Decline of America, One in a Continuing Series

Tidbits of news, depressing enough on their own and adding up to a bigger picture.

  • The James Webb Space Telescope, having gone so far over budget that large swathes of NASA’s science program has been shelved to make room for it, is now in danger of being cancelled.
  • Everyone knows that education is of paramount importance, especially for economically disadvantaged kids. Therefore, communities across the country are — cutting back on school time, especially for economically disadvantaged kids.
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon — the climactic conclusion to auteur Michael Bay’s explosive trilogy of awesome explodyness — grossed over $116 million over the holiday weekend.

On the other hand, Google+ was launched. So it’s not all bad.

45 Comments

45 thoughts on “Decline of America, One in a Continuing Series”

  1. Future doesn’t look good in terms of Science. Maybe we should ask google / facebook if they have some extra $$$ to spend for science, seriously…

  2. All four people who left my institution with a PhD in astrophysics got jobs in Germany next year. None of them could find work in the United States.

  3. We’ve spent our future. No more conspicuous consumption to buff our collective vanity. Instead, there are creditors to be paid off for the next generation or two.

  4. Sounds like the conspiracy theorists might have gotten one correct regarding why NASA moved the JWST budget to a line item earlier this year.

  5. NASA still operates on more money per day than Transformers brought in per day of their opening weekend… so that’s probably a good sign.

  6. The only “big picture” I see is intellectual snobbery. That people can choose to spend their OWN money on silly entertainment is just how it should be. The managers of the JWST should be ashamed that they need more BILLIONS to do what they said they could do for much less. I applaud Michael Bay and his financial backers for creating a legal, profitable product. Besides, explodyness is a Fourth of July Weekend tradition.

    In the truest sense of the word, the future of science is awesome. Funding isn’t going to change that one bit. Now, if you mean “Science” as an employer, yeah, things are tough all over.

  7. Joshua,

    It’s pretty bad here in the UK as well. Last week was the going away party of a uni friend who got a job, great one, in China’s Tsinghua university.

  8. Dutch Railroader

    @TedL

    The future of astronomy is not awesome if JWST is cancelled. HST has pretty much hit the wall in terms of its ability to probe the early Universe. That is the job JWST was designed to do, and there is nothing else that can touch it. We scuttle JWST, then that’s the game.

  9. @ Dutch Railroader:

    No argument. But game not over, just delayed. If the situation is as you describe it, astronomy will still be there when we can afford it.

    And if that’s the “decline of America,” so be it.

  10. Low Math, Meekly Interacting

    Sad, but not surprising. SSC redux, in all the most discouraging ways, only this time the Congress is much more dysfunctional, and the national economy much worse.

  11. Google+ Where? I haven’t seen it, I can’t use it, I just hear other people talking about it. I’ve had a Google account for years, doesn’t seem to make a difference.

  12. A different perspective for today.

    Imagine it was 1700+ years ago and we were Roman. Most likely, we would be proclaiming the end of the world. Certainly civilization was ending as none of those savage tribes on the periphery of the Empire’s greatness were any good. Powerful yes, but civilized? No way.

    My point is that science is not threatened, nor is civilization, nor is humankind. In fact I doubt that the current world order is ready to be upended either. Not just yet.

  13. Low Math, Meekly Interacting

    For those with a “no big deal” reaction to this, I must say, I’m baffled. The JWST has no conceivable peer for the foreseeable future, and if it’s not launched it could be decades before a comparable telescope is operational. Losing it would do to astronomy and astrophysics about what not having the Hubble would do to the past 20 years of space science. No “science” won’t come to a screeching halt, but come on! Its absence would truly be devastating to the field, easily on the order of what not having the SSC did to high energy physics.

  14. re: #18
    In general, what should be the requirements for canning a NASA project that is going nowhere?
    Behind schedule?
    Check.
    So over budget that it has cannibalized everything else in its field?
    Check.

    JWST has already killed off just about every other cosmology mission for the decade. How much more damage do you want it to do?

  15. Folks: Actually, part of ensuring that astronomy will still be there when we can afford it is making sure we don’t lose critical expertise, as astronomers and engineers are laid off on specific programs and nobody else is trained or hired to take their place. We may actually slide backwards in terms of highly skilled people available to undertake big projects. And of course we’ve mentioned the inevitable human suffering of displacing a lot of highly qualified and specialized people… I’ve been trying to find numbers on the web that say how many jobs (grad student, postdoc, faculty, staff, technicians) will disappear if JWST dies, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place.

    This isn’t even counting the science that’s not going to get done (by us or our international partners) and other indirect costs to education and the public’s engagement in science as a result. We don’t need to denigrate entertainment, nor do we need to praise waste and mismanagement on big projects or the culture that enables such mismanagement, to know that US astronomy will be much worse off if JWST doesn’t fly. Things definitely need to tighten up at NASA, but the technology side of JWST is totally feasible and on track. They just finished polishing the mirrors, even.

    NASA’s not the only one suffering, either — NSF, NOAA and NIST are all funded hundreds of millions of dollars below Obama’s request in that bill. We can’t keep under-funding our scientists and expect our economy, education, and culture not to decline.

  16. @Lab Lemming: what you’re missing is the fact that the money NASA allocated to JWST, the money that was taken away from other parts of NASA’s budget, is also gone. So at the end of the day, they’re left with less money than they had before, *and* with no clear successor to HST. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was part of someone’s master plan… get NASA to put all its eggs in one basket, and then throw out the basket.

  17. @TedL:
    “astronomy will still be there when we can afford it.”

    The Universe will still be, yeah. But as Richard Scalzo said, astronomy as a discipline will suffer terribly if there are no space observatories. The brainpower that leaves the field doesn’t come back in when the funding returns.

    And this is a huge waste, given all the instruments for JWST that are already built. The major cost for the next several years was to be keeping it in a vacuum while undergoing testing. Ending it now, after we’ve spent so much money on it, means we’ve lost that money, and now have nothing to show for it.

    Oh, and how enthusiastic do you think Canada, the Europeans, etc. are going to be about joint scientific projects if we show them we’re so unreliable as to pull out of JWST (which is not just a US project)?

  18. @Brian Too:

    Over 1000 years of ignorance and religious insanity covering an entire continent, no big deal? WTF? I mean, yes, I’m a cosmologist, so I can put on that hat and say “Milky Way galaxy, no big deal”, but… as a human, I’m rather aghast at your “optimistic” viewpoint.

  19. The James Webb Space Telescope can be saved if all public employees pay more into their own pension funds and University employees take payroll cuts.

    Sacrifice will get us all the James Webb Space Telescope.

    You can make it happen.

    Sean? Contributed your own fair share to the JWT?

    Sean?

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