WASHINGTON — NASA has confirmed a new cost estimate for its James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that a key congressional appropriator and critic cited in July in proposing to terminate the flagship-class astronomy mission.
"NASA has completed a JWST replan that assumes a revised life-cycle-cost of about $8.7 billion and a launch readiness date of October 2018," agency spokesman Trent Perrotto said in an Aug. 26 email to Space News. "The $8.7 billion life-cycle-cost includes development, launch, and five years of operations and science costs."
That figure is $2.2 billion higher than the already budget-busting lifecycle cost estimate provided by an independent review panel last year. At that time, NASA’s official cost estimate for the James Webb Space Telescope, the designated successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, was about $5 billion.
The Webb telescope, unlike Hubble, would be deployed far from the Earth at an Earth-sun Lagrange point — a point in space where the respective gravitational pulls of the two bodies cancel one another out. Hubble, on the other hand, is in a low Earth orbit and was deployed and later serviced by space shuttle astronauts.
Whereas Hubble makes its observations in visible light spectrum — and to a lesser degree in the ultraviolet and infrared spectra — JWST is optimized for observations in infrared wavelengths. Space.com
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