NASA seeks funding alternative for James Webb space telescope

The Office of Management and Budget is considering an alternative financing plan from NASA to finish building the James Webb Space Telescope, Nature reported on its website.

Designed to be the successor to the enormously successful but aging Hubble Space Telescope, the Webb telescope is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2018. The cost of meeting that deadline is expected to be about $8 billion, or $1.5 billion more than what had been forecast by an independent panel in 2010.

Instead of financing the extra development costs only using funds slated for the telescope, NASA hopes to pay for half of the costs using funds appropriated for programs outside the agency's science division, which is developing the telescope. By doing so, NASA hopes to help preserve funding for lesser-priority science-division programs.

"There's an acknowledgment that the science budget can't solve this on its own," Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, told Nature. The Baltimore-based institute operates Hubble and will operate the JWST.

Even if OMB approves NASA's plan, congressional appropriators will still have the final word. Last month, the House voted to eliminate funding altogether for the telescope in part due to its cost overruns. The Maryland-based telescope may have more luck in the Senate, though, where Sen. Barbara Mikulski , D-Md., chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee in charge of NASA's budget.