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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.
Duct-tape an AR-15 onto it, spray on a camo paint job, and call it a SPACE FORCE unmanned recon ship. Funding guaranteed!
(Of course that could have dire consequences, but doesn't everything these days?)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... 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. . . .
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!
Just for reference, the LHC only cost $6.4b.
This is what happens with cost-plus contracting instead of fixed price contracting.
This seems like a good idea but what you actually get is no company will sign such a big contract with so many risks. The threats to the company are simply too large. If something goes wrong -- something not always under the control of the contractor -- it can easily bankrupt the company when billions of dollars are on the line. Then NASA gets left with a half-completed project, a bankrupt company that can't finish it, and all the money spent up to that point was wasted.
What's really needed here is realistic estimates on what it will take to complete the project from whatever companies that bid on it. It should also include a rigorous non-partisan review of the bids to make sure someone isn't lowballing it hoping to get the contract and add fees on later.
What isn't this being done already? Politics. The only thing politicians care about is the money getting spent in their districts. They don't care if things like the JWST actually fly and do good science so there's zero incentive for them to be efficient. After all, it's not their money being spent, is it? It's ours. I've never met a politician who didn't think they could spend my money better than I could and that will probably never change.
Thank God SpaceX is starting to shake things up. Yes, SpaceX sucks off the government teat just like other "private" space companies but at least they're trying to innovate and do things differently.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Perhaps the project just should be canned.
If not falling for the sunk cost fallacy, but completely disregarding how much we have already spent, will the now needed money (and realistically, multiply it by 3) buy us something that gives us more than if the money is spent on something else?
If the latter, axe the project.
And given how old and outdated this project already is, my inclination is to spend that money on new technology for new problems, not what was designed 15-11 years ago, and will still cost us more now than what was budgeted back then.
Part of the problem with NASAs cost is congressional mandates as pork barell to districts with the plants. Shelby comes to mind. If NASA were more independent of congress perhaps their engineers could exert more discipline on their suppliers and select based on best value?
..Or he's got a very dry sense of humor. Kind of hard to tell in print tho.
Judging by his other posts, I expect he is serious and the reason he hates Musk so much is because his space factory plans aren't being recognized for their genius and acted on by SpaceX.
Would you rather spend another 9 billion on a new one, or a billion finishing this one?
What makes you think we would be successful with some other technology if we can't be with this one?
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?
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
I understand the sunk cost fallacy angle.
But why do you assume it's old and outdated? If we got it into the air, it'd be humanity's best telescope. Even 15 years after it's initial design.
Duct-tape an AR-15 onto it, spray on a camo paint job, and call it a SPACE FORCE unmanned recon ship. Funding guaranteed!
The good news would be that a military JWST would be up and running in no time. The bad news is that it would now cost $100 billion.
It's not old, it's not outdated, and the sunk cost fallacy is inappropriate in this case. If the project is scrapped, NASA has a ten billion dollar paperweight sitting in a warehouse because you don't want the government to spend the equivalent of pocket change on a space telescope.
Another billion dollar (and it's likely going to exceed that) is not pocket change. It's more than the original cost estimate for the entire mission.
For comparison, the New Horizons program cost around $700 million all in all. Dawn was around $500 million.
And new technologies not available at the time those missions were planned, and certainly not when JWT was planned, are available now, giving more bang for the buck.
This is a prime example of sunken cost fallacy, where people feel obliged to continue because of how much has already been put into the program, instead of looking only at how much we need to put in from now on, no matter how much was put into it in the past.
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.
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