You’ve got to be kidding me.

One of America’s greatest, grandest scientific successes — and possibly one of the biggest scientific successes of all time — has been the Hubble Space Telescope. It has expanded our knowledge of the universe in ways that no one could ever have imagined.

NASA has been working on the next generation of this revolutionary device, the James Webb Space Telescope, for years. Billions of dollars have already been spent. The Webb Telescope will orbit in deep space, and send back images from the very dawn of time, looking farther and deeper into the universe than ever before.

And now the Republican Party is trying to kill the project: Nasa fights to save the James Webb space telescope from the axe.

Last week the US House of Representatives’ appropriations committee on commerce, justice, and science decided that it had had enough of these escalating costs and moved to cancel the project by stripping $1.9bn from Nasa’s budget for next year.

A terse statement, released by the Republican-dominated committee, said that the project “is billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management”. The decision still has to be approved by the full appropriations committee, the House and the Senate. Nevertheless, analysts say the telescope now faces a struggle to survive.

Not surprisingly, the move to scrap the telescope, which has been under construction since 2004 and is named after a former Nasa administrator, has horrified astronomers. The James Webb was intended to be the centrepiece of astronomical research for the next two decades. Its segmented mirror would be almost three times the diameter of the Hubble telescope’s, and because it would orbit outside Earth’s atmosphere it would be able to make observations of unprecedented accuracy. This would allow it to capture images from a time when the first stars and galaxies lit up the universe.

Tod Lauer, of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, said: “[Cancellation] would be an unmitigated disaster for cosmology. After two decades of pushing the Hubble to its limits, which has revolutionised astronomy, the next step would be to pack up and give up. The Hubble is just good enough to see what we’re missing at the start of time.” The James Webb would be able to fill in those gaps, he added.

The Republican Party is deliberately sabotaging America’s future. This is truly horrifying.