From Hubblesite.org.The no-fun House Appropriations Committee science subpanel is ruining space for everyone. Earlier today, the group voted “to cut funding for the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, calling the project ‘billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management,’” The Hill reports. Such a budgetary trim still requires a go-ahead from the House and Senate Appropriations Committee.
For those unfamiliar with the objectives of the ill-fated Hubble successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Web site is characteristically informative on the subject. The James Webb was designed to orbit a million miles above the Earth’s surface to “find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy.” Its ancestor, the Hubble, is responsible for this famous deep-space photograph (shown above), instantly recognizable to anyone who took Introduction to Astronomy sophomore year as a pass-fail quantitative-reasoning requirement. That photograph, which looks like nothing more than wallpaper for a toddler’s room, is actually “the deepest portrait of the visible universe ever achieved by humankind.” Per the Hubble’s Web site: “the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called ‘dark ages,’ the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe.” The James Webb photos could have been that much more incredible.
Is it within the budget for the House Appropriations Committee science subpanel to rent Apollo 13 again and remember why they got into this business? (It’s to revel in the unknowable majesty of space.)