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James Webb Space Telescope Cost Overruns Adding Up
digitaldc writes "The scale of the delay and cost overrun blighting NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been laid bare by a panel called in to review the project. The group believes the final budget for Hubble's successor is likely to climb to at least $6.5bn, for a launch that is possible in September 2015. But even this assessment is optimistic (PDF), say the panel members. Estimates for JWST's total cost to build, launch and operate have steadily increased over the years from $3.5bn to $5bn. Along with the cost growth, the schedule has also eroded. The most recent projected launch of 2014 has looked under pressure for some time. Charles Bolden has ordered a reorganization of the project and has changed the management at its top. Whereas Hubble sees the Universe mostly in visible light, JWST will observe the cosmos at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. It will see deeper into space and further back in time, to the very first population of stars."
we need more pictures of the sky!
is that this will be in an orbit we can't get to if there have to be repairs, much like the Hubble desperately needed. They better get it right the first time.
It's still going to cost significantly less than a month in Iraq or Afghanistan....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't care if it costs 6.5 trillion. The amount of knowledge gained from peering that far back is invaluable.
They just underestimated the original bid to get the contract. That's just the way things work.. SNAFU
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit, our 9.6% unemployment rate, our sluggish exports market, our extended overseas military conflicts, our wide-open borders, and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...but what do I know?
I don't care if it costs 6.5 trillion. The amount of knowledge gained from peering that far back is invaluable.
Pay me $6.5 trillion and I'll put up two space telescopes! I'll keep the $6.49 trillion or so in change, of course. One has to be adequately compensated for providing the "invaluable"!
Gee, I wasn't aware that presenting conflicting opinions counted as "trolling..."
No, you won't.
787... late, over budget.
JWST... late, over budget.
Constellation... late, over budget.
F35... late, over budget.
Seems like every major program is struggling, but 30, 40, 50 years ago we could do amazing things.
What happened?
Akins laws of spacecraft design #29:
To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal place on the cost requirements one place to the right.
http://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/old_site/academics/akins_laws.html
For that cost you can build many smaller satellites and many many more land-based observatories. It's not really worth the price NASA asks for.
i c whut u did then
Every big scientific project looks bad when projected onto the one-dimensional axis of cost. They're big, expensive, and the accounting for them is a discipline onto itself. None of this has anything to do with science. The scientific goals of the JWST are laudable and important, and as a society, we need to figure out how to get them done. The US has a substantial problem in this area. The nature of the US congress is that it cannot force any future congress to do anything, include paying for a project they proposed last year. So, every single year, every big scientific endeavor has to fight for its life. Every big project will run into problems and roadbumps along the way, but these are smart people and they can figure it out. The difficulty of the project makes it more important that it be completed, rather than less.
But what inevitably happens is that Big Science Project reaches some cost overrun or technical snag, or national economics takes a temporary downturn. Gloom-and-doom articles are written. Review panels are formed. Said project gets cancelled next year, after an investment of billions of dollars. You might call it Ares or the Superconducting Supercollider. Meanwhile, countries with more stable funding structures are able to achieve the same goals. You might call them China, India, the ESA or CERN.
I'm a theoretical physicist. Early in my career, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. It was three times the energy of the LHC. Had the US had the balls to carry forward with that project, we would have discovered the Higgs boson and answered many important questions, as much as 10 years ago already. Yeah there were some political and funding problems but these could have been fixed. I spent several years at CERN. They have a funding structure in which member states pay into a common pot as a fraction of their GDP as an international treaty. When there are cost overruns or problems (recall the magnet explosion last year that shut down the LHC for a year?) the fixed budget means it just takes longer. The project does not risk cancellation. We still get the important science results. As a consequence, they can go for more speculative, long-term research. They are able to drive advancement. The next CERN collider, CLIC has been in the planning and develoment stages for years. It uses new experimental (and still not fully proved) kind of particle acceleration.
The US will lose in the global science race unless it can establish a more stable funding structure for big science projects, and use them to drive scientific advancement. These things are important. Through the JWST and LHC we gain invaluable knowledge about the structure of our universe. Don't let short-sighted penny pinching bureaucrats or alarmist journalism deprive us of scientific progress.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Yeah, because stopping investment in science is SO going to make use the leader of the world economy for the next century....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Instead of a telescope, maybe the scientists could do with a microscope to see where all these costs have gone.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Gee, I wasn't aware that presenting conflicting opinions counted as "trolling..."
It's not. It's Flamebait.
Another option that would have got you the Flamebait moderation would have been if you'd posted something about how we should be trying to cure cancer instead of doing research about anything else.
See their biggest mistake was the name, if they had just named it the James Woods telescope instead it would have been under budget and on time. But they didn't listen and now it's too late.
Monstar L
That's an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a "Perfect example for the sad state of humanity"-mod option.
May I in turn suggest ending your overseas military conflicts, use the cash to repair your ruined infrastructure, thereby raising employment rates and getting the local economies going? Then you can start to worry about your exports and fix your immigration system. Oh, and fuck that "leader of the free world" thing. I am part of the free world, and I feel no desire whatsoever to have any leader at all, let alone the US.
Compared to the money you guys are pissing into the wind for no return whatsoever, this telescope is a drop in the bucket. And if you have any interest at all to get your exports going, developing your local high-tech talent with projects like this might be a first step...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I fail to recognize how a complete replacement of one of the world's most powerful telescopes to gain a semi-marginal improvement in its abilities counts as an investment in science. I don't know, maybe it would be, but the time to recoup our costs would be far in the future to say the least. Let's wait until the economy turns around and for now focus on things less abstractly beneficial...
Feel free to write them a check then.
. . . to finish the Ares Heavy Lifter. I mean, what's the point of having the Space Telescope ready for launch if there's no launch vehicle to put it in orbit?
We're keeping smart people employed doing the things they enjoy doing, that's about as good an investment as we can make. I've personally worked with guys that started their careers doing work like this, went on to do work for the military, and ended their careers doing work in industry. Those folks ended up contributing to 3 of 4 major aspects of society (caring for others is the 4th, and most of them did that as well), killing their drive and enthusiasm when they were young would have been a very bad thing for society.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
For $6.5T, build a ship to fly there, not just look around. That'd be enough to build a city on the moon, not just a scientific outpost. A self-sustaining city is another matter, but not impossible since there's enough water.
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.
Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were made in the United States of America and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines.
Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.
This will go on for several more years, wasting at least one billion $ (possibly considerably more). Periodically, a new slate of promises will emerge (with some cool looking computer animation at the press conference), accompanied by setbacks that always leave the launch just a few years out of reach. At one point NASA will simply stop talking about the project, and the press (with the attention span of a 3-year-old-child) will never follow up on it or ask why it failed or why so much was wasted on it (having moved on to a whole new bunch of promises about other exciting programs which will also ultimately go nowhere).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Are you saying that the first airplanes came in on time and on budget or that Constellation is less amazing than an aircraft carrier built during WW2?
I don't care if it costs 6.5 trillion. The amount of knowledge gained from peering that far back is invaluable.
I agree, but a project that is 4 years off, is already running over budget and is expected to get worse is worrying. These are signs of a project with intrinsic problems that will probably get in the way of the research trying to be done. It is worth considering starting over in order to avoid a multi billion dollar boondoggle. If the project is projected to cost more than twice as much as planned, odds are their plan wasn't very good, and will continue to cause problems.
Divide the 6.5 billion amongst all of the problems you list and you'll see how insignificant it is. That's like saying you should not buy that big screen TV because there are people in the world that are starving to death right now. Sure, it may be true that there are people starving to death, but not buying that big screen tv is not going to save them. It is a bigger issue.
-Xoltri
I'm no scientist, but I thought the whole point of the JWST was that it could do things Hubble can't. Not because it's a "semi marginal" improvement.
From http://michaelgr.com/2007/05/20/the-hubble-space-telescope-vs-new-james-webb-space-telescope/:
So the James Webb telescope will have about 5.8 times more mirror surface area than Hubble, and it will be able to observe on frequencies that Hubble can’t
That doesn't sound like a semi-marginal improvement. If the JWST had double the mirror surface and operated at the same wavelengths as the Hubble, then maybe you could call it a "semi-marginable" upgrade.
...then he and Seth MacFarlane will pay the tab.
I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit,
There is a difference between deficit and debt. In any event, while the cost (and cost overrun) on the JWST is a substantial amount of money, it is very small relative to the total debt or annual deficit. The complete NASA budget is less than $20 billion per year; even if the government chooses to destoy its entire space program it's a useless place to try to resolve the deficit. If you want to free up a couple of billion dollars in construction costs, cancel a Virginia-class attack submarine, or pare back the order for F-35 fighter jets (15 jets - out of a contracted 2443 - would save two billion dollars).
our 9.6% unemployment rate,
How does a high-tech project, employing highly-trained workers to the full extent of their abilities (and not incidentally keeping them in the United States, rather than seeing them move to other jurisdictions) hurt employment?
our sluggish exports market,
How does a space telescope hurt U.S. exports?
our extended overseas military conflicts,
How does building a space telescope affect overseas military operations?
our wide-open borders,
Yep, those damn Canadians keep getting in. Fortunately, the JWST is an infrared instrument, so in its off-hours it can be used to scan for illegal immigrants crossing the border under cover of darkness.
and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...
How is shutting down prestigious research projects going to improve the United States' global reputation? Let's let China do the cutting-edge space research from now on -- that ought to bolster our standing on the global stage. (What the hell does "leader of the free world" mean, anyway? I really hope it's more "we're a shining example" and less "we're in charge because we're scariest".)
but what do I know?
Not nearly as much as you'd like to think, apparently. The U.S. federal civil service has close to two million employees -- not counting the armed forces or the post office. Why is it that people assume that an organization of that scale is only capable of doing one thing at a time, and that there cannot be multiple concurrent projects directed at multiple priorities?
~Idarubicin
And what would we use that knowledge for?
Solving hunger?
Educating the poor?
Eradicating disease?
It is a 'nice to know' but really has zero impact on anything of any significance. Just like we know there are two large bubbles at the center of the galaxy. Whoop-de-do! That matters why?
6.5b is one 99c hamburger for every person on the planet.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
And, in general, if you look at all the $6 billion investments in ANYTHING that at large society would be making if the government hadn't allocated these funds to this project, is the telescope really going to generate a better rate of return? The stock market (where people invest money in the most fungible way possible) is expected to take a $6 billion investment and return $240 million a year + inflation. Can this telescope return that, plus its depreciation costs, plus whatever it takes to keep it going, by providing Science?
(I'd be interested in whether people think it can.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
You chose a poor example.
Sure, buying one big screen TV (just like building one JWST) won't really make a negative difference about utilization of resources and where they are directed, but...
One that hath name thou can not otter
we stopped eating lead paint chips as kids?
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I think you're missing the point. You seem to have this image in your mind of some guys in white coats loading $6 billion dollar bills into a capsule and firing it off into space. In reality, at least from my experience as a physicist in contact with researchers involved in the LHC, this is far from the truth.
I would wager that a large percentage of the project costs go into the R&D ; the material costs are likely to be very small in comparison. A small part of the R&D money goes to the researchers, who then spend it on rent and food etc, i.e. boosting the local economy and creating jobs. The rest is likely spent on co-developing technology with high-tech industry, an area of the economy that seems to me to be a very sound investment considering the number of out of work graduates that are being churned out each year.
I'm only paying $13/month for web space.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
The Moon has a relatively stable orbit, so far. Telescopes could then be placed on adjustable platforms. Maintenance could handled on sight as needed, by calmer minds. Long term issues could be more easily evaluated, by more senior staff.
Smaller satellites implies smaller mirrors. The resolving power of a telescope depends on the diameter of its mirror. So you could have many small telescopes in orbit and only get fuzzy, unclear images, or one big one that delivers sharp images, and due to the mirror size is more sensitive to boot.
As for land-based, build a 100 meter mirror and scope and you will see.... nothing in infrared, which is what the JWST is designed for. The earth's atmosphere absorbs and re-radiates low infrared which means all you can really see is a sort of dull glow. Yes you can see stars, but the really faint light you want is drowned out by atmospheric emissions. That's why the JWST has to be kept so cold, because thermal emissions from the mirror would drown out any light signal from truly faint objects.
...it's full of stars!
and a lot of other stuff we've never seen before because we're missing out on everything beyond a certain limit of red-shift and absolute magnitude
But, at some point, we will be looking at the edge of the universe. If it's emitting electromagnetic radiation. Then you can complain.
Though if those few satellites will fly in formation, as an interferometer... (yes, not what the parent meant / such formation telescopes, likely much more expensive than JWST, are coming...at some point)
One that hath name thou can not otter
You always bid on the best case scenario, then specify that changes will require additional funding. If you do the work you said you'd do, at the cost you said, it's not really true that you've underbid it. The problem is that there are things that are unknowable going in. You could try to account for them by adding 50% or 100% to your bid, but that will put you at a disadvantage to the other bidders, and you'd just be pulling numbers out of your ass anyway.
The bidding process is to select the cheapest/best contractor for the job, not to get a realistic idea of the overall project cost. The bean-counters in Washington know that, but they don't want to put a realistic cost in a bill because they know it won't get funded. Realistically, for this kind of project they should always add 100% or 150% to the bid price to allow for unforeseen problems. Even for a typical infrastructure project they should probably add at least 50% to accommodate change-orders. Then if it's to expensive, they should cancel the project from the start, rather than waiting till they've sunk most of the cost to decide to cancel it.
Yeah, because stopping investment in science is SO going to make use the leader of the world economy for the next century....
You don't spend $20 on a ticket to a museum or art gallery or concert when you can't afford to put on the table.
Investment in science and research will not be cut to zero, but there are different priorities for things.
That supercomputer you're sitting in front of, molecular biology, genetic engineering, mass drug studies done using molecular modeling, they're all possible because of science. Science is an area, to be frank, still in its infancy. These big projects like JWST, by studying the structure of the universe, ultimately feed knowledge back into a refinement of our understanding of subjects like quantum mechanics.
Will JWST feed a hungry child? No. Will the science from JWST help improve our understanding of physics? Yes. Will that indirectly lead to an improvement in the ability to grow more food, provide ready access to information, create better medicines. I think we have has already proven that to be the case.
How about close 90% of our overseas bases (leaving enough to have local sea and air ports in each theater), get the hell out of Iraq, kill a few more weapons platforms that the military doesn't even want, cut farmer subsidies for food we end up giving away, and then talk about cutting science funding?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Much of the public believes NASA's portion of the budget is much larger than its one percent. Plus cutting NASA doesnt affect core federal functions they believe. Most federal science will be under budgetary attack the next few years.
Only that projects like this keep thousands of scientists, engineers and machinists employed in the US, Canada and Europe. They in turn support the local economy by spending money the money. Furthermore, all the parts for space projects are usually manufactured within the country of origin (especially since many space projects have ITAR restrictions). Aerospace is probably one of the last industries still alive in North America.
Lastly, where do you think many of our fancy technologies come from? These are huge R&D projects that result in many spin-off companies giving you anything from carbon fiber bikes to night vision in your car so you don't hit any deer.
Why is it that people assume that an organization of that scale is only capable of doing one thing at a time, and that there cannot be multiple concurrent projects directed at multiple priorities?
Looking through the prism of their own limitations. A way to generally distrust "the scientists" too.
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's over QE2 is here, currently we are down 118 in the market, stop holding on to the past and do something long term for the future.
Unless you are a boomer who thinks quarter to quarter only 4 months out you should do great works that actually occur over years not months.
Crash projects and collective dick-waving are not the best approach though - remind me again how is that Moon effort going along?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Science is an area, to be frank, still in its infancy.
You can't be so frankly sure of that. OTOH...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Oh well, as you see, my other reply to you ate a troll mod, too - the bury brigade is decidedly bipartisan...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It strikes me that JWST has already been descoped so the project is not so much over budget as under scienced. In the long run, we are going to need a bigger telescope with better mid-infrared capability, possibly an interferometer. So, let's consider this a prototype and any budget issues are just part of the learning curve.
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1305
For a place that bills itself as "news for nerds" there certainly is a very large group here who seem to not be interested in any type of scientific research, are seem more interesting in whining about paying taxes.
A lot of us didn't want to invade Iraq, but our tax dollars were used any way. Don't want us to pay for a space telescope? Tough shit!
What will they launch it with? Supposedly it's quite big.
A carpenter can estimate the amount of time required to frame a house, or build a deck, with a high degree of accuracy. This is evidenced by the fact that he can put a rule on how much to over estimate. He can do this because of his 40 years experience. There are very few people experienced in building orbital infrared telescopes, hence the margin of error is much wider.
It is a 'nice to know' but really has zero impact on anything of any significance.
And how exactly do you know this? Number theory and lasers are classical examples of discoveries that didn't have direct applications, but which are now fundamental for modern society. Number theory is the basis of asymmetric cryptography, and lasers have countless applications.
We would be stuck in the stone age if we adopted such a dismissive approach to basic science.
My UID is prime. Hah!
Randomly I just ran in to an employee of a contractor on that project here in LA. He explained that there are in fact multiple telescopes being launched, each to deal with a different part of the spectrum (visible, infra-red, x-ray, etc.). Their firm was working on SPANET(?) inter-device links, which apparently are supplied as raw RF links w/250ms latency per pipe. Someone else does the link layer.
Of all the $6 billion investments in science the government could be making with our tax dollars, what makes you think that this one is particularly effective at making the economy a better place?
This is, of course, the standard argument that has always been used against most research, exploration, etc. If our ancestors had listened to it, we'd still be living in caves or on the plains of East Africa, living short, violent, disease-ridden lives.
It's likely true that 90% of all research has no (direct) benefit. But the remaining 10% is what has made our lives what they are today. And we don't know beforehand which 10% will pay off.
The same argument is used every day by millions of school children. "How will I ever use this stupid 'knowledge' in my life?" You probably won't. But if you apply that reasoning, you'll grow up illiterate and ignorant, and you won't know the things you'll need to survive. And nobody knows what information will be useful to you later. We only know that remaining illiterate and ignorant isn't a good survival strategy.
Telescopes are an interesting case. I've seen a number of versions (translations) of the criticisms of Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons. Several (church) leaders of the day ridiculed this discovery as utterly pointless, since those moons are far too remote to ever be of value to humanity. It was only a few decades later that tables of Jupiter's moons' positions were published. It turned out that they moved rapidly enough that they could be used to solve a serious problem of the day: longitude determination. If you're sailing a boat full of people or goods across an ocean, not knowing your longitude meant you didn't know when you were getting near things like shoals or reefs.
Measuring latitude is easy; you just measure the altitude of some visible stars near either pole, and subtract that from their known altitude. But there was no good way of knowing your longitude. Then people figured out that the Jovian moons would work as a clock, accurate to within a minute or so (depending on your equipment and viewing conditions). This gave a much better estimate of longitude than the mechanical clocks they had then. It did turn out that this method was very difficult to use from a rolling ship at sea, so it wasn't all that useful unless you had a very good navigator with some expensive equipment. But it was easy to use on land, and led to much better maps (of those shoals and reefs) than they'd had before. Then, when better clocks came along, all the navigators at sea already had accurate maps; they now knew where they were on those maps.
If Galileo and his colleagues hadn't done all that "worthless" research with telescopes, studying things that were so far away that we couldn't even see them, a lot more sailors and goods would have died earlier, and a lot more goods would never have been shipped due to the uncertainties in delivery. So after the fact, even the most strict "profits are the only thing that's important" capitalist will agree that the early telescope development had paid off. Even knowledge of the orbits of "insignificant" celestial bodies had paid off. But nobody knew beforehand that that particular research would be worthwhile in a few decades.
Ridiculing the "waste" of orbiting expensive new telescopes mostly indicates a lack of knowledge of history. Even if you don't approve of knowledge for knowledge's sake, you should at least be aware that this sort of research has paid off in the past. And with what we've learned lately of small, insignificant objects like comets and asteroids, you should also be aware that it is likely to pay off if the form of warning us of an impending disaster at some (currently unknown) time in the future.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This might be a bit of a flame-bating stretch but I'll take a shot at it. The JWST will be able to see as far back to a few moments (on a cosmic scale) just after the big bang. The amount of evidence (and pretty pictures) gathered regarding the origin of the universe stemming from a single, brilliant explosion will increase (and NASA will publicize it, they have a great PR program). Each bit of evidence ingested by young minds that are being raised in creationist households (or just generally uneducated households) will contribute to that young mind wanting to learn more about our origin and the wonders of the universe. It probably will even go on to inspire a few more kids to study science, math, and other such fields. This will produce a few more college graduates, a few more rational beings, and a few less emotion driven doofuses. It might even go on to squelch some of the more outspoken religious nutjobs once and for all.
Fast forward some years and those minds are now voting on important issues, like hunger, the poor, disease, etc. When they vote, since they are a bit more educated, they will vote a little less passionately and more reasonably. Those minds will now vote for funding to go to projects like the JWST, rather than killing "them damn Muslims!" over a religious pissing match. When they look for jobs, they will find jobs in the sciences. Jobs that may continue to help the fight against disease, or hunger, etc. And little by little the big social problems that you list will get chipped away at with successive generations of students (and even grown adults being exposed to evidence for the Big Bang for the first time) growing more intelligent.
Projects like the JWST and other scientific undertakings combat the problems you list indirectly through attrition. Public education regarding, and access to, scientific knowledge helps battle social problems through a war of attrition. The reality is that the problems you listed are symptomatic of society's attitude, not it's technology. We can produce enough food to feed everyone. We have enough smart people to educate everyone. We choose, as a society, not to do such things because we do not value them as much as other distractions presently. Every project like the JWST helps to shift those social values a little further away from emotional and sensual satiation towards scientific progress and the development of the human species.
In other words, your list of problems cannot be solved by technology (or, more appropriately, they already have been). They must be solved by social attitude. Projects like the JWST help shift that social attitude in the right direction over time.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
> It turned out that they moved rapidly enough that they could be used to solve a serious problem of the day: longitude determination
Wrong. The system never worked well enough to be useful in spite of a century of effort. John Harrison's clocks solved that problem.
The French used it on land, but that's about it.
> Smaller satellites implies smaller mirrors
Not really, but that's besides the point. For much less that $6.5 billion we could build a much larger telescope here, say 1/5th that. For that 1.2 billion you'd get more science, like from the European Extremely Large Telescope.
People love to point to Hubble pictures and say how great they are and how you couldn't get that on Earth. Hogwash. Hubble just gets all the publicity. NASA's good at that, and having IMAX films about it doesn't hurt. TMT has ten times the resolution and an even wider bandwidth than Hubble, but where's the IMAX film about it?
Actually, they're a very very dark Olive Drab.
Every dollar you give to a) engineers b) scientists c) computer technicians d) all the other support staff involved in programmes like this is a dollar that is pumped into your domestic economy. It's just as much a fiscal stimulus as the $600 billion quantitative easing programme that the Federal Reserve is about to embark on.
In fact it's better, in a few different ways:
1) It doesn't rely on a trickle down effect- which always risks part of the money you put in being leached away from its intended purpose (such as foreign banks benefiting from QE, having negligible effect on the US economy).
2) You train and retain highly skilled workers who are useful in all sorts of other industries (some of which are highly profitable export industries).
3) People on normalish salaries tend to spend a far greater proportion of the money you give them than those on 6 figure salaries. Give $100,000 to 3x IT techies, it'll get spent far faster than giving it to 1x Wall Street financier. And spending is what makes the economy go round.
I'm not against technology. Rather, quite for it. But we're spending billions attacking religion. We could be spending billions on things that will actually matter here at home. If we poured that kind of money into anti-gravity, we'd have extremely cheap travel and infinite energy and instantaneous communications. Fusion research. Asteroid detection and deflection.
All of these are "out there" in terms of today's tech, but are far more rewarding than trying to find god in the cosmos.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Cost overruns can be a sign of severe mismanagement. They can also be a sign that the project faced great uncertainties from the get-go. Uncertainties like, how much will it cost to acquire technology X in 30 months? How many developer hours will it take to write the mirror controller software? What will the cost of putting this sucker in orbit be come 2015? You can only make educated guesses.
We're talking about a piece of genuine cutting edge technology here. Nobody has ever built anything like it. Managing a multi-billion dollar project isn't rocket science; it's harder than rocket science. Clearly, they made some avoidable mistakes. They're in the report. But overruns do happen to even the best managers, especially in big, cutting edge projects.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Excellent rebuttal, I wish I could mod you up. Playing devil's advocate here, it is politically better to reform a project that is doing poorly than to stand up for it because, if it fails, it will look like it could have been scrapped early, and if it succeeds, early problems will distract from the accomplishment.
How much does the us pay each year for it's sick military and the attacks on foreign countries for oil?
16 month year?
A small part of the R&D money goes to the researchers, who then spend it on rent and food etc, i.e. boosting the local economy and creating jobs.
Oh, I see; it's a stimulus package. Not a selling point for someone on my side of the aisle...
This is waaay too much insight for being buried six-deep in a reply chain. My only point is you don't remodel your bathroom when the house is on fire. Make short-term investments for now and postpone longer-term investments until we're back in Clinton-era shape.
it is very small relative to the total debt or annual deficit.
A penny saved is a penny earned. You're better off shutting off your cable, cutting back your cell phone plan, and eating Ramen Noodles for a year if it's going to keep you from losing your house. And I didn't say that cutting this project was the only solution to the deficit; there are plenty of other common-sense cuts that could add up to hundreds of billions if congress had the nerve to pass them.
How does a high-tech project, employing highly-trained workers to the full extent of their abilities (and not incidentally keeping them in the United States, rather than seeing them move to other jurisdictions) hurt employment?
Because government employment does not provide true growth; it simply recycles tax money. Just ask Cuba.
How does a space telescope hurt U.S. exports?
Because it furthers our deficits and therefore weakens confidence in our currency, our bonds, and ultimately devalues our goods.
Yep, those damn Canadians keep getting in. Fortunately, the JWST is an infrared instrument, so in its off-hours it can be used to scan for illegal immigrants crossing the border under cover of darkness.
Go to El Paso, Mexicali, Moses Lake or Juarez and then tell me how funny you think the border situation is.
What the hell does "leader of the free world" mean, anyway? I really hope it's more "we're a shining example" and less "we're in charge because we're scariest"
Simply means we have the guts to stand up for our own interests and not let apologism or political correctness get in the way. Walk softly and carry a big stick.
The U.S. federal civil service has close to two million employees
Two million people taken out of the private sector when they could be employed by companies and promoting real growth. Even Obama would be willing to admit as much after last Tuesday.
Not nearly as much as you'd like to think, apparently.
Pretentious prick...
That doesn't sound like a semi-marginal improvement.
No, it doesn't. It sounds to me like the point of diminishing returns. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/telescopes/4299775 We own or jointly own all five of the top five telescopes in the world. What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?
No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe.
So it's not about "more science". It's about science that can't be done in any other way. You could probably find a way to get more science out of the funds spent on the LHC, but not that science.
The enemies of Democracy are
What makes this one so much more beneficial that it's going to help pull our economy out?
I have no argument against this -- I don't see how any telescope is going to pull our economy out of the state it's in.
But some research has to be state funded or it will never get done -- space exploration in one of those areas. If governments don't fund it, it won't get done because there's not much commercial payback in deep space knowledge.
You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the whims of the economy.
Here's a fun exercise... take a look at this chart of the US budget, and see how much of our budget goes to science:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html?hp
Isn't spending money to invest in the future exactly what governments are supposed to do? The fact that it is unpopular is irrelevant. Someone has to think ahead and spend accordingly, otherwise in ten years time when the economy has sorted itself out naturally, people will be wondering why the US has fallen behind on science and all of their best university lecturers, researchers and high-tech engineering companies have left for greener pastures. They realise that it will cost more in the long term to entice those people and industries back over.
You apparently think that no large research projects should be state funded because on a project that takes over a decade to plan and execute, it can't be left to the whims of the economy.
Not at all. I just question the timing. Get our finances in order and then I have no problem with its funding.
May I in turn suggest ending your overseas military conflicts,
Whether our initial actions were right or wrong, we have a responsibility to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq to stabilize their countries and protect their people as long as necessary. So, no.
use the cash to repair your ruined infrastructure, thereby raising employment rates and getting the local economies going?
Yeah, cos our first 1.4 trillion worked so well. Don't see how another 150 billion a year's going to make a difference...
Oh, and fuck that "leader of the free world" thing. I am part of the free world, and I feel no desire whatsoever to have any leader at all, let alone the US.
Don't hate the playa, hate the game, son.
Compared to the money you guys are pissing into the wind for no return whatsoever,
As I said, we have a moral responsibility to finish what we started and not leave the people to death and oppression. Unless you're referring to social security and medicare...
And if you have any interest at all to get your exports going, developing your local high-tech talent with projects like this might be a first step...
Maybe. But after we get our finances in order.
> No ground-based telescope is going to be able to observe at the infrared wavelengths that are needed to observe the ancient universe
So then we spend $6.5 billion (for now) to do that, or we could build far more practical designs that will return orders of magnitude more science for 1/5th the cost.
EVERY decision has to be studied in terms of price/performance. Space based telescopes can be extremely effective (the HALO series for instance) but in overall terms Hubble is not that great, and it's pretty clear that Webb won't be either. It's a 1980s solution being applied in the 21st century.
You seem to be treating "science" as if it comes in interchangeable units. So if ground-based telescopes can produce "more science" for the same cost, they're better. But that's not how it works.
There are specific questions in the realm of astronomy and physics, fundamental issues about the nature of matter and the birth of the universe, which cannot be answered by observations with ground telescopes alone. The observations of those telescopes, and the observations of space telescopes like Hubble and Webb, are not interchangeable. They do not produce the same science. And the science produced by combining observations from both cannot be produced by either alone.
So you need to account for the fact that Hubble is providing a specific, highly desirable, and otherwise unattainable scientific benefit, and the inherent cost of providing it, or your price/performance metric is busted.
Considered that way, the price was higher than I'd like yet not ridiculous considering it necessarily had to operate in space, but the performance is simply amazing, and in my book that comes out to a pretty damn good investment.
The enemies of Democracy are