The James Webb Telescope is an ambitious piece of space engineering which could greatly extend our understanding of the cosmos. In the current budgetary environment of slash and burn, it’s also a financial black hole threatening other valuable science missions at NASA. Now, a group of high-profile space scientists and engineers have published a letter saying so:

When JWST was ranked as the top major initiative for NASA astrophysics in the 2001 NRC Astronomy Decadal Survey, it was estimated to cost $1B and launch by 2011. NASA has now spent $3.5B on JWST and it is now projected to cost a minimum of $8.7B for a launch no earlier than late 2018. As a result, JWST’s cost increases have outstripped the resources of the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s Astrophysics Division, and NASA leadership has now declared JWST an “agency priority.” Resources of other NASA programs, including the Agency’s Planetary Sciences Division within the Science Mission Directorate, are now threatened to cover current and future JWST cost overruns.

There are people high up in NASA who are behind the JWST no matter what the cost for one primary reason: public relations. The Hubble Space Telescope was more than a smashing scientific success, once the focusing issue was fixed, it was a public relations bonanza. Ask anyone to name a telescope at random and odds are good they’ll say Hubble.

Understandably, NASA planners see the JWST as the next big thing that will appeal to the masses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, NASA is funded by politicians making it a political agency in part which has to fight for every scrap like any other bureaucracy. But without significantly more funding, the JWST could easily swallow entire NASA departments, a dozen promising missions to other planets and moons would have to be put on hold indefinitely or scrapped altogether. If we as a nation want this device, we as a nation will have to pay for it.