Smart People, Dumb Choices
2011-04-12 21:41:02.558194+02 by petronius 0 comments
A rather sad piece from Science News: Back in the late 90s NASA proposed the James Webb Space Telescope, which would explore the cosmos in the infrared spectrum from a spot more than 1 million KLM in space. They originally priced it at $400 million, which they knew was a ridiculously small amount. Now more than a decade later they are looking at a $6.5 billion cost, and the JWST is taking up most of the astrophysics budget at the agency, and Congress is turning its instruments on NASA. It appears that a pervasive culture of dubious accounting and deceitful lowballing was allowed to grow, and now Congress is in no mood to give them a second chance. Meanjhile, new missions to search for an ocean on Titan or life in other solar systems are told to cut back drastically. This is exactly the sort of thing that killed the SuperCollider back in the 1980s.