Budget-Managing Tips, but for Space Telescopes

Sometime in the mid-2020s, the United States plans to launch a new member of its fleet of space observatories, one with a field of view 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST, will spend six years scanning the universe. It will scour the Milky Way in search of hundreds of more exoplanets, and it will soak up the light from distant stars in the hope of understanding, even just a little, the great mystery that is dark energy.

But first, NASA has to figure out how to foot the bill.

The estimated cost of WFIRST has ballooned steadily since astronomers proposed their preliminary designs for the mission in 2011, from less than $2 billion to more than $3 billion. NASA officially began from an independent committee that NASA established to help the space agency manage the mission.