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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
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!
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And given how old and outdated this project already is, my inclination is to spend that money on new technology for new problems, not what was designed 15-11 years ago, and will still cost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?
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?
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But why do you assume it's old and outdated?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.
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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