How Trump’s budget cuts could affect 2 iconic space telescopes: Hubble and James Webb
https://www.space.com/astronomy/hubble-space-telescope/how-trumps-budget-cuts-could-affect-2-iconic-space-telescopes-hubble-and-james-webb
How Trump’s budget cuts could affect 2 iconic space telescopes: Hubble and James Webb
https://www.space.com/astronomy/hubble-space-telescope/how-trumps-budget-cuts-could-affect-2-iconic-space-telescopes-hubble-and-james-webb
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“For scientists, some of the most serious consequences of Trump’s 2026 budget request have to do with grant funding being significantly reduced. Though it’s great to have an operational telescope in space, that telescope isn’t of much use if scientists can’t create instructions for it.”
Any more info than just a post title and a link? A short TL:DR would be nice.
As much as the budget cuts are terrible for science across the board, Hubble and Webb with their outsized public impact are relatively insulated from the worst effects of the cuts. They are requesting a reduced budget and not an outright cancellation, which is happening to a lot of important science missions which the public are less aware of, including Chandra, Fermi, New Horizons, MAVEN, Juno, DSCOVR, and many more.
While it’s obviously great the HST and JWST are not as impacted by these cuts, the budget reductions, particularly for JWST, are still horrible and will have a ton of consequences. The president’s budget plans to slash JWST grants by 2/3, meaning that those that just got observing time in Cycle 4 will likely not be paid to carry out their science. The fact that the administration wants to cut JWST at all in it’s prime mission is shameful. We spent 10 billion dollars on it, the least we can do is spend the small pittance of money to keep the telescope running and the scientist carrying out the groundbreaking work paid for more than 3 years after launch.