Webb telescope launch date slips again
- Thread starter JournalBot
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Just ship it by French or US nuclear aircraft carrier. Additional costs and delays cased by choice of shipping method would be a rounding error in case of this project.
Any pirates still interested would deserve whatever they get by attacking that shipment.
Any pirates still interested would deserve whatever they get by attacking that shipment.
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I wouldn't be surprised if NASA doesn't publicly acknowledge having a escort either. Including the US military in a pure science mission that's very much of the peaceful international flavor might have some political sensitivities. What will probably happen is that an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer will just happen to be conducting a FONOP in the Caribbean while the JWST in in transit.
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"Development began in 1996 for a launch that was initially planned for 2007 and a 500-million-dollar budget"
For comparison, SpaceX didn't exist until 6 years after the start of this project - PayPal didn't exist until 2 years after the start of this project (where the SpaceX money came from). Yes, this is a hard thing, but it's been in progress for 25 years. Twenty. Five. Years.
Pardon my pessimistic outlook, but this whole thing seems doomed - it has had so many budget issues, has taken so long and slipped so many times that it just feels par for the course that the whole thing is going to blow up on the launch pad or fail to deploy. I will be very surprised if it actually works in the long run. I would like to be wrong.
For comparison, SpaceX didn't exist until 6 years after the start of this project - PayPal didn't exist until 2 years after the start of this project (where the SpaceX money came from). Yes, this is a hard thing, but it's been in progress for 25 years. Twenty. Five. Years.
Pardon my pessimistic outlook, but this whole thing seems doomed - it has had so many budget issues, has taken so long and slipped so many times that it just feels par for the course that the whole thing is going to blow up on the launch pad or fail to deploy. I will be very surprised if it actually works in the long run. I would like to be wrong.
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Honestly, the folding part isn't the hard part. Designing the mirror segments and actuators so the mirror could be tested on the ground added a bit of weight. If we had cheap access to space, one could design a seven-segment mirror that could only be assembled and tested in space. Frankly, if we're doing that, there's no reason to stop at a 7-segment mirror. You probably aren't mass limited with a 19-segment mirror.
But really the minimal mass budget on the sun shade was a horrible program decision. If we decide to do an IR 'scope again, we should set aside several launches for the shade so there's zero chance it fails and isn't a piece of tissue paper waiting to tear at a moment's notice.
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That's why your escort is the Coast Guard. Their ships have guns, but they're most certainly not the Navy nor even the National Guard.
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Maybe they are working up the gumption to ask SpaceX for a loan of a few...
Ninja?
SPACE Ninja!
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I still maintain that dashed line is plotting an asymptote and not an intercept.https://xkcd.com/2014/
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A Coast Guard Cutter would be a much better fit for this mission. Anyway, who's to say they don't already have plans for an escort, and they just aren't advertising it.
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No, that's how the Navy does its job.
That's not the job of the Navy. "The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas."
Force projection (power projection) is a term used in military and political science to refer to the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory. It is an extension of diplomacy and foreign policy.
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I would imagine that for operational security they are not intending to announce any details of the shipment. That would include any details about a military escort through areas where piracy might be a concern.
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Yeah, I don't get the piracy and the covid issues/excuses either. Both problems are easily solvable within the US means. As many pointed out we have enough resources to vaccinate everyone at the site and around it, and the military should provide escort for the ship. How hard can that be considering the value of the cargo and the importance of it to the US?
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Is not the shipping route a drug shipping hotspot? Seems there are already a lot of military assets down there.
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Wow, we have definitely entered a new era when you are concerned about pirates stealing your space telescope.
Very excited for this launch and those very first images.
Very excited for this launch and those very first images.
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Guiana Space Centre, is not in the country of Guyana, but in the French department(province/state) of Guiana.
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The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.
It would seem protecting JWST from piracy is perfectly within mission scope.
(Edit: formatting)
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HST took 24 years from first committee to usefulness after WFPC2 was installed, so your timeline is hardly outside the pale for this type of mission. For logistical reasons they had to fold the repair mission into the pre-launch sequence.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
You don't need a carrier group. The Russians aren't going to try to steal it. They're just worried about some rando weirdo group talking the thing for ransom. A medium CG cutter with a 2 inch deck gun and a radio would be more than sufficient.
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That was the original claim with the JWST - "We learned so much from Hubble that this will only cost $500 million instead of $4,000 million". And look how that turned out...
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I have spent more than a decade caring for critically ill patients, but the thought of doing anything on jwst? 
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General reply to all similar comments: of course you don't need a carrier group; my somewhat tounge-in-cheek post was pointing out that there is no possible cost objection to providing a naval escort relative to the overall cost of the JWST project. "Piracy" should not be an issue with shipping it wherever it needs to go.
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Besides "being in space", there isn't anything I can think of that's common between the two final products. Even the bolts and materials are probably different.
The next gen, though, can reuse segmented mirrors and the general "not a repurposed spy sat designed to fit in the Shuttle" shape ...
Just kidding, they will find ways to make it completely different again.
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And medical staff to administer it (that speaks the local languages), and the logistics and infrastructure to get those vaccines to remote regions ...
The difficulty in many poorer nations with vaccination efforts are not just lack of vaccine, there are underlying weaknesses in the medical systems
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Part of the issue here is that each satellite has a very different mission. We almost certainly will see segmented mirrors again if this is successful. However, segmented mirrors won't be the solution for every observatory.
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"Webb telescope launch date slips again"
Really? By the standards of previous JWST launch date slips, shifting by a couple weeks hardly counts.
Really? By the standards of previous JWST launch date slips, shifting by a couple weeks hardly counts.
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I have the feeling they could have screwed up and built a fixed version a few times over now. Sometimes this extreme caution and over-engineering is more expensive than “git ’er done”. (See: SLS vs SpaceX.)
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The main purpose of a navy is to protect a nation's shipping, while also posing a threat to enemy shipping in time of war. Projecting power is useless if your nation is starving because the ships bringing in the food are lying on the bottom of the ocean. Ask England about that.
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I'd suggest they use a couple of LCSs for the job, but odd are that they'd have a breakdown during the trip and need to be towed home. Maybe the tug that accompanies the Kuznetsov around is available right now!
/s
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French Guiana has a population below 300,000 people so 600,000 vaccines needed not exactly difficult for the US to obtain.
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Well, yeah, everything on board is 20 years old! At least the detectors were only manufactured ~8 years ago after a fatal design flaw was discovered (thank goodness for launch delays
).
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That has been one of the more consistent complaints about the JWST program. NASA could have flown prototypes of the various systems in LEO and even gotten some useful IR data from them along with learning how best to deploy sunshields in microgravity, all for less than the current bloated mess cost.
Instead, they kept insisting that they didn't need no prototypes and spent much more on ensuring that the rig would work.
There is a reason that many astronomers refer to JWST as "The Telescope That Ate Astronomy"
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some quick websearching hasn't yielded much other than reddit crap,
and so I'm very seriously wondering about
the multiple comments over the years about how
once JWST is on station its "unmaintainable/unserviceable"
This is, presumably, by design given that HST was built to be deployed by shuttle,
and periodically visited by shuttle, and no one figured that a spacecraft capable
of getting to the Lagrange point would exist to go service JWST.
With new spaceflight capabilities coming online (Starship, even Orion if we want to believe
that SLS flies more than once) is JWST still "doomed" if the insanely complex,
nearly 200 step deployment process fails?
The obvious caveats that come to mind:
* money to fly "tbd" spacecraft to JWST at the lagrange point
* money to train astronauts to do whatever servicing is required
* money and time to develop whatever repair tools, systems are needed
* TBD spacecraft being able to station keep with JWST? (presumably no Canadarm grapple fixture anywhere on JWST
* spacecraft needs an airlock for cycling while repair crew goes in and out
* rad hardening for 'tbd' spacecraft, EVA suits because in 'deep space'
That's the first order list that comes to mind: but I still ask the question because
for the stake of just how much $$$ was spent on JWST, if deploy step
154 fails, and all the remote troubleshooting fails, does it really
just get thrown away ? ( sunk cost fallacy enters the rambling here too I suppose)
Does a, say, $150M repair mission to get the multi-billion dollar JWST back online
come into the conversation?
and so I'm very seriously wondering about
the multiple comments over the years about how
once JWST is on station its "unmaintainable/unserviceable"
This is, presumably, by design given that HST was built to be deployed by shuttle,
and periodically visited by shuttle, and no one figured that a spacecraft capable
of getting to the Lagrange point would exist to go service JWST.
With new spaceflight capabilities coming online (Starship, even Orion if we want to believe
that SLS flies more than once) is JWST still "doomed" if the insanely complex,
nearly 200 step deployment process fails?
The obvious caveats that come to mind:
* money to fly "tbd" spacecraft to JWST at the lagrange point
* money to train astronauts to do whatever servicing is required
* money and time to develop whatever repair tools, systems are needed
* TBD spacecraft being able to station keep with JWST? (presumably no Canadarm grapple fixture anywhere on JWST
* spacecraft needs an airlock for cycling while repair crew goes in and out
* rad hardening for 'tbd' spacecraft, EVA suits because in 'deep space'
That's the first order list that comes to mind: but I still ask the question because
for the stake of just how much $$$ was spent on JWST, if deploy step
154 fails, and all the remote troubleshooting fails, does it really
just get thrown away ? ( sunk cost fallacy enters the rambling here too I suppose)
Does a, say, $150M repair mission to get the multi-billion dollar JWST back online
come into the conversation?
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Yes of course it is. And the Elysees - which has dramatically botched the job of vaccinating the country - is likely to refuse any offer for vaccines for the department of Guiana. But it is worth the offer to vaccinate that small number of French citizens.
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The US doesn't need to import food, neither did Spain, France or Germany when they had huge navies.
Using WW1 and WW2 after the UK's 19th century population boom when it went from 10.5 to 37.8 and the UK needed to start importing to feed itself is a poor example since for most of the 19th century and before the UK did not need to import food it was resources for the factories that where imported.
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Of course you could have also very easily heavily exceeded. the budget of the current telescope. Things like what SpaceX is doing works a lot better when you're not developing something fundamentally new.
Given my understanding of the solar shade there is no way to handle that besides being extremely careful prior to launch. The big challenge is that all the folding has to be done correctly for it not to get damaged during launch and to deploy correctly.
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