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NASA Tries To Save Hubble's Successor
Last month we discussed news that the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to the HST, is on the budgetary chopping block. Now, an anonymous reader points out hopeful news from TPM's Idea Lab blog, which says NASA is trying to "spread the cost across the agency rather than just pulling from the $1 billion astrophysics division, with at least half of the funds coming from other areas of NASA's total $18 billion budget." According to Nature News, the decision resides with the White House's Office of Management and Budget, and support for the project depends in particular on Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD).
As Alan Stern pointed out on NASA Watch earlier today, this is a very dangerous move for the space science community.
The science program has worked hard to put up firewalls to prevent the manned program from raiding them for funding when the going gets tough. By breaking that firewall in the opposite direction it opens the science directorate to future funding losses when things get bad on the manned side, (as they are sure to when the already obvious failures of SLS come calling).
Between these two massive programs whose budgets keep growing I fear for the interesting smaller programs on boh the manned and unmanned sides...
Look, in order to save tax breaks for private jets, sacrifices have to be made. I mean, which is more important, exploring the vastness of the universe, unlocking the secrets of mankind, or making sure trust fund babies dont have to shell out a small amount more for their private jets. If you answered the former, you are an American-hating, greedy, muslim-atheist socialist!
Monstar L
http://mikulski.senate.gov/contact/
BTW, she's also got a crabcake recipe on her site. That scores points in my book...
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Repeat after me..... JWSB != Hubble successor
I hate to "steam" you even more, but NASA disagrees with your "JWSC !- Hubble successor" belief.
You are right, JWST is not Hubble. But there seems to be no reason at all to replace Hubble with an identical instrument. In that regard, as a spaceborne science telescope that can help capture the public's imagination of sights across the universe, the JWST *is* the Hubble successor, and it's useful to keep calling that.
Hubble's mission became largely irrelevant half way through it's lifetime. The purpose was to achieve detail which was impossible for ground based instruments that were trapped below miles of distorting atmosphere.
After Hubble was launched, researchers perfected techniques to work around atmospheric distortions. They fire a laser up and observe how the atmosphere distorts the beam. Using this data, a computer reverses the distortion of the atmosphere that the telescope is observing. Clever and effective. There are now dozens of earth based stations that are better instruments than Hubble.
So JWST is designed to do what ground based stations can never do: observe parts of the spectrum that never reach the ground. No amount of computer trickery or laser distortion detection will make infrared light reach the surface. The atmosphere blocks most of it. So in that respect: A space based telescope designed to do what ground based stations CAN'T, it *is* a successor.
This also ignores the fact that Hubble is enormously popular. There is power in this. Why would NASA not leverage that popularity and say "Remember that great program we started in the early 90s with the space telescope? Congress wants to axe funding for the next one that will be EVEN BETTER!"
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Replacement != successor. JWSB is the latter, not the former. They deal in different spectrum, and Webb will be used to investigate further interesting things Hubble first noticed but couldn't really see in infrared. So its kinda like how human missions to Mars won't replace robot probes, but will succeed them. One fills one role, the other another based on what the first saw.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
we need change how these kinds of projects are done. Our problem is that we are using cost plus on all of these and every player in this is making money hand over fist. It is a NIGHTMARE. Instead, like commercial launch services, we need to push for having this done via a bid basis. Basically, large american companies should do fixed bids on this and then be required to anti up. Ideally, this same idea can be extended to support building of satellite backbones. Then to the backbone, we simply attach new instruments.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You are and idiot, that much is clear. Early to-mid-90s, raised revenues, spending, not so much. Result, surplus. Seriously, are you REALLY that dumb? or just trolling?
Monstar L
Better still: The Ronald W. Reagan Deep Space Telescope.
Republicans would wet themselves like a little puppy getting its belly scratched. Or like Reagan himself during his last 2 years in office. But there would have to be a rider saying that the telescope would have to be built in Texas and absolutely no union workers could be used. And an amendment naming Genesis Chapter 1 as the Official Creation Story of the United States of America.
On second thought, it would still probably get filibustered until the White House is back safely in the hands of a white Republican man.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The JWST is a nightmare in terms of the management of that project, where engineering changes alone due to a lack of vision about what exactly it was supposed to do in the first place are causing enormous grief and huge budgetary problems. There reaches a point where you simply have a pull the plug on a poorly run project.
I would argue that killing the JWST and instead taking the current design goals, sending it out to bid on a new project with new construction, would bring the project in at a cheaper price than simply trying to "salvage" what is left of this current project even if the mission itself was something worth keeping. If done under the right contracting model, you might even get it done sooner and at a much cheaper price.
Heck, it would be huge if NASA decided to make something like a Centennial Prize competition for this telescope: $3 billion for the first telescope, $2 billion for the second and third, and $1 billion split up among anybody left. As an extra incentive, all money awarded would be free of all federal taxes. Convince me there would be no takers for such a competition, where the prize money could only be awarded if the telescope got to space and met specific objective criteria such as being able to obtain data from specific stars and other known objects. For the same price as the JWST, we could have not just one but several telescopes.... even if we completely shut down the existing project and considered all of the money spent to date as water under the bridge.
Yes, I know that technology has improved and there are some changes in scientific objectives which are different than was the case when the Hubble was first built. But there are better ways to get this disaster of a project off the ground.
Your reasoning is fictitious.
If people are evading taxes, the proper response is to put them in prison, not give them a tax break. Similarly, taxes hurt the economy, but so does unregulated banking, subsidies, and bailouts (yes, they do, really). You argue as if any raise in income is physically impossible, which seems to have become a meme among the fascist right. Taxes do not have an immediate or even pronounced effect. They have a slowing effect IF the money is not well spent after it is collected. However, an increase in taxes will always yield a an increase an income, until you get to absurd levels (which pretty much by definition are going to have to be higher than Europe...).
"It's a historical fact. Let me repeat it again: every time they raise taxes, they raise spending even more, so they still will have deficit spending and won't have enough for the telescope."
This is not true*, but for the sake of argument, lets say it was. Doesn't it stand to reason that if spending is lowered, that taxes will be lowered, and the deficit will remain the same? Ah, but that's what you want... the government to not be involved in economic matters. Let the poor fend for themselves. Sorry, we tried that for the last 3 decades, and it got us here. Now is not the time to try to destroy the country with even more of the same failed ideology, it is time to try something new. You are welcome to sit down and shut up.
* Our modern deficit was built by Reagan and the Bushes.
Great Intellect...
But with the tax money saved from these wasteful government programs, every American will be building rockets and satellites in their own back yard!
JWST is expected to cost $6,500,000,000 if it doesn't go even further over budget. That's more than twenty times as much as SpaceX say they spent to develop Falcon 9.
So yes, if those billions were given to people building rockets then there'd be a heck of a lot of them.
1. I would hardly call slightly more "dwarfing."
2. Obama actually had an economic downturn to deal with, largely created by Reaganomics. Bailouts, stimulus, etc. Bush and Reagan had huge economic booms, such as the dotcom boom. Yet, still ran a massive deficit.
3. I'm tired of the double standard. Tax and spend is always evil... when it is a democrat doing it. Teatards spend days solid ranting about how immoral and harmful to the economy it is when Obama runs a deficit, and yet completely forgive when Republicans do it, both in the past and present.
Great Intellect...
Have you bothered to look at what Obama has done during his short time in office? It dwarfs what Reagan and the Bushes did.
Well, clearly you haven't, because what you claim is completely false.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
I know, it's an article of faith with you, and there's no point in trying to change your mind with facts. Arguing economics with Republicans is like arguing biology with creationists.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Because the JWST yields scientific knowledge that does not have immediate forseeable potential for profit, companies aren't going to be paying for it (other than possibly for PR purposes). As to private charities, it appears to me that most of philanthropies sponsoring science research are aimed towards promotion of causes like human health, renewable energy, etc. - daily, practical concerns. Nothing lofty like the JWST which will help us view the cosmos. Even basic biology research that might have a medical impact 50 years down the road won't get sponsored by charities, because there is way too much uncertainty involved.
That's why government funding is necessary to sponsor basic science research - for those areas of science which are so far down the road in terms of turning a direct potential benefit to humanity, that can either radically change our view of the world and our way of living or simply be an interesting piece of trivia. Most of the time it's somewhere in between, in which even the interesting factoids will provide bits and pieces of the puzzle on our way to the Next Great Invention or Theory (TM).
Cogito, ergo sum, fosho!
Which would be really cool. That way we'd have lots more rockets with which to launch ... uhm ... what, exactly?
Which would be really cool. That way we'd have lots more rockets with which to launch ... uhm ... what, exactly?
Whatever you want.
If SpaceX can build Falcon 9 for about a tenth of what NASA estimated it to cost, they could probably knock out a couple of JWSTs for a billion or less.
OH GOD I am so tired of this argument - 'If it's worth doing then why isn't the private sector doing it, or funding it'. Private sector absolutely is beholden to the shareholders and the quarterly profit cycle. That's exactly why lots of tropical diseases that are imminently curable go unaddressed - oh, they don't have money? No new drugs for them.
If you were honest with yourself, you could fire up Wikipedia, or open up a history book, and make a list of 'things the government did first that private industry benefited from later'. Ok, here's my five second stab at that
- the interstate system
- the internet
- lots of immunizations and vaccines
- GPS
- MOSIS
- sequencing the genome
- clean water and air standards, which are nice
This magical thinking that if the government evaporated tomorrow, some guy in his garage would do all those things, somehow better and more efficiently, is a crutch for people who are uninterested in how the world really works. In effect, NASA IS PAYING private companies to develop and build the JWST - but twenty guys in twenty garages somewhere are not going to independently come up with twenty telescopes better than Perkins Elmer, Ball Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grumman - who are all getting money as part of JWST, and, last time I checked, all ARE part of private industry. In fact, you might reasonably argue that it is reflexive dishonesty and underbidding by the commercial subcontractors (who have been conditioned to this by decades of working for the Pentagon) that has been the major driver of cost overruns. But hey, believe what you want -
Umm, no.
"Entitlement" has a specific meaning in Federal law. You cannot be denied Social Security once you reach retirement age for any reason, therefore it is an "entitlement". Ditto Medicare.
Note that applying means testing to Social Security and Medicare would change them from entitlements to something else. But we haven't done that, and shouldn't do that (the nasty thing about means testing is that once we set the precedent that we can deny SS/Medicare to someone for making too much money, we can lower the amount of money that is considered "too much" whenever we have budgeting issues - which we will have pretty much every year from now on).
Note, of course, that the source of the money used to pay for an "entitlement" is irrelevant to it being an "entitlement" under the law.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"