Since the JWST design started, there's been a revolution in the "easiness" of launches.
I wonder if a future evolution of space telescopes will be some kind of interferometric (obviously extremely hard for IR or visible light, but easier for radio and microwaves) swarm of cheap semi-disposible telescopes than one enormous one.
Then you can add to the swarm, upgrade elements, and retire failed elements without having to eat a multi-billion helping of humble pie.
And rather than have a fearsomely complex integrated sunshield, you could have a similar swarm of simpler satellites that provide a large cool area at L2, and then the observers just need to handle their own heat.
I suppose this could be described as microservices...in spaaaaace. Draw what parallels you will from that!
Astronomer here, we are thinking about doing interferometers in space[1,2], but it won't be a catch-all for everything. One reason is that the instrumentation is equally as important as the telescope optics itself, and it's non-trivial to have your swarm of satellites both collect light, but also do science experiments with the light. One thing we are thinking of is to fly more proto-typing missions to get the technology readiness of various components to mature stages before assembling it all together for the real thing (I would say we did not do this as well for JWST).
Is there any sense in using internet providing sattelites for astronomy? Like if starlink published it's noise data from all sattelites in realtime could it be used as one huge radiotelescope?
Probably pretty difficult to find too many compelling cases. The bands starlink transmits in are designated communication bands, so interference from other satellites is going to be so high that it will drown out any signals. There are astronomers working on removing this foreground, but it's really difficult! It's actually becoming quite a problem in radio astronomy with the amount of the electromagnetic spectrum that is quiet enough for science.
> Since the JWST design started, there's been a revolution in the "easiness" of launches.
Producing novel observation platforms is going to be expensive regardless of which platform, because of launch costs.
> I wonder if a future evolution of space telescopes will be some kind of interferometric (obviously extremely hard for IR or visible light, but easier for radio and microwaves) swarm of cheap semi-disposible telescopes than one enormous one.
With space recovery and repair mission capabilities like https://nexis.gsfc.nasa.gov/osam-1.html growing, a single large asset could be easier to repair than constant refresh.
Anyways, small satellites = small sensors.
There is a big difference between a projected life of 1-3 years, and a prestige mission with a long lifespan. Hubble has been operating for ~30 years now.
> Then you can add to the swarm, upgrade elements, and retire failed elements without having to eat a multi-billion helping of humble pie.
Keeping a swarm of space assets ideally situated over time, with proper attitudes and control is a non-trivial problem. Look at Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, that is considered a hard problem.
Software solutions don't always translate to hardware.
> Producing novel observation platforms is going to be expensive regardless of which platform, because of launch costs.
This is exactly the point: launch costs are coming down, and there is widespread anticipation that they will start to plummet as the next generation of launchers comes online. If/when Starship (a) becomes available + (b) has any significant competition, launch costs could plummet by an incredible factor.
Right, and the GPS constellation has been active for almost thirty years too. I think the GP is probably right that it would be great if the risk associated with a single mega launch/deployment could be spread over a fleet, but ultimately it does no good if you can't use that configuration to get the observations you want, hence the question. It has less to do with it being a "software solution" and more just whether it would actually practically work.
To their point, though, lots of ground-based radio telescopes are now also arrays of many dishes [1], so it's not at all hard to imagine that a similar configuration could be of value in space.
The fearsome requirements imposed by optical interferometry are a real killer here: the JWST mirror segments can be controlled with 10nm precision for a reason.
Radio is a billion times easier (at least in naive terms): wavelengths in the kilometers rather than hundreds of nanometers
Ah, that is a helpful distinction. I had been thinking that JWST was for radio observations, but it's the opposite of course; JWST is for making high energy observations of things like gamma rays.
Well of course its not going to be simple, and I doubt it would even be possible for the JWST successor, which I assume are already being sketched out, but its an interesting idea to think about. Satellite swarms are a very active area of research, along with cheap launches enabling cheap hardware based on substantially COTS electronics, which means 10 "unreliable" things, of which 9 may fail may be cheaper than 1 gold-plated one that will definitely not fail.
And yes, they have small elements, that's the whole point. A small element is disproportionately easier to produce than a bigger one. The point of The Swarm would be to offset the small area individually small elements with a large number of them. ALMA does this, and they even pick the dishes up with giant forklifts and move them around to reconfigure the array.
Optical interferometric arrays are very hard and only recently even possible, so it's unlikely you could do it in space "soon" (even LISA is still a long way out, and that's been planned since I was at school). I obviously don't have a handle on if the added noise from positioning errors outweighs the literally astronomical baseline advantage.
And yes, Hubble might have lasted 30 years, but JWST has about 10 years life, and then it's dead and will fall away from L2 unless they can get a refuel/regas mission launched (it does have the ports for it) to it in time.
Of course any number of practical issues can torpedo such a thing from the phase space of feasible implementations, but they're still fun to think about.
> There is a big difference between a projected life of 1-3 years, and a prestige mission with a long lifespan. Hubble has been operating for ~30 years now.
Is there anything other than manoeuvring/orbit-correction propellant that puts an upper limit of t5he James Webbs projected life? (At least until micro meteors trash too much of the optics?) Is it possible a resupply mission capability could effectivel7y extend its useful life indefinitely? (Did they even bother putting a fuel filler on it?)
There's a lot of miscellaneous things that can break on a spacecraft
Reaction wheels (which use momentum to help you point the vehicle) are a semi common failire. There's usually some redundancy built in, but if enough of them wear out you'll lose stability and pointing accuracy.
Even radiation-hardened electronics will wear out over time. If you look at unprocessed images from the Hubble, there's a shitload of pixels that have been fried in the cameras (the effect kind of look like stuck pixels in a computer monitor)
Though resupply missions are not yet going out to those orbits, it is completely conceivable that they will in time. For the price of a $100M mission they'll be able to recoup or fix more expensive ones. I normally hear about batteries, reaction wheels, and fuel limiting life, but I think that would relate most to orbit, propulsion type, etc. IDK about a fuel filler.
The other thing to bear in mind is the size of up coming launch vehicles. SpaceX Starship will be 9m and Blue Origin’s New Glen is expected to be 7m in diameter. Both of those could take a telescope the size of James Webb with much lest or no “unfolding” required.
Annother option with some of these cheaper launch vehicles is to build the telescope into the upper stage, using it as a bus/platform. So for example you could convert a Starship upper stage into a telescope, using its full 9m diameter for a mirror. Fully assembled on the ground before launch.
Now that the folding trick has been proven and loaded into institutional memory, I'd rather use it, e.g. LUVOIR-A at 15m in diameter, planned for the 8.4m fairing on SLS but suitable for the 9m fairing on Starship.
I do love me a scientific megaproject, but I still do wonder if a glorious $24 billion (and that's before the overruns) monolith is the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar, especially if it also has a limited lifespan due to consumables.
That's fabulously expensive: you could have four LHCs, have enough change to replace Arecibo with 10 FASTs and then maybe a aircraft supercarrier on top just for funsies.
It feels like JWST again: it's so expensive that it cannot be allowed to fail, so it's engineered to near perfection, but that costs so much that it has to be engineered even more to be sure, and so on until it's 1900% over budget, a decade late and muscling other science out of funding.
> I do love me a scientific megaproject, but I still do wonder if a glorious $24 billion (and that's before the overruns) monolith is the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar, especially if it also has a limited lifespan due to consumables.
The 2nd mission with which I got involved, an Air Force Captain explained to me that continual trend was to massively underbudget a mission, and then make it whole through cost overruns.
Of course, my work was all about increasing the security capabilities of the constellation, which likely added in the tens, to hundreds of millions in cost to the system.
> It feels like JWST again: it's so expensive that it cannot be allowed to fail, so it's engineered to near perfection, but that costs so much that it has to be engineered even more to be sure, and so on until it's 1900% over budget, a decade late and muscling other science out of funding.
Launch costs are dropping and the space body of knowledge is changing rapidly
System Engineering tools are in their infancy, so rework or changing requirements are pricey. I expect this will really the cost of missions over time, since it directly relates to labor costs.
Simultaneously, the space operator mentality of "extreme availability at all costs" is meeting the hard reality of "space is now an offensive and defensive cyber domain".
We're building too many one-offs and too few constellations, both the birds, and the sensors. If you want lower cost we need to get past unit volume of one.
> the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar
> muscling other science out of funding
But we don't need four LHCs. We do need a way of observing dim and distant infrared light with high resolution. There's no other instrument that can observe EM radiation from 13 billion years ago. So it's not one or the other; something like the JWST was going to be built sooner or later.
24B is peanuts. Public spending has a greater than 1 multiplier, especially infrastructure, science and R&D.
It took a supply shock and a demand shock and trillions for the economy to see inflation, and unfortunately almost all of that is just due to fucking fertilizer and lack of livable wage for logistics workers, not science equipment manufacturers hiking prices...
I much rather launch 5 9m telescopes then one 15m telescope. And work on the technology to build even larger one in space in the generation after that.
These mega project that cost a gigantic amount and are hilariously oversubscribed are not actually the best return on investment in my option.
I don't know anything about astronomy but my intuition is that since we aren't going to the kind of places you see with a 9m space telescope any time soon the goal should be pushing the boundary rather than filling in a complete picture. In other words, I'd rather the one 15m telescope.
Could you explain what I'm missing? Have we reached a point where the returns of increasing size are very low or is it more that there are enough big mysteries to solve at the smaller size so it isn't much worth increasing until it can be done cheaper?
My question is similar but slightly different: is it possible to throw a "lot" of much "worse" hardware at the problem and solve it through a different kind of brute force than just building ever-bigger mirrors (which will only ever get to low double digit metre diameters at least in the foreseeable future without orbital assembly capabilities).
Say for JWST, there are 18 segments. Could you have 1800 mini Webbs and offset the inaccuracies that come from that with the vastly higher total area? Does that eventually reach an asymptote where a adding more units isn't useful? Does it reach a point where the data re-integration becomes the intractable issue? Can it ever be as good as a gigantic monolith even with an arbitrary number of units? Would the cheapness of individual units be outweighed by the number of them needed?
Its not that a bigger size wouldn't be better, its more that you have lots of scientists who would like to do lots of research in lots of different directions.
Combine a wealth of data sources in many different directions and many different observations can also lead to new insides.
When majority of the community, a whole generation of scientists, all have to wait for one massive telescope that can then only do 1/1000 of what people like to do with it, are you really gaining more insight?
Instead I believe JWST will be the last telescope with reflective optics we will launch. The new thing will most likely be based on diffraction based optics (Aragoscope). It is much easier to launch in space a disc of some light and bendy material of some lightweight material than a set of hyperdelicate and precise mirrors.
According to the simulations performed in [1], an aragoscope of 1km would be able to directly image objects the size of Jupiter's moons (so basically exoplanets even on the small side) 23 light-years away.
EDIT: Took the time to scavenge the numbers: JWST has 0.1 arcseconds angular resolution, a 100m aragoscope would have a 1 milli-arcsecond angular resoulution, a 1km aragoscope 0.1 milli-arcsecond which translates to be able to alpha centauri in a 70x70 pixels patch (and so see its sunspots) or as I mentioned above exoplanets on the smaller scale at 23 light years away (Europa is 1560 km in diameter).
for that matter, how many people have seen the beginning of Half Life 1 (dated, but still one of the best intros to a game I've seen, althiough it takes a bit to get to the good part)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsTEoGoAxUk
Due to budget cuts the only prize I can offer is back pain and a vague sense of nostalgia for a time when modems made a weird noise and your wierd aunt wasn't on the Internet.
ha! modems. we were all too busy trying to figure out Who Shot Jr(tm) to be worried about the internet! i can only imagine the forum insanity over that consipiracy
no, but the obvious emphasis was on spaaaaaace which is the part that matters. doesn't really matter what it is that's in spaaaaaace, its just the fact that it's in spaaaaaace that needs the emphasis. you can almost imagine a theramin playing in the background level of campy going one with the theme.
telescopes in spaaaace is so much more than lowly terrestrial scopes. i mean, we don't say telescopes on earrrrrth.
Yes, the original reference is not Portal. I don't even know what Portal 2 looks like not being a gamer, but the spaaaaace reference is much older than Portal 2 and possibly older than the people that created Portal 2.
In the final scene of Portal 2, a robot that was obsessed with going to space [1] drifts across the background and interrupts the villain, screaming "spaaaaaace!" out of excitement for finally being in space. The Portal usage is probably not related to the Lost/Pigs in Space usage.
I took zargon's comment to mean that the person implying the reference was only 10 years old was self identifying them self as a youngin without realizing it.
Yes, small satellites are simpler and cheaper. Larger systems are complicated and expensive.
But the entropy of a large system is low, because it's physically attached with the Strong Force of physics. There is a low risk to other neighbouring satellites (space junk collisions). A swarm of small satellites has high entropy, and is loosely-coupled with the Gravity force of physics.
At what point do we want to accept the financial tradeoffs involved? Humans and the economy also benefit from the large projects, and the management structures also teach efficiency to more people who can go on to create other exciting new sensors.
We could start with a small satellite like Sputnik, and make them grow. Eventually it will reach a point of stability with the neighbouring environment. That could be much larger than we expect. "That's no moon, it's a spaceship!"
One advantage of L2 is that it's a point of gravitational metastability when entropy inevitably hits, your satellite will slowly fall away from the point, and either depart for a long, initially slow, fall back to something rocky, or spiral out from the Earth-Moon system into interplanetary space.
An L2 swarm isn't bound together by gravity, it actually has to maintain active control to stay there, so it's a "self cleaning" area.
> But the entropy of a large system is low, because it's physically attached with the Strong Force of physics. There is a low risk to other neighbouring satellites (space junk collisions). A swarm of small satellites has high entropy, and is loosely-coupled with the Gravity force of physics.
I'm going to go and assume that you used the strong force and gravity as metaphors here.
Here's a funny asymmetry I've started noticing online:
* Whenever a person or group do something bad, the response is always, "Look how much humanity sucks."
* Whenever a person or group does something good, the response is always, "Look how good those particular people are."
Now, there is a positive explanation for this: It's good to give credit. When someone does something particularly good, it diminishes their act to say that it's just another example of humanity.
But at the same time, the aggregate effect of this bias is that always appears that humanity sucks with the rare exception of a few blessed individuals. But the opposite is much more likely to be true.
Or it could could be more that solving bounded problems that involve moving atoms around - like building a space telescope - is relatively easy.
But solving unbounded problems that involve moving emotions and attitudes around - like building a planetary culture that isn't violent, irrational, and collectively suicidal - is hard.
But somehow humanity works as a whole for these achievements. The higher education, the infrastructure, the people merely cleaning the launch site facilities, all get a sense out of this.
Using the same filter, I'd say non-Boeing engineers. After the 737Max revelations, the fact that they can't figure out why their space capsule doesn't work, etc, I'd be very very concerned for any of their space craft not screwing up after the launch. All of those $numberOfMinutesOfTerror would be excruciating from a Boeing engineered anything at this point.
To be brutally honest, this project being fourteen years behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget damaged mine. Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
One can reasonably argue that an over time, over budget project should be considered a failure even if it ultimately meets its objectives is a defensible comment. Arguing that people should be put in prison for such, absent actual malfeasance, is an argument that no one should ever do anything risky that's exposed to personal risk. Go away.
> this project being fourteen years behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget damaged mine.
There is a cogent response to that, as a series of questions.
1 - Which requirements changed?
2 - Which hard science & engineering problems had to be solved, and how trivial, or monumental were they?
3 - Which components failed, or passed testing, requiring rework, or re-engineering?
> Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
Initial estimated costs were higher than 500 million. The 500 million number was an NGST estimate, right? I don't think lifecycle costs were ever estimated at 500M, it seems crazy to be that low. Are you sure you are correct on the type of costs you are providing?
14 years late, 2000% over budget even while getting a free ride from ESA -- and loudly exclaiming this thing has no redundancy whatsoever: anything at all might brick it. It may be a great telescope, but it's a miserable failure as a project.
What is a "budget" when it comes to this sort of stuff though? They were doing things nobody has ever done before. How could anybody have any idea what it was going to cost?
Well, the companies that promised that they could deliver the things they were advertising claimed to know.
What should have been done is to have many more missions where these technologies can iteratively been proven so that once you head into a larger project you have some idea of whats gone happen.
And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.
And the companies that did it made fine profit of course. Promise the moon, don't deliver, make profit. Not a good model.
> What should have been done is to have many more missions where these technologies can iteratively been proven so that once you head into a larger project you have some idea of whats gone happen.
And how much do those projects cost? And what value do we derive from lots of small iterative solutions?
> And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.
If you're launching iteratively, then either you're proving out the tech until it's decades old, or you're never making progress on your iterative approach because you're constantly replacing the thing you iterated on with the new hotness.
Budget for big projects like these is not an easy concept. 14 years behind schedule means 14 more years developing the science and technology, 14 more years of research grants that probably funded project-specific but also tons of side research, new labs, new knowledge and experience that will be useful and be used way beyond the single project that funded its advancement.
Sometimes it's good to overspend if it's an excuse to fund research that would otherwise struggle to find money to stay alive.
If you’re worried about a $10b telescope, you going to lose your mind when you find out how much taxpayers overpaid on the F35 and the War in Afghanistan.
When we are talking about "directly observing a part of space and time never seen before. Gazing into the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed, over 13.5 billion years ago." I guess 2000% over budget seems fine to me. Even if you are thinking only about profit, I think the discoveries will pay for themself.
Plus I think the budget didn't jump from 500 million to ten billion dollars in on day, project grew and budget grew with it, and someone had to approve it, we are talking about multinational project, so I think everything is well documented and well approved from people who knows the project well better than us.
I do agree with you that if that was military budget, I would think that something is really wrong.
Why do downvoted and clearly negative comments like this nonetheless end up at the top of responses to the parent comment? Is it because it fomented a lot of responses?
On another article today, again the top response to the top comment was so negative that dang stepped in, and yet again, it's the first thing you see.
It's frustrating, because HN is doing a great job keeping things pretty constructive, but this still seems to reward negativity by thrusting it into view. Shouldn't it at least be below less-downvoted responses?
It honestly seems to have gotten worse over the past several years. I don't know exactly when it started, but I've noticed a distinct dip in the quality of conversations here. I don't know if it is HN specific, but I think it is an overall societal increase in people that are stuck in information bubbles, like all of us, but when they find they are in an information bubble, they don't care. They obstinately refuse to get out of their bubble.
>Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
Would you say the same about LIGO, for example? Originally thought to be easy, it turned out to be a 40 years long endeavor.
LIGO is a great example! The LIGO project repeatedly failed to meet requirements and in exchange had its funding requests rejected. The project management was completely restructured, with several people including the original team lead ejected from their roles. Only after coming up with a new budget were they granted additional funding, and after meeting those requirements they were given $200 million in additional funding with which they increased LIGO sensitivity by 400%.
I celebrate when I see first images come out. Feels premature to now say that it is going to work. How long did it take until we noticed and understood the flaws of Hubble?
That's an overly negative comment for a project that yourself said learned from Hubble mistakes. They are exactly trying to avoid Hubble mistakes by being able to correct mirrors in absurd units, and much more. I get the idea that failure levels are so high that "everyone" get a drug shot from them. I just expected better. Hope, if you wanna call it in some way, with evidence that indicates that things are going good.
I've been thinking a lot about how much easier this could have been using orbital assembly (crewed or robotic). So, so many human years must have been spent designing and testing deployment mechanisms that simply had to function the first time.
In 2019, NASA's Astrophysics Division finished up two years assessing the feasibility of assembling a large-aperture observatory in-space. The In-Space Astronomical Telescope (iSAT) Assembly Design Study [1] concluded that In-Space Assembly (ISA) is the only option for building observatories with aperture diameters over 15 m and would still likely be strongly beneficial for smaller ones like the JWST (6.5 m aperture diameter). Efforts like Northrop Grumman’s successful Mission Extension Vehicles, the upcoming DARPA RSGS and NASA OSAM-1 missions, and the usage of Canadarm2 to install instruments with standardized interfaces on the outside of the ISS all demonstrate the increasing maturity of robotic servicing and assembly. The iSAT study describes a telescope composed of modules with standardized interfaces, launched with a spacecraft bus that has attached Canadarm2-like robotic arms that can assemble and deploy modules delivered by space tug from multiple launches. The benefits over launching monolithic spacecraft with hundreds of single points of failure (cough JWST cough) are clear: the mission won’t be limited by a single launch vehicle’s lift ability or fairing size; the same inchworming robotic arm that does initial ISA can later perform repairs and upgrades, either with freshly delivered replacement modules or by debugging malfunctioning parts (see Mars Insight); the final deployed structure doesn’t need to be designed to handle harsh launch conditions; and, design and development will be faster without needing to design and test super reliable deployment mechanisms—if a part fails during orbital checkout, launch a replacement. The primary challenge is designing hardware that today’s limited-dexterity robotics can manipulate, and figuring out supervised autonomy with fallback telerobotics for bringing humans into the loop when needed. There are definitely challenges, but this feels like the right approach. If you could do it near a crewed station for infrequent debugging EVAs, even better. After it's assembled, raise the orbit to L2 with solar electric propulsion.
> The procedure and associated hardware are verified in simulated 0-g (neutral buoyancy) assembly tests of a 14-m-diam precision reflector mockup. The test article represents a precision reflector having a reflective surface that is segmented into 37 individual panels. The panels are supported on a doubly curved tetrahedral truss consisting of 315 struts. The entire truss and seven reflector panels were assembled in 3 h and 7 min by two pressure-suited test subjects.
The difference between automated deployment mechanisms and robotic[1] orbital assembly is that we have ~60 years of experience doing the former, whereas the latter is a completely brand-new, zero-experience field.
It would be good to develop that capability, but maybe do some trial runs on assembling something a little smaller, and less critical?
[1] Human orbital assembly of the JWST is not possible, because we do not have any crewed vehicles that can make the trip.
> Human orbital assembly of the JWST is not possible, because we do not have any crewed vehicles that can make the trip.
I was assuming that GP meant "assembly in Earth orbit" and then the JWST could then rocket off on its own, fully-assembled. (Or, if they didn't mean it that way, I mean it that way.)
Not much. There's a saying that once you get into orbit you're "halfway to anywhere", and required fuel is exponential in required delta-v. Just look at the sizes of the 3 stages of the Saturn V for a comparison point.
Assembly and testing was very difficult using humans on earth with proven techniques; it would seem impossible using novel assembly and testing technology in a novel environment.
Or conversely we'd figure out ways to solve those problems and those advances would have had even more compound value than the conservative approach. The challenge I suspect was more one of the political machinations to keep the project afloat. A more aggressive approach might have killed the project from a budget/politics perspective.
There's no hard evidence for this, but we know that this was a science mission first. Get the big hunkin' mirror into cold space. It was already extraorbitantly expensive.
No budget to try wildly new things. (The folding was already new enough.)
Also the constant scolding by Congress about the budget overrun has the very predictable outcome of fucking up the overall efficiency of the project. It got assessed and reassessed and committee oversighted, and costcutted...
but of course there was nothing to cut, and everyone knew. It was already risky as fuck and debating how much the sunk cost fallacy applied basically became a pastime.
> I can only imagine the utter delight of astronomers, physicists, and scientists who have worked directly on this project. Bravo to you all.
Perhaps Berger should also credit the engineers, team leaders, administrators, etc. who proved Berger wrong, and the American, European, and Canadian citizens who had enough vision to fund it.
Gotta really appreciate everyone that put in the effort to make this particular project not a horrific, graphic failure. Of course the science returns haven't come in yet and there's still plenty to go wrong but at least it got off the ground and unfolded.
This was a lot of money for some very pure science. If it had blown up on the launch pad (a French launch pad, where government employees were presumably paid to be on a tropical island in December) it would have been Exhibit A in the case against government funding of science for the next 50 years.
the French launch pad isn't on an island, but rather in the continental South America, at the start of the rain season, so it's not exactly my type of dream posting
Learning about the intricacies of the design and especially the deployment process, and then following the team's incredible badass successes has been one of the most heartwarming and inspiring experiences of this otherwise awful epoch. Bravo, and thank you, and can't wait to see the pictures.
There were DARPA-funded projects back in 2004 to try to avoid doing it like this, while it was being built. They were funding investigations into assembling the satellite on orbit, e.g. send up the segments one at a time and dock them together on orbit. Those projects were cancelled in W. Bush's second term after he pushed for manned missions again. To this day, I still think in space assembly would have been cheaper and possibly lower risk.
JWST and most scientific instruments are extreme one offs that take a long time to build and don’t have backup parts. So if anything trying to dock multiple parts in orbit would have likely increased costs and risks.
There is a very small risk of a launchpad failure, but sending up multiple launches only increases those risks. Further, building a second one would have been much cheaper though still very expensive.
The basic technology of robotic space construction, though, could have far reaching benefits in its own right. So while it may not be strictly better for this one mission, it might still pay put dividends in the long run.
When it comes to Mars, though, even if you’re only a month late it will normally result in a 26-month delay due to how often (or rarely) launch windows open for Earth–Mars Hohmann transfers, and this is exactly what happened with Curiosity.
TLDR: It was not the EDL [edited to add: entry descent and landing] system, it was the fabrication and integration (putting together) of certain actuators that are used in low temperatures at Mars. People at a contractor, and at JPL, were putting in double shifts and they came within a very close margin of getting it together.
Additionally, there were flight software/avionics issues.
But if you're set to miss the launch window by even a week, you have to wait for the next one 26 months later.
Is it that? Or is it maybe a sign that the current era is a little hyper-critical and in that hyper-criticality lost touch with what's actually possible and acceptable risks? This was no small engineering feat. It's also a good demonstration of the world of the possible.
Not too many other stars around, and none that are brighter than it within almost a half degree radius. If I zoomed in to the 0.0367 degree FOV of Webb's NirCam instrument, we would only see one other very faint ~21 mag star. However, Webb (and Hubble) can see much fainter stars than Gaia.
You don't want to calibrate against something interesting, because of you see something crazy, you'll never really be all that sure it isn't because your instrument is goofy.
Astronomy has long had an issue with this. Back in the late 19th century when the magnitude system was being formalized, an astronomer named Norman Pogson chose Vega to calibrate the system because it is easy to observe in the northern hemisphere. In this system, which came to be the most dominant magnitude system, Vega by definition has a magnitude of 0 in any filter.
There turned out to be two issues with this choice. The first is that Vega has a very unusual spectrum for a star. This means that more normal stars appear to have weird differences in their magnitudes between different colors. But it's not the stars themselves that are weird, it's just a weird choice of zero points!
A more serious issue became apparent when CCDs became more common in the 1970s and 80s. It turns out that Vega is somewhat variable. You can define the zero point of the magnitude system to be the average brightness over a long period of time, but that doesn't really help you on any given night since the equipment needs to be calibrated daily (or more frequently --- temperature and atmospheric changes require re-calibration).
Another source of annoyance here is that Vega is also very bright. This was a benefit in the days of photographic plates. But modern telescopes with CCDs cannot observe such a bright star. It almost immediately. So this makes calibrating the equipment trickier. (You essentially need a two step process where you use a small, specialized device to calibrate against Vega and then measure the flux from a dimmer reference star, and then measure the reference star with your telescope.)
Imagine if we decided to calibrate against a currently-assumed nondescript stable, in field of view star (HD 84406) but later it turned out was part of a strange stellar phenomena that we couldn't forsee (and didn't have the science for) until later on.
It may be that they don't want to use too bright a star because it would saturate their detectors, so perhaps they picked dim, but not too dim, in the right direction.
Edit: the link posted by muds while I was writing this gives the explanation.
Perhaps http/3/QUIC can help? UDP and all plus 0RTT handshakes with tls 1.3. Maybe not very good for RDP or IRC. But if I am rich like elon musk I think I will just watch Netflix and regular sites like HN or reddit. Maybe have a caching proxy on high earth orbit.
I'm not sure what work's been done on interplanetary / space-based network security, but suspect it would have to be based on known secrets or keys, cached well ahead of time.
Certainly, any protocols based on handshakes would be a non-starter even at lunar distances (384,000 km, 1.28 light seconds), let alone interplanetary ones (20 minutes to Mars, up to 90 minutes to Jupiter).
At interstellar ranges, the problem becomes even more complex, with keys taking years to be received.
There are some preliminary discussions of space-based IP communications. I do suspect that UDP would be preferred over TCP, for obvious reasons.
Exactly, from radiation to muscle loss - humans are simply not meant to live in space. BUT - it doesn't mean we won't eventually, especially if forced off Earth due to some human made or natural catastrophy. Humans may need to evolve for space living though. It may take many generations of evolution and adaptation and natural selection.
Maybe I will vacation back to lowly earth once in a while :) . But seriously, astronauts do up to a year fine right? Has anyone gotten seriously ill or died? I've heard of bone density loss, but do you really need dense bones if you will not come back to earth?
A significant chunk of money and most of the time was spent on testing everything conceivable. Manufacturing a second one is indeed much cheaper, but would probably not be the main cost at that point.
I'm not sure it "wouldn't have been that much more expensive" though. Building and testing these things takes a lot of effort, time, and thus, money. Even at just 5% of the costs we're talking about almost $500 million (and it would likely be much more than just 5%).
WH40k is a little bit obscure, but the gist of it is that JWST is designed as an instrument of cosmic revelation. The knowledge it will bring us will shape the future of thought.
If you don't have any spiritual life this might seem meaningless...
I feel the same. The complexity of the project, and the number of failure points, makes it hard to believe that nothing major has gone wrong so far. I hope the good luck continues!
It has been an amazing performance. In my mind the highest risk remaining with JWST is the cryogenic system. Cryogenics can never be taken for granted and Northrop Grumman struggled with the design of the JWST cryogenic system for years. That's because it is a complex, high spec system that continuously and uniformly cools the entire reflector.
Heh, I guess all those delays make sense with this kind of feeling of risk - you can bet that they re-checked everything 101 times and any piece that was even suspected of not working 100% as expected was replaced !
Kind of not really, IIRC the motors for the last mirror flaps are not working as they should but it was deemed to be within risk tolerances given a workaround. Also, if I'm not mistaken it is possible for the telescope to operate down some mirrors.
AFAICT, the reasoning was that opening up the glued-together satellite to replace the broken position sensors would have added more risk of breaking stuff than it would have mitigated in the replacement.
foone is a retro hardware hacker who goes on these amazing threads on twitter, and is famous for running Doom on various things, including a pregnancy tester (though admittedly by replacing most of the internals), and his "Carthago delenda est" was on how the JWST was a boondoggle.
To be honest, who cares what some nobody hardware hacker thinks? They won’t accomplish a tenth of what the astronomers, scientist and engineers working on JWST will.
The twitter nerd celebrity machine has gone topsy turvy
I was able to talk to some pretty powerful astronomers (one of whom had "fixed the hubble") and they did make a number of points about how JWST wasn't a boondoggle, but it did eat into the budgets of other legitimate projects.
Realistically speaking, $10B for a world-class scientific instrument that will operate for 20 years without any human intervention, producing image results that we simply could not have created in any other technically accessible way, sounds like a reasonable budget to me. $25B would be "too much" and $50B would justify inventing a time machine and going back to shut the project down before it wasted too much money.
I mean, of course it's a boondoggle? Isn't everything NASA does, outside of maybe climate science, a boondoggle? There was no real reason to put someone on the moon or build a space station. The Hubble has taken some pretty pictures, but doesn't really make people's live better in a measurable way. There's really no reason to want to see if you can fly a helicopter on Mars. The point is to do something challenging and cool and get some funding for science that isn't directly related to the military.
What NASA does, and has done since Apollo, isn't normal science and does not really fall under the category of "boondoggle".
it's special and different. NASA, and all the national peaceful space agencies, are about scientists using national pride to fund a wide range of projects, nearly none of which have direct impact on terrestrial applied science, but have captured the imagination of the public and leadership, and occasionally do provide practical terrestrial spin-offs (fewer than if we'd invested that money into terrestrial projects, but also very different from them).
look at what the dutch and later the english were doing with merchant ship technology in the 1500s-1800s. It wasn't just good business, it was propaganda to build the power of the Dutch and English states, playing critical roles in th e rapid expansion of those countries into world powers.
The US does what it does to prove that it can easily maintain space leadership (let's just pretend we didn't have to depend on Russia/Soyuz or Russian rocket tubes to put people into space). We can afford this (although, of course, people go starving).
Probably the best measurements we have of whole-atmosphere CO2 (as opposed to in-situ point measurements) come from Earth remote sensing (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov) -- you're right though, that is climate-related.
There are various thresholds of boondoggle. The doubt was whether the money invested in JWST could have been better invested in other discovery science projects of the same category as JWST.
It's a little nuts to me how many articles cite the $10 billion price tag as astronomical when we spent that in maybe 2 weeks during the peak of the Iraq War, and for what?
We used to joke at astronomy conferences that if we stopped by the nearest air force base and snagged a fighter jet we could fund all NSF Astronomy money for the next decade, and the math was probably within 10% tbh.
Someone that was sitting around complaining with us was more familiar with military gear and had some numbers on the cost of training the average fighter pilot. They calculated exactly how many pilot trainings it would take to fund all of NSF Astro for a year. That was nearly a decade ago now, so take it with a grain of salt, but it was in single digits iirc.
Yeah and when it is calculated over the period of time it was dispensed, that is hilariously cheap.
The defense budget for 2022 in USA is $768 billion for just one year. The budget for the entire development of the telescope was 1.351351% of that budget.
It's a rounding error compared to those, but it's not to the taxpayer. $10 billion split among roughly 100 million net-tax-paying Americans comes to $100 each. How many taxpayers would rather have an extra $100 than a space telescope?
That's a moot argument. We can use the Iraq war instead and do that same math, amounting to $11000 per tax payer.
Government budgets are well spent when they are used to do things that are impossible, unfeasible or unwise to do by individual people. JWST is a science investment, which is one of the wisest ways to spend public money.
agree, science and big projects like these are very much underfunded. All the mars reconnaissance missions were thrown together on a shoestring budget.
My friends were adamant that the US did it to steal Iraq's oil. Last time I checked, the vast majority of petroleum exploitation contracts didn't go to the US.
We really did it for nothing but pain and suffering for millions of innocent Iraqi people. And the weakening of our own economy.
Can’t be too specific because of Chatham house rules but I heard from three different high ranking US military guys at three different events that there was a non-trivial drive due to Saddam’s failed assassination attempt on Bush Sr in Kuwait
Iraqi's no longer have the monster that was Saddam and are able to vote for their leaders. You can say that it wasn't worth it, that's a perfectly agreeable argument, but it wasn't just for nothing - it was always to remove Saddam.
Over 4000 US dead, $1.9 trillion expenditure, hundreds of thousands Iraqi dead, their health care and education systems wrecked and still not fully restored, a regional rival empowered and dominant in Iraqi politics....
I think it's a relative context thing. For example, Hayabusa2 returned an asteroid sample to earth for ~$150M, Perseverance is chugging around on Mars for ~$2.9B, Cassini cost about $3.9B (not sure if that's inflation-adjusted), etc.
Also keep in mind that the original estimate for the program was under $3.5B. That's a cost overrun of almost 3x, which is generally a red flag.
It doesn't seem like this sort of comparison is particularly useful. Never was anyone presented with the decision to pick between those two items for where to spend the next $10 billion.
So $10 billion on Web vs $10 billion split between 5 other missions that didn't happen, for example, might have been the sort of tradeoff that could be analyzed (then or now).
Or $10++++ billion to enforce the provisions of the UN agreement to end the Gulf War vs. the hypothetical concern that Iraq would create more geo-political problems in the future that would ultimately cost more than taking some action now. Also a tradeoff that is hard to evaluate in hindsight, never mind at the time (hard -- but not immune from criticism or evaluation).
I'm not saying that either of the choices, $10 billion on Webb or $10++++ billion on the Iraq war, were the right choices -- just that the comparison isn't particularly useful, IMHO.
I don't see it so much as a direct comparison of those two projects, but more as a reality check of how easily $10 billion can evaporate, spent toward non-science related things without a whimper of protest.
> So $10 billion on Web vs $10 billion split between 5 other missions that didn't happen
This is a false dichotomy based on the premise that the NASA budget couldn't just be changed, with an added assumption that the Gulf War 2 was either pay all the money we did or not do anything at all. Neither of those are true, which is exactly the point of the comparison.
The terrestrial planet finder or any other optical telescope would have been much more revolutionary for fascinating humans with unbelievably pretty pictures
I saw on one of NASA's videos, an astronomer also commented that many of the bio-signature gases they would look for in exoplanet atmospheres are also best seen in the infrared. There's going to be a lot of interesting research coming out of this.
His compliment of Ariane 5 tingles my French pride. So annoyed when watching the launch live to see all the ameritards in youtube chat saying "what why is it not spacex" grrr. And we did it for free to boot.
Elon "Electric Jesus" Musk only does it as a business model. He'll never do important national stuff that go beyond budget efficiency.
I'm sorry, you getting down-voted because you are just completely wrong on all accounts. Not to mention using terms like 'ameritars' and 'Electric Jesus' are just embracing things to use in any discussion.
1. This was not a competitively bid launch. Europe provided the budget for launch so they selected their own launch vehicle.
2. Nothing the Ariane 5 did was very special no matter they hype about 'so exact'. Everybody know that was almost certainty happening. It was typical under-promise over deliver. Other certified rockets would have done the same thing.
3. Both SpaceX and ULA could have launched this mission. Both are full certified for first rate, lowest-risk launches by NASA. Please actually go and look at the list of launches and you will see:
4. Both ULA and SpaceX are launching both NASA and Dod payloads. Both required separate very detailed qualification.
5. SpaceX also has launched German Defense sats because it was cheaper then Ariane. Italy has just booked a SpaceX flight as well.
6. The SpaceX Falcon 9 is certified and has launched humans. I would consider that 'important national stuff'.
7. Falcon 9 based on most statistical models is now considered safer then Ariane 5. Falcon 9 has also already launched more often then Ariane 5. Insurance cost of payload on Falcon 9 is also the lowest in the industry.
8. Ariane 5 was just grounded for 6 month because of issues with the fairing and required government intervention. This actually did cause significant concern for James Webb lukeyl they had one launch before to test the new configuration. In typical Arianespace fashion they hid this error for as long as they could and didn't tell anybody why they are grounded. Great security culture they got, always trying to brush their failure under the carpet and not talk about it.
Fine to have pride but don't try to bring others down to lift yourself up. It makes you look silly.
Ironically spacex is most likely to provide a budget friendly route to space on an industrial scale - and is already cutting costs by a significant amount. Only reason they used the Ariene 5 was because of its width.
Not even that - the Falcon 9/Heavy fairing is the same width on the inside as Ariane 5, only the exterior is narrower (but the walls are thinner). The rocket simply didn't exist at the time when JWST was designed, and changing the launcher for a project of this complexity years after the design and build started wasn't even considered, understandably. But it will be very different for future projects.
Yes, as I understand the Ariane 5 was the widest reliable launch vehicle available at the time. Obviously trying to fold the telescope into a smaller space would have introduced even more complexity so they chose it - changing later would have added delays and additional complexity!
It has nothing to do with reliability or space. Its political. ESA put in the budget for the launch and they got a significant part of the science in return. And ESA of course put it on Ariane 5. There was no competition or comparison or any of that.
Since then the price of the rocket has gone from like 20%+ to like 2% or less of the cost. But they will still get the science. So all in all, might be the best investment anybody has ever made in terms of a science project.
The Delta 4, Delta 4H and Atlas 5 would all have been fully qualified to fly the JW and likely could all have launched it. Maybe the Atlas 5 is to small but there were certainty rocket in the US that had the required certification from NASA.
I wonder if a future evolution of space telescopes will be some kind of interferometric (obviously extremely hard for IR or visible light, but easier for radio and microwaves) swarm of cheap semi-disposible telescopes than one enormous one.
Then you can add to the swarm, upgrade elements, and retire failed elements without having to eat a multi-billion helping of humble pie.
And rather than have a fearsomely complex integrated sunshield, you could have a similar swarm of simpler satellites that provide a large cool area at L2, and then the observers just need to handle their own heat.
I suppose this could be described as microservices...in spaaaaace. Draw what parallels you will from that!