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NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope (nytimes.com)
In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.
This should be taken off NASA's budget and financed independently. It's a (potentially) great tool, but it's dragging down a lot of other projects.
We need space force more than ever to save us from this FAILED NASA program. Make it happen, Mr. President!
LOL. In fact, LOLOLOLOLOLOL.
It was supposed to launch 11 years ago and cost less than $1Bn.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
... it's a surprise that any scientific institution still exists at all.
If that isn't the case at the end of the current figurehead-du-jour's term, it certainly will, the next time people can't believe their votes are absolutely meaningless. Denial will make sure of that.
... the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion.
Getting close to the $13 billion cost of the latest US aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) and twice as much as the earlier Nimitz class aircraft carriers at $4.5 billion each. AND I imagine the flight-deck on the Webb will be*much* shorter.
I know they're apples and nuclear-powered oranges, but damn. The Hubble Space Telescope only cost $4.7 billion by the time it launched.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Please provide ANY large federal government program or project of the last 20 years that hasn't been seriously over budget, mismanaged, delayed, etc.
SpaceX could have probably done it at half the price and on schedule.
It's scary to think how bad things would be if the US federal government were in charge of healthcare.
Why don't they take my recommendation and build a space factory and use that to build the telescope? They could mine asteroids to get the raw material. That would save us from having to build it on Earth and deliver it to space. It would already be there! We could then reassign those factories to build other useful things.
It was only four months ago that they kicked JWST out to 2020. SLS got delayed to 2019 and is now being audited by the OIG; expect that report to be another shit show, followed by another delay to 2020.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Seems like NASA did better back when all the nerds gravitated to NASA. Since they started their outreach to attract more non-nerds they have gone downhill
Cancel it, ban all of its contractors/managers/subsidiaries from participation in government projects for a decade and place its deteriorating hulk in front of the NASA Administration building as a warning to future generations about letting a project grow out of control. The overages on this delay alone are around the entire budget of the initially planned telescope.
I love science, and I think we need more funds diverted towards it. But it needs to be done on some kind of fixed budget with meaningful accountability. JWST left that behind years ago and shows no signs correcting itself no mater how much money is thrown at it.
Just for reference, the LHC only cost $6.4b.
they didn't see that coming.
It's not good news, however considering potential science return it's still worth. This telescope will have capability of taking spectras from exoplanets - potentially finding signatures for habitability or even life.
With regard to the cost, treading into unknown is inherent to any discovery, thus the costs are hard to predict, "we do it not because it's easy, but because it's hard". In my opinion unlimited fund is not OK, however little bit over the current cost is acceptable (even though so much over-budged) - nobody questions today the heritage of Hubble, or New Horizons, or Cassini, or Curiosity.
We know that this is so costly because of all the private contracts sitting on top. They know that congress will renew the project; and therefore their contract.
To be honest, all STEM related activities should by the govt should be open source. If you are a contractor and do not like this, find business elsewhere.
Who came up with the idea of naming it after a bureaucrat who knew practically nothing about astronomy?
Every single person associated with JWST should be banned from ever working on another government-funded program. They lied when they originally proposed the project; they knowingly over-promised on schedule and capability while grossly underbidding the price. They counted on government project inertia and the "sunk cost" fallacy to keep them going once they won approval and the real price started to surface. This damned joke is already something like a decade behind schedule and 16x over-cost from the original bid. It gets re-reviewed every few months and at every such review its launch schedule "slips" and another BILLION (or more) dollars are added to the cost (which was originally about 0.5 Billion USD).
The jokers working on JWST do not care - they have made entire careers on this. Somebody who started on this in 1996 will have been on the project for 25 years by the time it launches and will be able to retire by the time it completes its mission. Such a person will not move-on to the next one, he/she will RETIRE. This is nothing like the earlier probes where a scientist or engineer might work on a whole series of Ranger or Explorer satellites/probes gaining experience on each and adding value to the next from the experience gained on the previous.
This sort of very bad behavior should never be rewarded. JWST should be put on a rocket this year, get launched "as-is" (since it's many years past its originasl promised launch date) and then when it fails spectacularly all involved should be prosecuted as frauds. The taxpayers should NOT be forced to pay billions of dollars to paper-over this level of incompetence/dishonesty.
It's being launched on an Ariane 5
I'm old enough to remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was an expensive boondoggle that would never produce valuable science. How did that turn out?
That kind of thinking is exactly, how we got to wasting so much money in the first place!
Aka the scapegoat sock puppet of the oligarchy of businesses.
Or do you still believe there are non-"lobbyist" politicians?
Got any documentation for either of those claims? From what I can see, President Dingbat has roughly the same management skills as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pretty much none whatsoever.
Six major bankruptcies in his projects plus the Trump Shuttle which defaulted on its debts in 1990 but was dismembered by his bankers and sold without declaring bankruptcy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
before they find us????
You have to look at the big picture....:-)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I think SpaceX has got the reliability but why would they want that business? They seem to have a pretty full manifest and nobody's going to remember the JWST for the low launch cost. So worst case it blows up and SpaceX gets the blame for setting astronomy back a decade. Best case they get a few bucks and a passing grade. And it's trivial to spin as a "money is no object" launch where they just didn't care what was the most cost-effective option. I mean they got national security payloads and are in the process of becoming man-rated, they don't need any poster child missions. And to be cruel if someone else's rocket fails it could be a fatal blow to a higher priced competitor, like what are we really paying for. So if I was SpaceX I'd feign interest but make sure not to win the bid...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The latest delay has caused been purely by T***p's insistence that a high-resolution Mexican spotter be added to the telescope.
Twenty years ago, the Green lobby tried to stop the development of astronomy in Arizona, first with a fake endangered species argument and then with a fake native claims argument:
https://link.springer.com/chap...
At the time, they claimed that Hawaii was a better location for ground-based telescopes than Arizona because the University of Hawaii owned an astronomy reserve on the summit of Mauna Kea, which was well supported by both the international science community and by the local economy. What happened, as we know now, was that as soon as the Greens lost in Arizona they immediately transferred their anti-science campaign to Hawaii, where they have been trying to oust UH from its deeded astronomy reserve and prevent the newest generation of telescopes from being built. They again ginned up a fake native claims argument, as in Arizona.
Their "go to Hawaii..." argument they tried in Arizona has now become "Send the telescopes to space..." When we have a space-based economy that will support scientific infrastructure on that scale, we will gladly do that. In the meantime, we need to finish our current generation of ground-based telescopes.
Mr. Trump, you have a bulletproof Supreme Court now. Send tanks up Mauna Kea, if that's what it will take, to get the keel laid for Thirty Meter Telescope.
This behemoth is sitting in a high bay at Northrop Grumman in Huntington Beach at the well known Space Park. Other contractors that worked on it let you tour and take pictures as it's a public funded item. NG has it in a secured facility and no pictures allowed. Delayed over and over again, it's not so much a NASA problem as a NG engineering debockle. They punish their support groups by demanding overnight calibration services as downtime is the devils work, using "work stoppage" and "deadlines" as justification because no one has the forethought to care if their equipment is calibrated or not. This is a "must not fail" project but they are not handling it as such, sadly.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
Our atmosphere is opaque to infrared. So any infrared astronomy has to be done from space. Hubble can only do partial infrared (specifically near-infrared), not the rest of the infrared spectrum.
Infrared is needed because it can peer through dust clouds. See this image of Eagle Nebula in visible vs. near infrared by Hubble to see the difference.
JWST works mainly in infrared, near and far. Moreover, it has much more aperture than Hubble (~ 2.4 meters vs 6.5 meters).
All this means that JWST can see back in time when the first stars that shined in the cosmos, and shed light on how the Big Bang progressed. Important stuff, and no instrument compares to its capabilities.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The main records Northrop Grumman has broken as of late are in no bid and cost plus government contracts. The execs hollowed out the company and pocketed much of it, got piles of money from the Bush administration, and borrow like mad to buy companies up such as TRW, who originally had this contract. I worked for TRW back in the day and saw the JWST in the cleanroom in the early 2000s. What I saw in the clean room was basically completed as TRW was a highly competent company who paid for top notch engineers and focused on a corporate culture that cut bureaucracy and waste. Seemed straightforward and it worked out well for TRW in terms of having the best stats out there. Northrop Grumman took over in 2004. It is 2018 now and all Northrop Grumman has really done is hollow out the team that was working on this and put some low cost screw-ups in place and then made it impossible for anybody to get anything done. While I was not on the JWST project, the facility I was in had all of its servers moved to a Texas datacenter, which promptly got destroyed by hurricane Rita shortly after finishing the move. At the same time they cut the number of T1 lines to the facility in half, so our connections to the servers just timed out again and again, so we could not get anything done even before the servers got destroyed. When I needed to download something like drivers off of the Internet, I would have to drive home, download, and then bring back on a USB drive because you know gotta cut costs by basically eliminating WAN connections and especially the main connection to the Internet needed to be cost reduced by just having a tiny pipe. They fired everybody and made them re-apply for their jobs for less money and many just walked away then. They put up job postings like Senior Oracle DBA for $50k/y and then went well no American will go for it, so more H1-B workers. They extensively outsourced sensitive defense contract work to "low cost" foreign workers and had meetings where they bragged about that being their strategy moving forward. They had a 7 figure exec on the east coast argue with our secretary over a pack of pens and in the end we did not have anything to write with. They took down the protective internal firewalls because you know "one Northrop Grumman" and the Slammer worm brought down everything and similar worms kept taking out the whole Northrop Grumman network as if it didn't already work poorly enough. They screwed around with everyone's benefits such as health and dental and changed people's hours including mine without telling me, so we just ended up with less money in our paycheck because that was our new 'salaried' hours without telling us. Didn't apply for overtime and lose 6 hours of pay per week before it kicked in because you did not know your hours were changed, too bad. So many good engineers just left without notice. All I saw coming in for replacement were dumb, sexually harassing fakes from Texas and such because you know Northrop Grumman loves Texans (at least during the Bush years) and H1-B workers.
To sum it up, I don't see any reason why the JWST would ever work. This is just throwing good money in after bad in a hopeless situation. The Hubble was a different story, so don't compare the two.
They should have just taken three more years, buried the money deep in the next three budgets where nobody would likely look for it, and kept quiet about it.