Trump Trying to Cancel NASA's Successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, Even Though It's Already Built

According to an early budget proposal that leaked earlier this year, the Trump administration is planning to cut NASA's science budget nearly in half, in what critics are calling an "extinction-level event" for research at the space agency.

As Scientific American reports, pending Congressional approval, the budget would have a mind-numbingly painful and unnecessary result: the effective cancellation of NASA's follow-up to its groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

For years, scientists have been hard at work on the observatory, nearing final integration and testing, before moving it to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch into space.

But the latest budget proposal, if approved by Congress, could be a death knell for the already-constructed space telescope.

"This is nuts," Simons Foundation president and former co-chair of Roman’s science team David Spergel told SciAm. "You’ve built it, and you’re not going to do the final step to finish it?"

"That is such a waste of taxpayers’ money," he added.

The telescope has historically had bipartisan support in Congress, suggesting efforts to cancel it could face significant opposition in Washington, DC.

In fact, as the publication points out, Trump has now tried to cancel the Roman telescope on four separate occasions — but Congress successfully fought back each time.

"We are extremely alarmed by reports of a preliminary White House budget that proposes cutting NASA Science funding by almost half and terminating dozens of programs already well underway, like the Mars Sample Return mission and the Roman Space Telescope," said representative Judy Chu (D-CA) and Don Bacon (R-NE), co-chairs pf the bipartisan US Congressional Planetary Science Caucus, in a statement.

"If enacted, these proposed cuts would demolish our space economy and workforce, threaten our national security and defense capabilities, and ultimately surrender the United States’ leadership in space, science, and technological innovation to our adversaries," they wrote.

If launched, the Roman space telescope could provide scientists with an unparalleled, extremely detailed look at large-scale cosmological structures in infrared light.

Named after Nancy Grace Roman, the late American astronomer who made important contributions to star classification and served as NASA's first female executive, the observatory could shed light on some of the biggest scientific mysteries astronomers are pondering today.

"Roman has the sensitivity we need to understand what’s going on with the 70 percent of the universe that we don’t understand, which is dark energy," Spergel told SciAm.

Beyond the Roman telescope, Trump's proposed budget cuts would also kill off other major planetary science and space exploration projects, including a mission to Venus, and NASA's already hard-pressed Mars Sample Return mission.

However, funding for existing telescopes, including NASA's JWST and Hubble, is accounted for in the budget proposal.

Experts have been appalled at the suggestion of dealing a near-fatal blow to the space agency's Science Directorate.

"It sets back a program that is clearly the leading program in the world — in a historic fashion," one former government official told SciAm. "You take that program and shoot it through the head."

Cancelling the Roman space telescope, in particular, could be devastating news for the scientific community, if not the world.

"Why do we even plan on doing great things if, on a whim, we can just decide ‘nah’?" a senior space scientist told SciAm. "These things take a generation to build and enable multiple generations of scientists. They should not be blithely thrown away."

More on the Roman: Trump Planning Brutal Cuts to NASA: "Extinction-Level Event for NASA Science"

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