NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope $1 billion over budget

Science : A committee convened by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) and chaired by John Casani of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has issued its report into NASA’s successor to Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope. The report estimates that the spacecraft’s cost, originally put at $5 billion, could rise by as much as $1 billion. To accommodate the overrun, NASA might have to postpone JWST‘s 2014 launch to 2017. But spending an additional $1 billion in those three years would adversely affect other NASA missions. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee and Andrew Lawler’s report in Science ends with the paragraph:

A senior NASA official, who did not wish to be named, says the Casani report is not the final word on how much JWST will end up costing or when it will be ready for launch. The report, he says, will be only one of a number of inputs that NASA will consider in drafting a budgetary plan for completing the project.