NASA's heralded James Webb Space Telescope will remain stuck on Earth until March 2021 because of "screw"-ups, and the space agency administrators are left to answer to Congress why, The Washington Post reported.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and Northrop Grumman chief executive Wes Bush will face the House Science Committee on Wednesday with questions about the project's delay and soaring cost high on the agenda, the newspaper said.
The telescope is expected to replace the fabled Hubble telescope, but unlike Hubble, astronauts will not be able to repair it in space since it will be a perched a million miles away from Earth, the Post noted.
An independent review board reported this summer, though, that Webb has up to 344 different "single-point-failures," which has created concern in the space community because one failure could render the telescope useless, the Post said.
"We have a ten-billion-dollar paperweight sitting out there," astrophysicist Grant Tremblay of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said about what Webb could become if it hit a snag after launch, according to the newspaper.
Technicians found that some screws fell out of the telescope during testing this past spring, along with other design flaws that forced another delay in the long awaited mission, The Washington Post said. The cost has also ballooned form $7.4 billion and an estimated price tag of $9.7 billion.
Thomas Young, a former NASA official who chaired the review board, said, according to the Post, that the Webb project should go forward, but with more care than in the past.
"There's got to be an all-out effort to try to find any additional embedded problems," Young said, according to the Post.
SpaceNews.com reported that the 29-month mission delay from October 2018 to March 2021 will incur about $1 billion in additional costs, only $200 million which is covered by existing project reserves.
"Accommodating this is likely to impact other parts of the astrophysics budget and possibly beyond astrophysics," Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division, told the agency's astrophysics advisory committee Monday, according to SpaceNews.com.
Hertz didn’t identify specific programs that could lose funding because of Webb's lingering delays but stressed several areas – like research and analysis grant funding to scientists – would be protected, noted SpaceNews.com.
"We will make sure that we fly decadal survey priorities as we make these decisions," Hertz said, according to SpaceNews.com.
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