JWST facing potential cuts to its operational budget

WASHINGTON — While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to exceed astronomers’ expectations, a potential funding shortfall could reduce the telescope’s effectiveness as soon as this fall.Officials with the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which handles JWST science, say the telescope, halfway through its official five-year prime mission, is performing better than expected and demand for observing time far outpacing supply.“JWST is not even close to hitting its peak science or demand,” said Jennifer Lotz, director of STScI, at a town hall session during the recent 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. “It’s performing better than expected.”Macarena Garcia Marin, JWST project scientist at the institute, said that includes images that are twice as sharp and instruments that are, in most cases, more sensitive than required. “In a nutshell, it is truly fulfilling its promise of revolutionizing science,” she concluded.JWST has a design life of 10 years, but officials said they expect it to far exceed that. The telescope’s only consumable is propellant for stationkeeping at the Earth-sun L-2 point, and that propellant is projected to last more than 20 years. That gives astronomers optimism that JWST can operate well into the 2040s and overlap with the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a future large space telescope that could launch as soon as the early 2040s.There is growing demand for observing time on JWST. In the latest round of proposals for telescope time, called Cycle 4, astronomers submitted 2,377 proposals seeking about 78,000 hours, more than nine times the hours available in the proposal call.However, astronomers at the town hall session raised concerns about budget pressures on JWST. NASA requested $187 million for JWST in its fiscal year 2025 budget proposal last March, $127 million for telescope operations and $60 million in science grants to astronomer using the telescope. The agency projected keeping that funding flat through fiscal year 2029.The problem, said Tom Brown, head of the JWST mission office at STScI, is that mission costs were set “somewhat idealistically low” during planning for the mission a decade before launch. In addition, inflation has been higher than projected in recent years, eroding buying power.“The institute is being asked to consider a significant — about 20% — cut to our operational budget for the mission,” he said. That cut could start as soon as October, at the start of the 2026 fiscal year.The effects of that reduction would “pretty much cut across the entire mission,” he said. That could include, according to his presentation, various impacts to science productivity, from support for astronomers to availability of certain modes on JWST instruments and resolution of problems with the telescope.At the town hall session, astronomers raised concerns about the potential for budget reductions, particularly for a spacecraft still in its official prime mission. “It’s extremely worrisome that, while we’re in the middle of the prime mission, we’re also maybe looking at significant budget cuts,” Brown said. “The impacts are quite significant when you’re talking about a 20% cut to operations.”The challenge, he and others said at the meeting, is tight budgets for both NASA overall and its science programs specifically. At another town hall at the conference, STScI officials warned of cuts to the budget for the Hubble Space Telescope, also run by the institute, that would affect telescope operations and increase mission risk.“NASA’s astrophysics and science budgets are quite constrained, and Webb is not immune from that,” said Jane Rigby, senior project science for JWST at NASA, during the town hall. She remained optimistic about the telescope’s long-term future, though. “We don’t actually know what that ultimate lifetime for Webb is going to be, but we want it to be several decades.”