James Webb and Telescopes

This morning I noticed this story over at Space.com:

Scientists Condemn Plans to Scrap Hubble Telescope Successor | James Webb Space Telescope | NASA Budget & Congress | Space.com

The James Webb Space Telescope is expensive, absolutely, and it's over budget and behind schedule, just like Hubble was. In fact, does anyone remember how much trouble Hubble was? Three shuttle missions, millions of dollars and countless hours of hair-pulling on the part of the scientists who designed it and all we got was a look into the deepest regions of space and the origin of the universe.

It all makes me sigh wearily, because this is a problem that the space program has faced since it's earliest days: funding. It really reminds me of my "other life" as a film historian, because so much of that history consists of people begging for money, slapping backs and making compromises to get the job done.

The analogy is even more apt when you consider that the public's attitude to both activities is more or less the same: pretty, but unnecessary. The fact is that visionaries have a hard time getting businesspeople and politicians to invest in their dreams, particularly when there's no obvious commercial aspect to them. I will always argue strongly that every penny spent on the space program is worth it for what it contributes to the development of our species. But that's not a fashionable opinion, nor does it win the day in Congress.

The irony of this whole situation is that the telescope in question is named after James Webb, the administrator of NASA from 1961 to 1968. Webb is described in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff as an "off the ballot politician". Documentary footage of him show is a jowly bulldog of a man with slicked back hair looking like Jimmy Hoffa. His reputation is that of an old-fashioned, pre-Kennedy political operator. He was a dealmaker, a lobbyist. He knew what hands to shake and what backs to slap to remind a typically amnesiac Congress that they agreed to send men to the moon by the end of the decade. He also, in Andrew Chaykin's words from his A Man on the Moon, "knew where the political bodies were buried".

In other words, James Webb would be just the man to save the telescope that carries his name.

It's a stark reminder that in space exploration (like in film), you need creative, daring people who doggedly pursue their dreams, but you also need fast-talking powerful friends (in a film this would be a sympathetic producer) like James Webb to make sure things happen. Otherwise, in the words of filmmaker James Cameron, the "nattering nabobs of negativity" will win the day.