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James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Next Hubble, Delayed Again (cnet.com)
NASA has been planning to launch a powerful new telescope that can see across the universe and perhaps to the beginning of time for many years now. But the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears likely to have to wait at least two more. From a report: On Tuesday, NASA said it needs more time to test the $8 billion space observatory, pushing back the scheduled launch date to approximately May 2020 from the earlier plans of next year. "Webb is the highest priority project for the agency's Science Mission Directorate, and the largest international space science project in US history," Robert Lightfoot, NASA's acting administrator, said in a release. "All the observatory's flight hardware is now complete, however, the issues brought to light with the spacecraft element are prompting us to take the necessary steps to refocus our efforts on the completion of this ambitious and complex observatory."
It has been a long time. The Shuttle Fleet, has been aging, and becoming harder to maintain. Also during a recession NASA is usually the easiest target to pick to cut. Because their services rarely cover any short term goal.
In may ways this brought to light companies such as Space-X who offer new approaches to space flight, that a government agency without any competitive priorities can maintain. We are OK with the Russians going bankrupt running their space program, because the only real reward is bragging rights, which isn't that much of a reward anyways.
That said, We need NASA or some other government space agency, because a lot of the real science that will have a long term benefit, will need big money, and effort put into putting devices with scientific equipment into space, vs. an electric car just because it seemed like a cool idea.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Having worked at NASA surely you would have known that the space shuttle problems began long before Obama. Sure he did little to save the program, but the space shuttle was far more expensive than originally planned and was at the end of its life. While NASA worked on the replacement, no proposals met the criteria needed so the whole thing was scrapped.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Sadly it should be taking less and less big money which is the antithesis of any large organization. With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once? In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.
I think part of the problem, is they were looking for a single Shuttle Replacement, The Shuttle was an attempt to match our Science Fiction view on how a space craft should be. A multi-use device, designed to handle many different type of mission parameters. The problem with the design, is that it made to do many mission parameters but none ideal for the shuttle itself. It is like the first set of jets, didn't have adjustable seats, but were designed for a mans average height. That meant they couldn't find anyone who would comfortably fit in it, because very few people actually meet the price measurement of average.
The Shuttle was ahead of its time, perhaps we should revisit its ideas in 50 more years, where a lot of the engineering principals and designs may be easier to implement affordably and safely.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You must also recognize that each president that comes in sets a different agenda for NASA. NASA programs take more than a decade to launch (ha!), but their bosses last 4 or 8 years. It's a schizophrenic situation.
Well, janitors usually do get the inside scoop.
NASA has been gutted since the Obama administration when the Shuttle program was cancelled and manned space flight was handed over to the Russians.
NASA "gutted"? How do you figure? Their budget hasn't been slashed. They finally got rid of the boondoggle that was the Shuttle program. New rocket systems (public and private) are coming online. Robotic missions and science exploration has continued more or less as before. I'm puzzled how you think the Obama administration in any way "gutted" NASA.
Who cares that we are using the Russians for a few years to get people into orbit? That's a temporary situation and a far better one than the ludicrously expensive unreliable and wasteful shuttle. We wasted decades on the shuttle program when we could have been doing so much more. Any problems from that are frankly our own damn fault and happened WAY before any of the recent presidents. You have to go back to the Nixon/Ford/Carter/Reagan administrations for the bad planning there.
I'll add it to my waiting list along with fusion power.
If you're going to spend just... all the money... on something, and that something can't be things like education or infrastructure, then it might as well be on something cool like putting people on the moon.
There are no stupid questions, just stupid people.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
With all of the knowledge and know how of the past, why did it take 50 or 60 years for access to space to drop for once?
Because getting to space is technologically hard. It takes a while for economies of scale to build up enough to really make a big difference.
It took about that long for air travel to become reasonably affordable. Heck even today an estimated 80% of the world population has never flown. When I was born less than half of the US population had never set foot inside an aircraft. The term jet set originated from the fact that until the 1960s-70s air travel was too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy.
In the beginning you are building infrastructure, but after that is done, you should be using it for its intended purpose, not as some lifelong gravy train of project contracts.
Well bear in mind that we took a 30 year wrong turn with the shuttle which delayed a lot of that infrastructure. We're just now digging out of the hole from that.
See http://www.thespacereview.com/... and https://www.forbes.com/sites/q... for background. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 said the shuttle program should be recertified (its safety to fly re-evaluated) if flights were to extend past 2010. Bush announced the retirement in a speech at the beginning of his second term on January 14 2004.
Because NASA didn't have enough money (remember when congressional Republicans were deficit hawks?) to continue to operate the shuttles and develop a successor, they had to end the shuttle to free up funds for a successor launch vehicle.
By the time Obama arrived four years later, the decision would have been a nightmare to reverse, so he didn't try.
B-b-b-but Obama!!11!!111
From wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Retirement
The Space Shuttle program was extended several times beyond its originally envisioned 15-year life span because of the delays in building the United States space station in low Earth orbit—a project which eventually evolved into the International Space Station. It was formally scheduled for mandatory retirement in 2010 in accord with the directives President George W. Bush issued on January 14, 2004 in his Vision for Space Exploration.
NASA has been gutted since the Obama administration when the Shuttle program was cancelled...
The shuttle program was cancelled by George Bush.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I think part of the problem, is they were looking for a single Shuttle Replacement, ... A multi-use device, designed to handle many different type of mission parameters.
Perhaps NASA could use Emacs for their launch vehicle. I'm sure it could easily get things to LEO.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Does anyone have a report or link to details of the findings that led to the delay decision?
There are like 5000 people working on this thing and I would think they have to issue a report to explain a significant delay.
JWST is really just too much to expect of today's NASA. Too complex, too long a time frame, all spinning out of control in the leadership vacuum that has been misgoverning NASA for at least 10 years. Expect to see another NASA announcement to delay SLS as well; the current 'estimated' launch date is Nov 2018. They won't make that and it will get pushed into 2019 or later. Same reasons. NASA doesn't even have a confirmed chairman and the previous chairman was an indifferent caretaker; Bolden oversaw delay after delay of a project he inherited and then handed down.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
For the past few decades NASA funding has been a rounding error in the federal budget. Cutting its budget is pretty much meaningless in the bigger budget scheme. For 2019 its 20B and Congress just passed a 1.3T budget for rest of the year.
By the time Obama arrived four years later, the decision would have been a nightmare to reverse, so he didn't try.
There is scant evidence that Obama wanted to revive the shuttle program. It was obvious by that point that it was a boondoggle and it was equally obvious that Congress was in no mood to increase NASA's budget. So the shuttle program (rightly) got the ax. Living without a manned program for a few years is more of an ego bruise than a real problem. I think in the long run it will be the right decision and I applaud both the Bush and Obama administrations for pushing to kill the shuttle program and to promote privately developed/funded launch vehicles. While I can make critiques of the handling of NASA, this was probably the best available decision.
If you want to know what's wrong with NASA, consider this:
Edwin Hubble was a scientist.
James Webb was a lawyer and administrator.
... committee
perhaps NASA is overly bureaucratic and effectively incompetent?
perhaps bureaucrats are over-paid and irresponsible?
and perhaps we let it get that way?
perhaps greed has done us in?
Uh, they aren't maintaining the Shuttles any more. They were retired in 2011.
Then move to Somalia
Amazing President Trump will fix this. He's got it all under control.
Can we get a Politics Tag/Mod? I would like to see science be just science again. The mangy pol cat trolls are everywhere!
Oh and Go JWT!
Obama Admin killed the Ares V rocket NASA was developing, and wanted to spend the money on R&D. Congress stopped that, and set about designing a super heavy rocket based on Space Shuttle components, which became the SLS rocket. If you wanted to have a generic super heavy rocket, eliminating the Space Shuttle knowledge base would be foolish. Of course, you should fly a rocket at least a few times per year to utilize it.... but Congress did not allocate the extra money for that.
it's true they weren't gutted under Obama, and the trend will show every president has been guilty lately.
Guilty of what? At worst they basically ignore NASA. NASA's budget fluctuates a bit but it's been a reasonable approximation of constant (adjusting for inflation) for the last 45 years. In 2014 dollars it has ranged between $14B and $24B for the last 45 years. Lowest was in 1980 and highest in 1991 in inflation adjusted dollars.
it's also true that under Obama NASA's budget was the lowest it had been since the 70s.
Not true in absolute or inflation adjusted dollars. In inflation adjusted 2014 dollars NASA's budget is higher than in the 1970s or the 1980s. As a percentage of the federal budget it is lower but that is more a reflection of how our budget exploded with deficit spending on other stuff. The budget during Obama's tenure was similar to slightly lower than under Bush but remember that Congress ultimately allocates the money so any budget changes really reflect the composition of Congress more than anything.
Because she lost the election.
Incomes is pricey but not insanely pricey. $20 a pound for raw material is not a big factor in space programs. Machining it is a pain in the butt, but on par with most other aerospace materials.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Originally designed to see the Big Bang, delays mean it will only be able to see back to 4 years after the big bang.
Terrible, terrible news. I know I could go to their wikipedia page and look again, but I feel disgusted right now. Wasn't this telescope proposed in the late 90s? Originally supposed to launch around 2005 or something? Holy fuck. They must have all of their top men working on it.
Best thing for NASA:
1. Cancel SLS
2 Use off the shelf commercial launch suppliers ( like Ariane, spacex, blue origin, sierra nevada, orbital, for high risk flights, Ariane or ULA for now, etc)
3. Use saved money to resurrect cancelled programs and work on finishing delayed space programs
NASA needs to focus more on the payloads, the science missions, rather than the rocket. The rocket is a means to an end. For too long, it seemed like under the Shuttle, the rocket was the end itself and much of the space program revolved around the rocket. By sucking up funding on a very expensive and flawed concept, the shuttle set the space program back by decades by taking money away from more effective technologies. NASA needs to get out of the rocket business and let commercial suppliers take care of that.
The SLS must go so NASA can get back to science missions.
Cancelling the white elephant that was the shuttle was a great thing for NASA. Now we just need to cancel SLS as well. Really all either of these do is suck up all the money on an overpriced rocket leaving nothing for the science programs. They can use the commercial launch platforms like Ariane, ULA, eventually SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital.
We don't have nothing. A number of rockets could be man-rated within a year if it were essential. Also most of the science return in our space program comes from unmanned missions, for which there is no shortage of US and EU launchers. It also actually turns out keeping Russians employed in our space program is a plus for world peace. Manned spaceflight is just not interesting enough to put in more resources. If we had a shuttle replacement, what would be use it for? going to the space station. Not exactly a need to hurry there.
TomR teh Pirate observed:
You must also recognize that each president that comes in sets a different agenda for NASA. NASA programs take more than a decade to launch (ha!), but their bosses last 4 or 8 years. It's a schizophrenic situation.
That's one of the political roadblocks to NASA meeting schedules and budgets for their most ambitious projects. The other one is Congress, which has consistently refused to authorize multi-year funding for the agency. As a result, NASA administrators routinely present best-case scenarios to the pols, even though they know very well that those are hopelessly over-optimistic, and that the actual, final costs will be considerably higher. They do so, because using realistic figures that take Congressional caprice into account would trigger outright, unanimous rejection of those projects by every committee whose approval their budget requires.
So NASA is forced to pretend their projects will be fully-funded in a timely manner, and Congress is forced to pretend it believes NASA's cost estimates are reliable. Neither thing is true, so we get the death of a thousand (budgetary) cuts that will eventually result in the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - which will end up being at least five times more costly than the project Congress initially approved, and nearly a decade past its original launch target date ...
(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)
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Check out my novel ...
After the Obama Era Political Engineer / Scientist Purge, Honestly, Suck it.
This is your Liberal Moment to pull it out of the dirt, lots of luck.
The new rule:
When any project is begun it should be allocated a budget, a schedule, and a launch vehicle. When the scheduled launch data arrives, the vehicle shall launch with whatever is ready. If the object is incomplete or defective (because the team has exhauseted its budget, or is too slow, or incompetent, or for ANY other reason) it is launched anyway and if it fails to meet its objectives the team is rublicly ridiculed and banned from any future projects.
The rationale:
The teams behind projects like JWST have been gaming the existing system. They have intentionally over-promised, and knowingly low-balled the costs of their projects (JWST is hardly the first time, it's just the worst example) in order to be chosen over other projects, and they have counted upon the "sunk cost" fallacy to force congress and NASA to give them lots more time and money later. These researchers are getting entire careers just designing and building a single probe! JWST is nothing more than a jobs program for an elite few at this point, and as a taxpayer who works in the aerospace industry, I'm very pissed at these jerks; they ought to be fired and their telescope dumped into an auto crusher at this point to put a large exclamation point on the theme that such frauds will no longer be tolerated. They've learned too many bad habits from certain defense contractors who win contracts by low-bidding systems with over-promised specs and then later deliver underperforming products, over-budget, and behind schedule (with the certainty they will be awarded follow-on contracts of more money to fix the junk they delivered).
JWST started 22 years ago, with contracts for construction issuing 12 years ago. It started with a half billion dollar price tag, and is now at nearly 9 BILLION dollars (for a damned telescope that will return NOTHING of value to the taxpayers who are being asked to shell out more and more cash for it). Remember: Hubble is already providing vast troves of information on the universe, including billions of stars that humans will NEVER be able to visit (by the time we could get to them, most would have burned out). It would have been a vastly better investment for the taxpayers to build a much less expensive telescope or set of telescopes for searching for NEOs that could endanger the taxpayers who are paying for this stuff, or to spend those billions on a lunar outpost to do lunar exploration that MIGHT at least be of some benefit to the kids or grandkids of the current taxpayers. The stuff JWST will discover will certainly be interesting, but none of it is so important that it must be learned NOW rather than in 60 or 100 years from now - it's study targets are so distant they are neither a benefit nor a danger to us.
Nope! It's just the James Webb Space Telescope being delayed yet again.