Tag: James Webb Space Telescope

NASA says the launch of its flagship James Webb Space Telescope is being rescheduled for no earlier than 2021, with its total price tag boosted to $9.66 billion.

That price tag includes a development cost of $8.8 billion, which breaks the $8 billion development cost cap mandated by Congress in 2011. That was the last time the Webb project went through a do-or-die debate.

“Congress will have to reauthorize Webb through this next cycle of authorization,” NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said today during a teleconference announcing the reset.

NASA officials strongly supported going ahead with the telescope, which is in the latter stages of testing and assembly. The general-purpose telescope is expected to build on the trailblazing observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and provide unprecedented insights about exoplanets and the farthest frontiers of the observable universe.

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NASA says it’s reviewing its options for repair and corrective action for the multibillion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope after tests shook fastening hardware off the observatory’s sunshield covers.

The issue isn’t expected to force further delays in the Webb Space Telescope’s launch, which was recently postponed to no earlier than May 2020.

Word of the loose hardware surfaced this week when Webb program director Greg Robinson referred to the issue during a presentation to the National Academies’ Space Studies Board, sparking a report in Space News. Robinson was quoted as saying “it’s not terrible news, but it’s not good news, either.”

In today’s follow-up report, NASA said it’s not uncommon for such issues to turn up during pre-launch testing. “This is an example of why space systems are thoroughly and rigorously tested on the ground to uncover imperfections and fix them prior to launch,” Robinson said in the NASA update.

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NASA is delaying the scheduled launch of its next flagship observatory, the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, by a year — which may hike its cost so high that Congress will have to OK more money.

Acting agency administrator Robert Lightfoot said that the outlook for additional delays emerged from an internal schedule review, and that a new date for the telescope’s launch on an Ariane 5 rocket would be negotiated with the European Space Agency.

For now, NASA is looking at launch in May 2020, rather than the spring of 2019 as previously planned.

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NASA says it’s moving the launch date for its $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope from October 2018 to the spring of 2019, citing a longer-than-expected process of integrating elements of the house-sized spacecraft. The latest delay for the oft-postponed launch was announced Sept. 28 after a routine schedule assessment.

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After years of busted budgets and stretched timelines, NASA says its $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope is ready for testing and on track for launch in 2018.

The telescope, seen as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, is designed to capture images of the first galaxies ever formed and provide unprecedented data about planets circling distant stars.

“Today, we’re celebrating the fact that our telescope is finished, and we’re about to prove that it works,” Nobel-winning astrophysicist John Mather, the telescope’s senior project scientist, told reporters at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland today.

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