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GAO Denied Access To Webb Telescope Workers By Northrop Grumman
schwit1 writes In a report as well as at House hearings today the GAO reported that Northrop Grumman has denied them one-on-one access to workers building the James Webb Space Telescope. "The interviews, part of a running series of GAO audits of the NASA flagship observatory, which is billions of dollars overbudget and years behind schedule, were intended to identify potential future trouble spots, according to a GAO official. But Northrop Grumman Aerospace, which along with NASA says the $9 billion project is back on track, cited concerns that the employees, 30 in all, would be intimidated by the process." To give Northrop Grumman the benefit of the doubt, these interviews were a somewhat unusual request. Then again, if all was well why would they resist? Note too that the quote above says the cost of the telescope project is now $9 billion. If the project was "back on track" as the agency and Northrop Grumman claim, then why has the budget suddenly increased by another billion?
n/t
...who ground the Hubble mirror wrong because the primary measuring instrument said it was right, even though two independent test instruments said it was wrong...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't give a fuck if they're doing blow and fucking hookers, I want my god damn Hubble successor.
I know the PP is a bit trolly, but it's important to note that the investigators that were denied access belong to the GAO, not to the Congress. The GAO has a generally good reputation as being non-partisan and being genuinely interested in reducing government waste.
It costs about half a billion to launch something that size into a Lagrange point. It costs maybe a billion dollars to make a telescope that big. It costs maybe another billion to make a telescope that big that you can fold up onto a rocket's nose cone and have it unfold into the right shape by itself. Add another half a billion for the cameras and instrumentation. That makes 4 billion, which was the original budget. Add another 50 percent to make it flight qualified and for the various surprises that happen at the coal face and aren't quite as evident when you're writing a grant proposal with all the rigor that I'm putting into writing this comment. That's 6billion. Where does the other 2 billion come from? Easy: when a project this big picks up another 2 billion and congress critters and the gao start to make shutting down noises it makes it hard to retain good people on a projectwithblood in the water, and it goes on with the next notch down in talent but no less stringent requirements. So you now make more mistakes, catch them, and are obligated to go back and redo work, since it's better to go over budget than to deliver a 6 billion dollar turkey that doesn't work as advertised. Bd
A really good telescope could as well be turned towards Earth to look at details on the surface.
No. For two reasons:
First, it's an IR telescope. The reason they're putting it in space is to get it away from Earth's atmosphere, which is opaque to the IR wavelengths it's designed to detect. Earth would look like a light bulb for all the IR it gives off and there is zero chance of seeing the surface.
Second, even if it could somehow be used to see through the opaque atmosphere, it couldn't make out anything. The James Webb telescope has a claimed resolution of 0.1 arc-seconds. It's going to be put into the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrangian point, about 1.5 million km from the Earth. At that distance and resolution, each pixel of the image would be ~730 meters square... just under half a mile. Useless for any kind of surveillance.
=Smidge=