#315 NASA budget cut in half (draft bill)
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/s/8MctZcOSfa If this pass this will be an extreme unprecedented tragedy, not only for roman telescope but also possibly for other telescopes of which there are no planned Chinese or European counterpart. Moreover while I am skeptical of the real value of lagrangians, xuntian being in LEO might have substantially lower infrared accuracy though I have never been able to find a quantitative estimate of how significant VS negligigble of a difference this makes.
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This budget will pass, like everything else Trump is doing. And it won’t be very subtle; all telescope including the Hubble-ST and Webb-ST are also on the chopping block.
An article in Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/trump-white-house-budget-proposal-eviscerates-science-funding-at-nasa/
More numbers and Musk’s reaction https://archive.ph/Umr2c#selection-517.0-517.12
In the Ars Technica article they say that Webb and Hubble won’t be affected, but others telescopes would be. I can’t imagine them cutting Webb.
We’ll see…
@ExpEarth, not looking good for WST… “The Webb Telescope is making incredible discoveries: It may go dark” https://phys.org/news/2025-04-webb-telescope-incredible-discoveries-dark.html