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.

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.

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.

Lots of highly paid people are needed to run them.

It is incredible value for money. It's one of the few non-bullshit industries.

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

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.

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.

I would pay for Hubble cam videos lmao

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

100% of our tax revenue goes to welfare. All other spending is deficit financed. Politicians are limited in what they can cut.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunately the Europeans don't really have the courage to step up.

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.

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.

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.

Its weird just how resistant people here are to admitting that inflation is a big problem.

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.

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.