), then LISA was brought back a few years later, with NASA as a junior partner, and an MoA was finally signed last year. Now the NASA side has apparently been cut, though the ESA side is continuing, and who knows, maybe eventually it'll be launched...)
Honestly, ESA should probably consider just stopping doing joint missions with NASA; NASA is just too vulnerable to political interference.
Unfortunately the Europeans don't really have the courage to step up.
Talk about penny wise, pound foolish. We spent $10B putting the JWST in space and now we're going to underutilize it to save .4% of that? Dumb.
Time to spin up a patreon... or onlyfans.
IIRC Carl Sagan saw a spacecraft which had a potentially long life had it not run out of fuel. If he knew it was a Mercedes-level of money in advance, he would have raised it out of pocket.
Yeah, as non American, only indirect way I can contribute to NASA is to buy some official merch, but I would not mind throwing some $ to sustain/extend some ongoing programs operation costs.
Throwing money at government agencies is an exercise in futility. Trust us Americans, we do it every year in the form of taxes, and things aren't getting better.
Every country throws money at their government and some actually do make things better or care for their people.
This particular US administration seems especially keen though to simply delete anything that might be worth tax dollars.
> This particular US administration seems especially keen though to simply delete anything that might be worth tax dollars.
Depends on who is determining the worth. Those making the decisions very much find the causes their pork is going to worthy.
What you are parroting is been part of the Republican plan to erode government and our trust in government over the last 50 years.
It's not just a Republican talking point. The hem and haw of taxes from left to right, (just enough to keep the same two parties taking turns every election) for the past 50 years leaves both parties complicit.
Cutting taxes on a broken tax system that disproportionately taxes poor and middle class citizens does absolutely nothing positive for the vast majority of the electorate in the long term. Neither does the reciprocal raising of taxes once the other side jumps in the drivers seat.
Also, please refrain from suggesting posters are "parroting" arguments. It's an argument that doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion, and isn't in the spirit of HN guidelines.
I would pay for Hubble cam videos lmao
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> focus on feeding and housing our fellow countrymen, shouldn't have our money diverted to such things
This has to be parody. JWST isn’t being cut to feed and house anyone. It’s being cut to give folks like me a tax break, so I can finish renovating my deck and buying artwork, and my neighbour so he can build a ski villa in Selkirk.
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Please don't comment like this on HN. If it's an important topic, it's important to get your point across without all that rage and bile. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future, especially these ones:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
This is the core of the problem. Political posts should be prohibited on here, because each one of these discussions turns into political battle. It wasn't nearly this bad a decade ago. Now there is just no seeing eye to eye with anyone. It's full on "my tribe vs their tribe. My tribe better!". This place would be a lot better for everyone with a "computers or GTFO" rule.
I addressed this issue in just the past day here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557068
We can't prohibit political posts here as nobody can agree where the line is between political and non-political. We tried having a politics-free week once and it led to a meltdown, and that is perhaps a lesson that the more you try and suppress something, the more it finds a way to resurge.
It's fine for political stories to be discussed here when they really do contain "significant new information" and provide a foundation for people to converse curiously. But that requires people to come here with a sincere intention to be curious and respectful and to observe the guidelines. Of course many don't, and our role as moderators is to remind people of the expectations. But as long as enough people do bring the right spirit, HN can still be a better place than elsewhere for discussing difficult topics.
This isn't how government or the economy work! Like... at all! Where did our basic econ literacy go?
I'm getting exhausted from blatantly uninformed "hot takes" like this comment and the GGP somehow becoming the majority. What is going on?
It fell victim to decades of the Republican war on education and learning.
So it should also be voluntary to "feeding and housing our fellow countrymen" and not having your money automatically "diverted"?
Ideally yes. But if you're going to have a government with forced taxation, it should at least take care of the fucking people before it starts spending billions of dollars on non-essential activities.
> it should at least take care of the fucking people before it starts spending billions of dollars on non-essential activities
Let’s put aside that none of the current cuts have anything to do with helping the needy.
Societies that focus on subsistence subsist. Societies that focus on thriving thrive. ROI is a real thing. Just taking care of people, paradoxically, short changes those folks in the long run. The most productive thing a government can do is long-term investments. JWST—and the skilled labour that goes into it—is one such investment.
(Another is education, which unfortunately is required to understand how investing for the long run works.)
And if those "non essential activities" result in economic growth and thus leading to more work places and fewer people living in poverty long term?
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This is dumb that it's even an issue. But in lieu of an administration change, could they "rent" them out? Like rich institutions could either pay for what they were already planning to do or they could request a different mission/objective.
There's far less interest in this than you'd expect. The Arecibo Telescope [1] was as famous as they come and was the largest single aperture telescope (> 300m) until 2016 when China surpassed it with FAST, which is just real life having some artistic foreshadowing. Opened in 1963, it was iconic and show up in various major movies like James Bond Goldeneye, Species, and contact. Yet it was nonetheless left to rot for a lack of interest in paying the low millions of dollars it'd cost to maintain it, all the while we spend trillions of dollars on wars half-way around the world.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope
Aricebo did not produce the same kind of imagination inspiring images that Hubble or JWST do. Aricebo lost out on it was too nerdy in its science where the visible spectrum platforms can also reach a more artsy demographic.
Compare Arecibo: https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/historic-space-ima...
To JWST/Hubble: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Hubble+and+JWST+images&ia=ima...
Wow there are actual videos of the collapse at the end of the history section.
Here's the engineering report,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42051368 ("Failure analysis of the Arecibo 305 meter telescope collapse (nationalacademies.org)", 114 comments)
Why does it take 300-400 employees to run a telescope?
As a taxpayer, that's what I want to know.
It's a $10 billion piece of hardware parked 930,000 miles away.
> Reid said STScI does not yet have a specific plan to deal with JWST’s budget shortfalls, but it will almost certainly involve reducing staff.
> “It’s fewer people, really,” Neill Reid, multi-mission project scientist at STScI, told Astronomy. “[JWST has] got 17 different modes. Each of those modes needs people to support it, to calibrate it, to keep it going. So, if you cut the funding, you have fewer people. And you can’t ask people to do twice as much work. So what will happen is that there will be potentially fewer modes available. There will be less user support.”
That's an interesting question! Can you tell us what research you've done to try to answer it? It's public funds, so there's probably some documentation for what jobs were created to support the telescope.
The idiocracy is a playbook.
Reading through these comments, I’m firmly convinced no one read the actual article. Is this just Bluesky now with a twist?
We dislike it as much as you that it seems so difficult to have a sober discussion about political topics here these days, but it's probably more related to the state of the world, and particularly the prevailing style of politics and media we're living with. We'd love it if HN could be better than other discussion platforms, but try as we might, we can't help but be affected by what's going on in the rest of the world.
Rather than condemning the whole community like this, which is against the guidelines, it would be more helpful to highlight the important parts of the article that you think others are missing.
Its weird just how resistant people here are to admitting that inflation is a big problem.
Agreed
> Another factor is funding cuts to both telescopes contained in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026 — especially JWST, which would see its operating budget cut by 25 percent relative to planned 2024 operations, from $187 million to $140 million.
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These figures are not proof of an anti-science administration (I’m not disputing that the administration is anti-science, just disputing that this budget is evidence of that)
If you compare Biden’s FY2022 budget estimates to this budget, it matches almost exactly (Webb 175M, Hubble 85M)
what the hell are you talking about? The budget cut for Webb (i.e. the new satellite) literally from the article you are reading is 187M to 140M. If Biden's FY2022 budget was 172M, that's 189M 2026 (from inflation), so this remains a 25% cut.
Bad reading on my part. It is much lower than Biden’s
Why are the budgets for operating these so expensive? The numbers in the article are staggering
We have multiple single humans with net worths over a thousand times their budget. The only thing that's staggering is what's getting priority over these monumental scientific achievements.
This comment makes me wonder, why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun? That's definitely what I would do. Besides, it must be a way funnier than buying Twitter.
Anyone who has billions of dollars to spend is obviously treating their wealth like some sort of highscore and don't give a shit about anybody or anything else, otherwise they would have been spending their money once they were already in the 100 million dollar level because they are already so far beyond any needs or material desires for them or their next 6 generations of family.
> obviously treating their wealth like some sort of highscore
yep. see
> Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard.
> “It’s a game,” Randy explains to his son.
> “How do you know who wins?” the boy asks.
> “Whoever dies with the most money.” [1]
not even exaggerating
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...
The more you have, the more you can invest. Investing is a form of helping. Also, you can use the profits from your investments to give direct aid and donations, as well as create nonprofit organizations to fund. All of this can be gamed for appearances’ sake as well. It’s a hall of mirrors. If everything is politics, what they do is as suspect as what they don’t do.
You can’t pour from an empty cup. The more you have, the more you have to work with, and the more you can help others.
This is what the parable of the talents is meant to demonstrate, for example.
> "why don't those rich people make space telescopes just for fun?"
They do! You can look up why the Simonyi Telescope, or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, bear those names. (Two examples from memory; there's many others). (edit: Or the Allen Array, for Microsoft fans)
The world's largest telescope of the mid (20th) century was a Rockefeller donation. Several of its peers were Carnegie's.
Observational astronomy was, for much of history, a useless hobby for kings and idle rich. It's a very recent thing that democratic societies decide to fund this kind of no-applications research through public institutions—and to do so on the megaproject scale. There are no precedents in human history for JWST.
Both Bezos and Musk have grand visions for space and humanity which they're pursuing in their own way.
The space based telescopes are useful and valuable projects that I think should be supported, but they also offer sharply diminishing returns paired with sharply rising costs. JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did at twice the cost (comparing at-launch to at-launch), and the successor to JWST will advance our knowledge far less than the JWST is at probably again some multiple of cost of JWST.
By contrast Musk seeks to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and Bezos wants to create an industrial ecosystem in space, not to just exploit resources in space but to move e.g. highly polluting industries into space. These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
In our economic and political system, I also think this is the more logical way forward. Government is no longer particularly good at long term projects and these sort of visions may come to fruition in a decade, or it may take a century. Left to government, the programs would 100% end up getting scrapped sooner or later. Either by fiscal rhetoric claiming they're wasting money, or by emotional appeal rhetoric claiming that it's unreasonable to indulge in space fantasies when a kid is starving in Africa.
> JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did
Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?
> These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
Another strong claim.
>Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?
We could start with the article [1]:
>"Hubble... produced a record 1,073 peer-reviewed publications last year... JWST is performing better than NASA expected, has produced around 1,200 papers since beginning operations in 2022...
Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years. It will take JWST many years to catch up to Hubble, and Hubble still has atleast another 8 years left in it. If you divide the cost of each telescope by the number of papers tied to it, the cost of the knowledge Hubble advanced humanity by will be many times cheaper than JWST, and that doesn't look like it will change given JWST may operate for 10-20 years.
[1] https://www.astronomy.com/science/james-webb-hubble-space-te...
Just looking at the number of papers gives a very wrong impression. You can have hundreds of papers that change very little, and a single one that changes a whole field.
JWST has already generated lots of counter-evidence for theories we were sure about based on Hubble. If your comparison doesn't even pay attention to this simple fact, how is it worth anything?
> Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years
It's a metric. A good metric? Maybe not. Feels like using lines of code to measure programmer productivity.
Plus, have you controlled for factors like time allocation? If fewer research teams are getting access for longer then this would explain it
I think the Hubble claim is easy to demonstrate because one can simply look at Hubble's greatest achievement - it proved that the universe's expansion is accelerating, in direct contradiction to what was believed prior. It made lots of other revolutionary discoveries, but none of it matters because nothing JWST has, or likely will, uncover comes anywhere near to this degree of relevance.
And that's not a fault of JWST - it's just the nature of diminishing returns when what you're doing is just expanding the capabilities of something that was already highly capable.
On the other issue I don't understand how you can think humanity would never become multiplanetary, outside of expecting an imminent self annihilation. And that is certainly a possibility, but certainly not something one could argue as a high probability event anytime in the foreseeable future.
JWT may well overturn our current theories of early galaxy and black hole formation with potentially revolutionary implications for our understanding of the Big Bang. So your statement is both premature and over confident
What you're describing would not be a revolutionary discovery, it would be evolutionary. Hubble discovering the universe's expansion was accelerating is something basically nobody expected, because it's completely ridiculous. I mean think about the absurdity of that for a second, instead of just taking it for granted.
But of course it's true. The announcement was largely met with skepticism. But after it held up, it led directly to the contemporary hypothesis of dark energy and created a general frantic hand-waving not about the earliest moments of the universe, for which we will never have any certainty whatsoever, but about what's happening at this very moment!
For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery effectively resolving dark energy/matter, which would sort of be the equal but opposite of what Hubble achieved. Of course the odds of it doing anything like this are near 0. On the other hand the odds of the universe's expansion accelerating were also near 0.
That, if it was not clear, is why I simultaneously support development of such telescopes and similar technology, but also am extremely skeptical that they'll provide anything of major value. Because in 99.9% of cases, they won't. But that 0.1% is worth looking for nonetheless, because you never know how large a leap it may enable.
> For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery
Yeah, I dunno, you've a pretty subjective valuation of these discoveries that I don't think is shared by many in the scientific community. Feel free to post links if I'm wrong.
What I've said is most certainly the norm. If you want discussion - nasaspaceflight forums are essentially the hacker news equivalent of space stuff. In general people are happy to have a new telescope which will provide some new data, but nobody is expecting much of it.
And what I said regarding Hubble was not subjective in the least. The observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating was huge. JWST cannot realistically be expected to match this, simply because such discoveries are unexpected by their very nature, and phenomenally rare on top of that.
I often wonder about this too. Fund nuclear fusion to a level that it can succeed. Or fund newspapers that do truly independent journalism. It seems a lot of these things would be perfectly in reach for quite a few billionaires. Musk could probably pay for a Mars mission out of his own pocket.
Fusion is already well funded by our oligarchs.
As far as I know these aren't non profits for the benefit of the world.
Do they have real money to spend or is it all stock valuations that would destroy the value if they converted it to cash?
They take loans using the stock as collateral
Because people that rich usually are sociopaths and if they are not they spend their money directly on humanity like Bill Gates.
If I had to guess, I would say they _are_ building space telescopes and other big projects, but they just aren't telling us all about it.
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Like optimizing and making sure people see ads?
This comment has to be sarcasm
> Couldn’t the geniuses debating whether the universe is expanding at 50 or 51 mph be put to work doing something a little more useful?
You do know that musing about the useless photoelectric effect is how we got a lot of modern technology?
At what point did we miss that civilisations that uncover milestones in basic physics tend to reap the rewards thereof?
How many billions were spent on that musing?
> How many billions were spent on that musing?
If one considers the leisure that the time’s thinkers were afforded with estates and enterprises underneath them, I wouldn’t be surprised if the sum total of the photoelectric investigations came to billions inflation adjusted.
This is one of the most harmful attitudes to come out of otherwise smart people in Silicon Valley. Dismissing any effort that does not bear immediate, tangible fruit, failing to follow a chain of causality to long term benefits and discounting the intellect of people working on such efforts.
For example, a similar attitude would have dismissed J.J. Thompson's work on cathode rays and electrons in the late 1800's, and would have seen his intellect directed to steam engines and steel work. That would have seen a delay in the very technology ecosystem that enabled the parent to post their comment.
Root cause of that attitude is the 3 month metrics reporting required by Wall St.
It is arbit and the largest corps that do research fully understand it can generate these counter productive attitudes generating deadline based superficial progress.
Which is why they try to keep their R&D people separate but it is never long lasting cause its all built on top of contradictions.
You want to build something long lasting look at how the Vatican survives not at how corporations/nations/empires survive. But getting science orgs to be that open minded is very tricky given all the baggage the Church has accumulated.
Which is ironic given where this is posted. Do all startups yield a net result? Either to the VCs or the humanity?
Interesting doesn’t necessarily mean important. There are an infinite number of potential scientific endeavors, I don’t think it’s unseemly to suggest that a field’s likeliness to improve humanity’s quality of life should be a factor in determining funding.
I think any advances in basic science is worthwhile. You can’t predict when or how it will become useful. Quantum mechanics or relativity were probably pretty useless for a few decades after their discovery.
Sure, but we don't have unlimited time and money. Prioritization is obviously a necessity, and therefore I think the OP's point stands. Considering potential tangible rewards shouldn't be seen as a taboo factor in that calculation.
Sure. But we also need a certain base level of research that has zero potential rewards we can imagine now but pushes the boundaries of our knowledge further out. Because a few decades or even centuries later it will become useful.
Evolution is search. These projects create demand for high tech manufacturing, this alone is a net positive. The money isn't burned in a pit, it is spent employing people.
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Basic research should be funded like defense. Allocate a certain percentage of GDP.
What is "more useful" than understanding how the universe, we all live in, works at a fundamental level?
You just compared a person's entire lifetime worth of savings and investments to an annual budget.
Because these are some of the most complicated and technically advanced pieces of technology that we have ever created.
To communicate with them we have a worldwide array of massive satellite dishes (Deep Space Network) which needs to be operated part of the cost is operating that. Then there is the scientist using the data. These are some of the greatest scientists in the world they are getting paid well enough. Then there is the engineers which make sure the spacecraft operates correctly which are expensive good engineers are expensive.and obviously all the other costs associated with it like facility, technology electricity etc.
In March, 2024 the US Department of Defense fiscal year 2025 budget request was $849.8 billion. The 2024 JWST budget was 0.022% of that.
https://nasawatch.com/exploration/ernst-stuhlinger
I think like they said, it's people. The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly), but it sounds complicated. For all our tech, the bottom line is it requires humans to calibrate this thing and keep it that way (or one of 17 different ways) depending on the science that needs done.
> The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly)
It's explained in the user documentation[1]. You did read the documentation right?
For example[2]:
JWST Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has 5 observing modes: imaging, coronagraphy, grism wide field slitless spectroscopy, time-series imaging, and grism time series.
With further details for each in subsections.
[1]: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/
[2]: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam...
Peak comment right here.
A failure is highly costly to NASA in terms of public support, so everything is incredibly over-engineered. That's also why failures are rare.
It is incredible value for money. It's one of the few non-bullshit industries.
$60M a year goes to Northrop just to ensure they’ll answer the phone if they’re needed.
Source?
Lots of highly paid people are needed to run them.
You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly.
The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”.
The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable.
While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”.
It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.