You looked up at the night sky on a long road trip home and wondered what was out there. You imagined what it was like to blast off into space and float around, to hell with gravity. In the city, you could barely see any stars but when you stepped out one night in the middle of nowhere, you could see hundreds of stars and wondered how there could be so many tiny little suns in that big black space.
Well, even if you didn’t ever do those things, remember that time when you first heard about the Hubble Space Telescope or saw one of its photos? Like this one:
Mystic Mountain
Source: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and STScl.
or this one:
Eagle Nebula
Source: NASA, ESA, and STScl/AURA.
Look at the rest of the 25 most spectacular Hubble photos at spacetelescope.org.
Perhaps, if you were like me, you were also fascinated by the sheer amount of scientific discovery that resulted from the Hubble Project. Hubble essentially helped us narrow down the age of our universe to between 13 and 14 billion years old. It helped in the discovery of dark energy, the stuff that expanded — and continues to expand — our universe from the Big Bang. Hubble has helped us find extrasolar planets around stars that are older than our sun to see what the fate of our Earth will be. To see all of the greatest scientific discoveries, check out the national geographic compilation.
Amidst all the news attention over the end of the shuttle program today, I want to bring to attention the possible death of a program that hasn’t even been launched yet: the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
(skip to the end at any point if you want to get to the good stuff: helping to save this project)
The Hubble Telescope is the size of a school bus orbiting about 350 miles above the earth with a mirror a couple of inches taller than a Yao Ming. The JWST is going to be about the size of a tennis court orbiting 930,000 miles above the earth with a mirror 7 times the size of Yao Ming. If the Hubble can see back to the first galaxies ever created with the Ultra Deep Field, the James Webb will be able to see back to the first stars ever created, way before there were any galaxies. The amount of scientific data and discovery that could come out of the project is simply unimaginable right now because never have we collected that kind of data before.
But what are we going to do if it gets cancelled? And that is a very likely possibility. As of right now, the Houst Appropriations Committee is in the midst of killing the project before it ever gets to launch, after 4.5 billion have been spent on the project. Read more about it in the New York Times article published on 6th July.
The issue now is that the program is too expensive, a burden on the budget, and something that can be killed off to stave off the possibility of a debt default in less than a month. But the costs area already sunk. Cancelling the program won’t retrieve the rest of this money and, as George Bush famously said, you really can’t switch horses in the middle of the stream. Well, let’s apply that logic here. The telescope is completely constructed, the projected launch date is set for 2017 despite the budget shortfall for the project, and they are moving on to the next phase of the project. We are almost there. More information on the importance of the JWST can be found at the Cosmic Variance blog in Discover Magazine.
So to see this project go the way of the Texas Superconducting Supercollider did in 1993 would be a catastrophe for our credibility as global leaders in science. After that fiasco, there was a brain drain of our prominent physicists and now CERN with its Large Hadron Collider is the one that will be making the latest discoveries in physics and shaping the way we look at the world.
If I haven’t convinced you, fair reader, by now that we need to save this project, then I don’t know what else I can do. Perhaps the idea that NASA only costs half a penny of a tax dollar may convince you. Maybe the idea of space research doesn’t make any sense when we have hundreds of thousands of problems to take care of at home. But the mark of a successful society is one that can defend against problems and advance into the unknown at the same time. When we begin to fear for our basic amenities, our basic securities, and our intrinsic rights on a daily basis, it shows something about the way our country has developed, or rather not, over the last decade.
The killing of this project is one of the many big steps backwards in the progression of American innovation and dominance in discovery. We may become the space version of Vikings when it comes to exploring the new frontier, but let us not become the same for all scientific research.
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Remember that time when you helped save the potentially one of the most important pieces of machinery to help us unravel the mystery of the universe? Well, dear reader, the only thing I ask is that you create this memory for your future self by helping to preserve what little concrete plans we have left of our space program.
I urge you to contact any member, preferably the one from your state, in the House Committe on Appropriations. Click on this link and scroll down to the bottom to find a representative from your state and contact them by phone or via the contact form and tell them to reconsider the budget cut to JWST. Contact the senators from your state as well here. Take the 5 minutes out of your day to let them know what you think. Please help save the JWST.
I’ll end with a great opinion piece written in the Scientific American. If you’re interested in following the progress of the JWST, please like the Facebook page and/or follow the campaign on Twitter.
