NASA’s Webb telescope threatened with budget cuts. They would hit hard.

The James Webb Space Telescope is peering into distant worlds and rewriting our grasp of the cosmos.

And in 2025, its budget is on track to get slashed.

At January’s Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Tom Brown, who heads Webb’s mission at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), showcased the observatory’s achievements, while also revealing the institute has been asked to consider around 20 percent in cuts to its science and mission operations. (The institute operates major telescopes for NASA, like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope.)

The budget shortfall would begin in October 2025, the start of the federal fiscal year. The telescope, orbiting about 1 million miles from Earth, has a team of scientists and engineers choosing the the most valuable targets, calibrating its observations, and fixing problems. Budget cuts would hit these jobs, and significantly diminish Webb’s productivity, Brown said.

“The operations work at STScI, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and other NASA contractors is funded by the operational budget for Webb, so the funding cuts would incur reductions in staff working in these areas,” Brown, who also researches star and galaxy formation, told Mashable.

“One could see reductions in observing efficiency, anomaly response, calibration cadence and fidelity, support for instrument modes, and even the number of observing modes available for science,” he added.

In 2025, NASA’s budget request for Webb was $187 million, which included $60 million in grants that enable scientists at other institutions to plan and pursue investigations with the telescope. Yet Brown noted, in his presentation, that Webb’s operations costs were “set idealistically low in 2011,” and the operations budget must now contend with higher-than-anticipated inflation and a tight NASA budget. The space agency has a lot of ambitions and investments spread across a budget of some $25.4 billion, such as $7.6 billion in annual costs for the looming exploration of the moon, and eventually Mars. For example, NASA’s new megarocket, the Space Launch System, was afforded over $2.4 billion in the 2025 fiscal year.

“If the budget cuts were to happen, the cuts would impact all aspects of operations.”

Should Webb’s operations budget be cut, meaning a drop of some $37 million compared with 2025 levels, little would be immune.

“If the budget cuts were to happen, the cuts would impact all aspects of operations,” Brown said. “This includes solicitation and peer-reviewed selection of observing programs, observation planning and scheduling, flight operations and commanding, systems engineering, anomaly response, data calibration, data analysis tools, science data products, data processing and archiving, management of research grants, and public outreach.”

The Webb telescope, which came online in 2022, is currently in its prime five-year mission. But it’s performing excellently, and NASA suspects it could run for two decades, if not more. Its productivity over this span, however, could be hampered.

A deep field view of the universe captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, including some of the farthest-away objects ever seen in infrared light.
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI

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The Webb telescope’s powerful abilities

The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It’s also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here’s how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for years to come:

– Giant mirror: Webb’s mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That’s over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror, meaning Webb has six times the light collecting area. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. “We’re going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed,” Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

– Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that’s visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn’t as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb’s infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can’t.

“It lifts the veil,” said Creighton.

– Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we’ll find?

“We might learn things we never thought about,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.