Does the next 30 years of astronomy depend on a single report?

So they say. And all isn’t well:

Organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, six Decadal Surveys have set the course of U.S. astronomy since they began in the 1960s. The results of the seventh, dubbed Astro2020, will soon be announced after two years of exhaustive deliberations led by a 20-member steering committee. And just like its predecessors, Astro2020 will reveal where major new investments and discoveries are most likely to be made—and where neglect, disinterest or even fear may block progress for generations to come…

For now, the U.S. remains at the forefront of off-world observing, but of the four “Great Observatories” NASA launched between 1990 and 2003, only Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory are still operational, and both are nearing their end, with no replacement on the horizon. “Hubble is probably not going to last another decade, and maybe we’ll get five more years out of Chandra. But then that’s it—they’re gone,” says Jason Tumlinson, an astronomer heading the community missions office at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “We’ll probably have a long gap with no real optical, ultraviolet or x-ray capability in space. And now is the time to decide how and when we might get it back.”

Lee Billings, “This Report Could Make or Break the Next 30 Years of U.S. Astronomy” at Scientific American

If activists can just ramp up the war on math and the war on science, maybe it won’t matter. Isn’t astronomy just imperialism anyway? Interfering with traditional beliefs about the stars…

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