The James Webb Space Telescope will be folded up to fit inside its launch rocket and then unfurled in space (Image: NASA)

The James Webb Space Telescope, already billions of dollars over budget and several years behind schedule, will be delayed by at least another year, to 2015, and will cost $1.5 billion more than current estimates, an independent review panel says. Costs and delays could escalate even further if funding for the project does not increase substantially in 2011 and 2012.

Cost estimates have risen for the ambitious mission, billed as the Hubble Space Telescope’s heir, since the idea for the telescope was floated in the late 1980s. At that time, proponents estimated that the project would cost about $1 billion. In 2008, NASA officials upped that amount to $5 billion. Though Congress approved all requested funding for JWST in 2009 and 2010, NASA came back asking for an additional $95 million and $20 million in each respective year.

Those escalating costs prompted Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, head of the congressional subcommittee that funds NASA, to call for an independent investigation into the project. “I am committed to space-based astronomy,” said Mikulski in a written statement. But “we are not in the business of cost overruns”.


Best-case scenario

The seven-member review panel released its report (pdf) on Wednesday. The panel estimates that an additional $1.5 billion is needed to launch the mission, putting the project’s total cost at $6.5 billion. And it says the mission could not be made ready for launch until at least September 2015, more than a year after its current target launch date of June 2014.

And those estimates are best-case scenarios. To meet the 2015 launch date, the panel says $200 million to $250 million would have to be added to the project’s budget in each of the next two years. That represents about a fifth of NASA’s annual budget for astrophysical missions like JWST.

“I doubt we’re going to find $200 million [per year],” NASA Associate Administrator Chris Scolese told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re in a time of fiscal [conservatism] where we have to make every dollar count.”

New management

It is not yet clear whether NASA will try to funnel money from other projects to JWST to make the 2015 launch date or whether the mission will get delayed even further.

Panelists blamed poor management and oversight of the programme for the rising costs and delays. NASA responded by reorganising the mission’s management structure and creating a new position, the JWST programme manager. Under the new design, JWST project leaders both at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, and at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will have to report directly to that programme manager who, in turn, will report to top NASA officials.

But despite its criticisms of the project’s management, the panel was quick to point out that the JWST mission itself will do top-notch science. The telescope will boast a 6.5-metre mirror, nearly three times as wide as Hubble’s, and will peer back at distant objects that appear as they were a couple of hundred million years after the big bang.

“This is a remarkable telescope and will be an outstanding facility that stands on the shoulders of Hubble,” said panelist Garth Illingworth of the University of California Observatories.