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NASA's Big Telescope Avoids Death-by-Budget-Cut
coondoggie writes "NASA's most ambitious and highly over-budget space projects, the James Webb Space Telescope has apparently been spared the budgetary axe. The US Senate Committee on Appropriations has approved about $530 million of NASA's $17.9 billion budget to 'enable a 2018 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.'"
I would say its a win for the management, they haven't produced anything and got even more money to do it ... for everyone else though?
While I agree with you in terms of budgets going over, delays and the like - the James Webb telescope is a disaster, I do also agree with MightyMartian in the sense that it is good to see the damned thing actually going to go up.
Program Management on the JW is terrible.
James Webb telescope itself is a good thing.
James Webb telescope on budget and on time would have been a better thing.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Yeah. It's not like it's even a war or anything useful.
It's fucking awesome in the way that the invention of the telescope was. Or in the way that getting eye surgery and being able to see better than you have for the past 20 years is. Or in the way that being able to discover something new is.
But yeah, it's no war. It's no bailout of huge companies. It's not as cool as any of these things: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2005/09/examples-of-government-waste But still... it's pretty cool.
That list is crap. May of the tems are misleading, or simple not true.
Others arn't waste at all.
Looka t this one:
The Congressional Budget Office published a "Budget Options" book identifying $140 billion in potential spending cuts.
How is potential spending cuts 'waste'? it's not. Its a report indcating areas that shuold be looked at for spending cuts. Not 'here are cuts yyou can make'.
or this one:
The Advanced Technology Program spends $150 million annually subsidizing private businesses, and 40% of this goes to Fortune 500 companies.
Yeha, they pay companies that ahve the tools to do so to work on experimental stuff they woudn't otherwise looka t. .. and it's 150 million. That's money well spent, not waste.
"The Department of Agriculture spends $12 billion to $30 billion annually on farm subsidies, the vast majority of which go to agribusinesses and farmers averaging $135,000 in annual income."
AND? annual income? so the fuck what. How much is profit? Farm subsidies maint a stable food cost. Personally, I like ahve a stable and reliable food source. Lok at the countries that don't ahve that. Food Riots every few years, and starvation. Fuck that noise.
The whole list is twisted, and the few that seem to be actual legit complaint are a small, tiny, insignificant amount of money. Not that they should be stopped, but it's hardly an example of waste. If that list is the best someone can do, that are government is pretty damn good.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know it's bad form to do so, but consider the source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation
So US should shut down NASA? Then the decline of US would be guaranteed.
R&D programs, like NASA, should *never* be cut, not matter what happens to the "economy". R&D is what drives our standard of living in the first place. Cutting it is like a business cutting workforce to increase profits. Sure, it works in short term but you have a smaller business. Same for cutting R&D, sure, you spend less and get more now, but later you will pay for not investing in new tech... Same analogy applies to nuclear power and any other project that takes 20+ years for ROI to be noticeable.
Cut these programs for your own demise.
I work on the science side and have collaborators and friends who are up on all of this. According to them, essentially all of the technical aspects of the mission that were originally viewed as "possibly not feasable" have been solved.
And as mojo-raisin pointed out, the telescope very recently passed CDR (Critical Design Review) meaning all of the major technical issues have been solved and what remains is essentially putting it all together. That's still not a walk in the park, but it means we should have more confidence this will actually work. As far as the microshutters go, my understanding is that it's all pretty much working up to spec now (although, as you say, over-budget).
And keep in mind that in fact, for astrophysics, zeroing JWST means that money probably disappears from astrophysics. Some of it is reassigned elsewhere in NASA, but it essentially means we (the US) are completely abandoning our lead in astrophysics, because we made the decision a while back to push our space-based lead to the detriment of ground-based astronomy. We're still good in ground-based, but not the dominant player we once were. Perhaps some of that money will make its way to other science, but abandoning JWST abandons billions of dollars of engineering and science that was done planning for and building JWST. If you ask people on the science side, at this point they're mostly willing to take the risk.
If you don't understand how subsidies provides a stable food supply you really should shut your fucking cakehole about anything involving government spending.
Fortunately, I do understand how subsidies affect the food supply. They kill farmers in the Third World who can't compete with subsidies First World food. They allow the creation of oligopolies by those who hold the right to the subsidy (not just anyone can grow peanuts, sugar, or honey and collect the subsidy!). They encourage monoculture crops. They eliminated cane sugar from sodas and many sweets. There's interesting speculation that agricultural subsidies are a good portion of the cause of obesity in the US.
But the dumbest part of all? Subsidies don't actually address a need. We don't need stability in food crops because the market is already very stable. People aren't going to stop buying food, so farmers aren't going to stop growing food.
I swear to god... Slashtards become more and more dense by the day. WTF people??!?!!?
Look who's talking. You provided a very retarded argument about federal spending by going through a list and discounting every single item. Then when someone disagrees with an especially weak argument of yours, you blow up in some sort of kindergarten-style temper tantrum. If "Slashtards" are really causing you so much heartburn, then go away.
WADR, they said the same about killing the SSC, that it would set particle physics back $yada decades. LHC appears to have made that argument moot.
20 years later!
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!