Star Cents
How the cost of NASA’s next big space telescope skyrocketed
By Ron Cowen
It will be the largest telescope ever launched into space, with a mirror that has about six times the light collecting area of Hubble’s. When the James Webb Space Telescope flies later this decade, its unparalleled infrared vision will record the flickers of the first stars and galaxies to light up the universe, in a mission that promises to rewrite astronomy textbooks. But for now, the 6.5-ton observatory has become a financial albatross for NASA.
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An independent investigative panel reported in November that the telescope, known by the acronym JWST, is running a minimum of $1.4 billion over budget (SN Online: 11/11/10). That overrun, which would bring the total cost of building the telescope to at least $6.5 billion, may lead to the cancellation of another highly touted NASA mission to probe the nature of dark energy and extrasolar planets.
Convened at the request of U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski, the panel found that managers for the James Webb project, based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., consistently underestimated the cost of the telescope. Lack of money in one year forced scheduled work to be deferred to the next, a practice that kept contractors on the payroll longer and ended up doubling or tripling the cost of their labor. Poor cost management and reporting practices went unchallenged by NASA staff in Washington, D.C., reflecting “the lack of an effective cost and programmatic analysis capability at headquarters,” the panel concluded.