[juiceandjuice]

This has been feared for a while in that community. There's quite a bit of animosity towards the JWST for soaking up NASA's budget in recent history, and JWST is trying to do some serious damage control because they're too far along and too big to fail. I saw John Mather (Nobel prize winner) give a talk recently that was basically "Look how far we are, and we're sorry for soaking up the budget."

[mturmon]

More on the JWST overrun:

http://www.spacenews.com/civil/101112-jwst-cost-imperils-pri...

[robryan]

Given the amount spent a launch failure would be pretty catastrophic for the JWST.

[mturmon]

A launch failure is always catastrophic for the onboard instrument ;-)

[d2]

Canceling the JWST will be a catastrophe for NASA.

[mturmon]

They're not proposing to cancel JWST.

It's just that its $6.5B price tag is overwhelming the whole astrophysics science effort. The original design was supposed to come in around 0.5B. See

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/71607/title/Star_...

[gammarator]

Unfortunately, with JWST sitting out there as its own line-item in the NASA budget (as opposed to rolled in with the rest of Astrophysics), there's concern in the community that it will be a tempting target for a Congress anxious to cut anything that moves.

[OstiaAntica]

To be fair to the cutters in Congress, running a government that borrows 40 cents of every dollar it spends is going to lead to a catastrophe.

[harshpotatoes]

Yes, this is true. But unfortunately, if LISA were allowed to be completed, LISA would be in the same situation soaking up all of the budget. LISA was expected to cost more than a billion dollars. As is true for any project of that size, there would be overages.