"If you have a large, complicated mission, you're going to demand high reliability because it's so expensive and you have so much riding on it," Frank said. "The more you try to do with one spacecraft, the more inherent technical complexity there is within the spacecraft," Frank said.Īnd as JWST became ever more ambitious, NASA became ever more determined to make sure nothing could go wrong. When the astronomy community began toying with ideas for what is now known as JWST in the 1990s, NASA leadership led by then-administrator Dan Goldin encouraged going bigger and bolder.įrom there, the ignominy JWST has faced over its ballooning budgets and ever-more-delayed launch may have been a little inevitable. (Image credit: NASA) An ever-growing project "If it weren't complicated, if it weren't at L2, if it hadn't had a sunscreen to keep it nice and cool, you couldn't do all the transformational stuff," Turner said.Īn animation shows the orbit of the James Webb Space Telescope around Lagrange point 2, or L2. Getting a spacecraft to L2, that's been done, but only by much smaller missions, like NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe that operated from 2001 to 2010 and the European Space Agency's Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background.Īnd there's no way to simplify JWST and get science results of the same magnitude. Not so for JWST.Īnd JWST's mirror is too big to launch in one piece, so for the first time on a space telescope, it must align 18 different segments to form one perfectly smooth surface.Īnd the five-layer sunshield that must unfurl in space? Nothing like it has flown before. The Hubble Space Telescope, a smaller telescope but the key predecessor in scale to JWST, had a safety mechanism built in: Thanks to its orbit around Earth and its careful design, astronauts could visit the spacecraft and tend to its instruments. "When you're doing something for the first time, it's really hard to predict how long it's going to take and how much it's going to cost," Elizabeth Frank, who was a planetary scientist working on NASA missions before becoming chief scientist at First Mode, an engineering company, told. When designs for JWST solidified, NASA had never built anything like it before. Scientifically, it's all very exciting, but in terms of engineering, it's incredibly hard. So JWST has been given an unprecedented sunshield and the observatory will be sent to a spot called Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2, 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) farther away from the sun than Earth. Prior years' requests were digitized and provided by NASA's History Office, and are hosted here by The Planetary Society.But infrared light is particularly difficult to observe because it doubles as heat. Since 1999, NASA has published its annual budget justification online. The budget requests also report prior-year financial commitments in form of contractual obligations, preserving a record of government spending on key space programs at a relatively granular level. space exploration priority over time, even if Congress ultimately opted to fund NASA programs at different levels. Reading through past budget justifications presents a history of U.S. In addition to serving as a blueprint for congressional funding, it serves as a statement of space policy by the current Presidential administration.
Every Spring, NASA submits a formal budget request (also known as a budget justification) to Congress for the coming fiscal year.
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