NASA's James Webb Space Telescope faces potential 20% budget cut
176 comments
·February 21, 2025chrisweekly
qzw
Not sure if it's the same one, but I saw a similar IMAX with my kids at the Kennedy Space Center a few months ago. Agree that it's well worth seeing and has some spectacular images from the JWST.
amarcheschi
Oh I thought I had seen it at ksc and then I saw your comment. I agree, it's breathtaking and moving. It's a shame that all of this is happening to save a bunch of money for the wealthy elite that see "you, the people" as disposable items
willis936
It says tickets are unavailable.
jgalt212
I'm bummed to have missed that when I was last there in 2024. Overall, I was pretty disappointed with the place. It's a good stop for kids under 7, though.
To the contrary, I found the London science museum amazing. Great exhibits and great presentation.
Jun8
You can find NASA's 2025 Budget Request Summary here (PDF link: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/fy-2025-budg...). It's a visually great deck that provides a lot info.
From Slide 26: "$317M supports the operation of Great Observatories including the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble, and Chandra".
Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
justinator
Stop trying to use logic to make sense of these budget cuts. The budget cuts aren't about saving money. They're about destroying whole parts of the Government.
mandeepj
You packed quite a punch in that short comment! Those fed employees who voted for this govt. and got laid off must be feeling a voters remorse.
radicaldreamer
Facebook is packed with posts of people saying they support this administration but could they please make an exception for their own role or for their loved one whose nursing care got cut (at the VA) etc.
They still don't understand that they voted for this specific thing, nobody was shy during the campaign about what was to come.
sennalen
Not just the government. Destroying whole parts of the future and the potential of humanity, just to stoke the egos of two men.
y33t
They don't want to destroy it, just make it so useless they have pretext to privatize it.
nickff
I don’t think anyone wants to privatize any of the space telescopes or NASA as a whole. Do you have any evidence that there is someone who does?
chneu
Nah, a lot of this is about removing regulation to let private businesses do whatever they want. It isn't about privatizing the government, it's about removing regulations and "woke" policies
dandanua
You see, those are necessary steps since billionaires are tired of rules and regulations that don't let them grow and thus hold America back, so it can't be great again.
b59831
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jisnsm
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knightfall21
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righthand
Once the money is approved it is then the receiving agency/orgs money. Not the Executive branch’s money to redistribute. There is no money being “saved” or “cut”, there are only corrupt people halting payments of the budgeted money and illegally laying off workers.
jandrese
I'd say at least the SLS program is in jeopardy. NASA has notably had some real scares recently about massive job cuts that have thus far not panned out. Since the administration revels in chaos this probably won't be resolved neatly or soon.
IMHO if someone wanted to cut the James Webb the time to do it was 15 years ago. Now that it is actually flying and producing the best images of the cosmos to date it is too late. Those costs are fully sunk. The ongoing running costs are downright modest by government standards. Plus the project is visible enough that cuts are likely to result in public outcry.
rurp
Many of the announced savings are fake. The actual savings are a paltry number that will be dwarfed by the 100s of billions that will be spent on border security theater, not to mention the trillions in upcoming tax cuts for the wealthy.
rqtwteye
They could stop with the Mars nonsense and cancel SLS.
worik
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope...
That said I am unsure if that is that much of a blow. The government is very good at some things, it looks to me (I am a casual observer) that SpaceX has eaten their lunch in terms of a space programme.
But the James Webb was exactly the sort of incredibly difficult, high risk project that NASA (and Government labs generally) excel at. No private company would ever do something like that. It is a huge achievement and is changing our view, again, of the Universe.
So I guess it will be doomed now too. Noting so dangerous as a good example.
SubjectToChange
The SLS being a government funded competitor to SpaceX has little hope
SLS was never about being the most practical and/or efficient launcher. It is a pork barrel project, but one with an important role. In particular, it is maintaining vital aerospace industrial capacity. If the US wants things like ICBMs then programs like SLS are a necessary evil.
preisschild
lol the Mars project is a prestige project for Musk now, no way that gets defunded.
radicalbyte
It's a distraction and likely a way to fund money to his companies.
2OEH8eoCRo0
SLS has been to the moon and back. Starship hasn't yet made it to orbit.
nickff
SLS has been around the moon and back; that mission was equivalent to an unmanned Apollo VIII. Going around the moon is much easier than landing on it and coming back.
bpodgursky
Starship has made orbit several times.
kelnos
> Can't some of the money that's been saved from other cutting channeled to NASA?
Why would they want to do that? This administration is hell-bent on reducing spending, period, not moving it around, as well as crippling the executive branch's ability to govern. And they don't care what useful initiatives die due to their actions.
And I can't see Trump's supporters caring about this at all. He won the presidency in no small part because he acknowledged that people were facing financial strife, while Harris just kept repeating that the economy was great (implying that anyone with financial issues was either imagining it, or themselves at fault). Why would a Trump supporter care about some "elitist" scientist being able to look at celestial phenomena? They don't care about this stuff, sadly.
postalrat
No. Because the people in charge of NASA will make sure to make sure that every dollar cut will go to the most loved programs to keep awareness high.
micromacrofoot
More likely to end up at Space X
sega_sai
Obviously it's pointless to try to make any reasoned arguments. These people don't care, they just want to destroy for the sake of it. In the past I wondered how great civilizations collapse and how this could happen. It is just becoming clearer and clearer every day.
nine_zeros
Yep. History of humanity is littered with stories of super powers crumbling under their own foolishness. Very strange to actively witness the death.
malshe
I think "Why Nations Fail" is highly relevant in the current context.
munchler
True, but you'd think that Musk, given his background and aspirations, would have greater appreciation for the JWST.
georgemcbay
According to Sam Altman "Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it", this (and a lot of Elon's actions, see for example the Thailand cave incident) seems to perfectly fit that assessment.
[and to be clear, my quoting of Sam Altman is not meant to be taken as an endorsement of Sam Altman, but I suspect he has decent insight into Elon]
munchler
That is interesting, and pathological if true. Thank you for the insight.
doctorwho42
What background? Buying other people's dreams and aspirations (aka their companies, their ideas, and their motivation)?
This isn't shocking but rage inducing.... We spent forever building this thing and successfully getting it up and operational... I know people who have worked on this... Elon musk isn't even a real physicist, he is a business and hype man that is able to get young engineers with dreams of contributing to a great dream to work for him with a terrible work-life balance.
Rebelgecko
JWST launched on an Ariane
bdangubic
he is not profiting from it so…
verytrivial
That Musk is dead.
lamontcg
Doubt he ever really existed, he was just better at keeping his psychopathy under wraps.
dr_dshiv
The assumption is that there is a way to do JWST at far less money at far greater scale. Apply same logic to everything. It won’t always hold. Those places become mistakes to be fixed.
Elon and Trump might be evil. But I don’t really believe in evil. And I keep underestimating both of them. It’s no longer a matter of choice; but if there is a positive possibility, I like to imagine it and make it a plausible pathway. Tons of bad things can happen; is there a path where the current direction could be very very good?
guywithahat
As someone who’s worked on NASA projects, I can assure you they could cut 20% and things would probably run more smoothly, since less people would be standing around bored looking for things to do
peterlada
No.
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knowitnone
Then tell me how you have gained from the this telescope or even how it has furthered NASA's knowledge of the universe?
stonogo
There's a section about this on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Sci...
But I suspect you're not asking the question because you want to know the answer.
AlecSchueler
Are you kidding? There have been so many discussions about the JWST's output on HN that if you haven't already heard the answers to your questions then you must have been actively ignoring them.
In any case it's partly aan impossible question at this stage because it hasn't been up so long. A lot of the research that came out of Hubble took years to complete and the datasets there were much much smaller.
guywithahat
I think someone like Musk would care deeply about our future in space. I’ve worked on NASA projects and they’ll assemble a massive team, always larger than needed, to build and engineer something, and then nobody ever gets laid off when it’s done. Some move to other projects but many sit on their hands doing nothing. I’d bet you could cut 20% of funding and have the telescope run better than before because nobody is standing around looking for work
stonogo
NASA does not directly operate JWST anyway (AURA does that via STScI), but the idea that NASA is bloated and Northrop/Ball/L3Harris are not is hilarious. If you know of people getting paid to 'sit on their hands' at NASA, you should report that to the OIG: https://oigforms.nasa.gov/wp_cyberhotline.html
Slashing the budget is not the correct way to combat waste. Accountability is. Otherwise a bad manager might claw back that 20% by firing whoever the top earners are, leaving nobody but the hand-sitters to run the show.
It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues. His team has already had to come crawling back to previously-fired staff a couple times at this point. I acknowledge that accountability is harder than running around with a loudspeaker and a machete, but that's a pretty bad reason not to even try.
guywithahat
JWST is part of NASA, they surely hire out contractors but those contractors would still report to NASA and probably work in a NASA building. I'm not sure what your point is.
And I'm just reporting on my personal experience. A common joke is if you don't want to learn new skills or contribute, you get sent to safety. Nobody is ever fired, and people are given fake tasks to go around and look like they're working. Saying we need to review accountability before layoffs in an organization that doesn't respond to market pressure is a great way to hire an accountability team and then never do layoffs, thus resulting in a larger staff and budget. That's exactly how NASA has operated for decades, and it's not working.
> It's pretty clear that Musk is focused on whatever the Twitter equivalent of sound bites are, and not on any actual mission execution issues
I don't know what you mean by this but you sound like a very politically misinformed person. I'm guessing you use a lot of reddit?
renegade-otter
A hedge fund manager, somewhere out there, does not have enough tax cuts to pay for the 5th infinity pool and a lambo. Science can go suck it!
Queue "In the eyes on an angel" by Sarah McLachlan.
d3rockk
This is basically "Don't Look Up" in real life.
bradly
Not commenting on the budgets cuts themselves, but operations, monitoring, and maintenance of JWST is under contract with Northop Grumman until 2027.
aaronbrethorst
Whew, good thing Musk and Trump love respecting existing contracts and settled law then. https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/02/18/g-s1-49...
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HeatrayEnjoyer
Why would that matter? Trump can break the contract and there's nothing they can do about it
andrew_eu
Depressing politics aside, I'm curious about how this affects the long term usability of the telescope. I guess as long as the orbit is sustained and it doesn't suffer physical damage, it would still be basically operable for it's design life.
If major cuts essentially leave a skeleton crew, or no crew, for an extended period of time would later reinvestment be able to put the observatories back to use with only lost time? Or do these things need constant remote maintenance to stay operational?
recursivecaveat
Apparently it uses ~2.7% of its fuel every year to station-keep in the right semi-stable orbit, so presumably you need at least some crew to manage that. (and any time it's not taking observations you never get back!) I know the voyagers have needed adjustments and reconfigutation from ground crews as equipment as decayed over the years, so I assume similar things would happen on a semi-mothballed JWST.
herodotus
Gee, I wonder if this will maybe benefit Space X in some way?
ahmeneeroe-v2
You're gonna have to connect the dots here...I don't see the benefit to space x
guywithahat
If anything it would hurt spacex since they (theoretically) might do fewer support/maintenance missions.
My experience on NASA projects leads me to believe they could cut 20% of staff and have things run smoother, since fewer people would be bored, standing in the way looking for things to do.
aaroninsf
Start to take seriously that the current crisis: - will affect EVERY aspect of public life, and ripple through everyone's private life - is exactly as bad as it seems - with goals as venal, selfish, and compromised as it seems
QED the appropriate solution if you don't want to ride the collapse into a dystopian horrorscape cum shithole,
is to figure out what direct action you and your closest circles need to do for - personal survival - community survival and hopefully - national survival
where the latter is going to obviously mean some real, literal effort, short term, to reverse the soft coup that is going down.
Doesn't matter if these people were voted in; they can never be voted out and the sooner they are taken out of power by whatever means avail, the better.
Think on the scale of national strike and national shutdown.
Nothing short of that is going to save what generations built.
otikik
Just name a random star “Trump” and the Oompa Loompa will be happy
oldpersonintx
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BurningFrog
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consumer451
Your comment raises an interesting issue. TFA is free of politics, aside from mentioning the incoming NASA administrator.
1) As political decisions impact things like science, is this not fit for discussion here, because there is a tinge of politics?
2) What are some not dumb points to make about this story? Or, are there none possible?
BurningFrog
All I know is that in this discussion, normally thoughtful and smart people are screeching that their outgroup are mean poopheads who want to ruin everything.
consumer451
Broadly speaking, there are two possibilities. These "normally thoughtful and smart people" are either correct, or they are not.
Have you considered that the prior is a real possibility? I mean, the accelerationist view requires destroying that which now exists. This is not something being invented out of nowhere.
I guess my real question is: what happens if "mean poopheads who want to ruin everything" is what is actually happening? How would one have a thoughtful discussion about that? Is that even possible?
Let's take a 30,000 foot view on this. Swap, or avoid, in-out group positioning for this thought experiment.
null
Everyone able to make it to the Boston Museum of Science should make a point of watching "Deep Sky" in IMAX (the story of the JWST and tons of new-to-mankind images of the furthest reaches / oldest objects in the universe), it's breathtaking.
https://www.mos.org/visit/omni/deep-sky