Webb telescope launch date slips again
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And we don't need anything close to a carrier group unless the pirates are now sporting war ships.
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How would you get it from California to Louisiana? With the shipping container, it's going to be well over five meters in diameter.
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yea, don't tell me navy can't spare a destroyer for a week or two.
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In this case, it would take more than that. It wouldn't take more than a few rifle shots to put the spacecraft in un-flyable condition. Or, at least in a state which would require taking it back to California for major retesting. I doubt this piracy concern is about someone stealing JWST. I'm going to guess the resale value on the black market is close to zero... Think more in terms of extortion over threats to damage it. Preventing that would take more than half a dozen marines on board. But I'd agree a couple Coast Guard cutters would be more than sufficient.
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Hey, this is a space telescope. Don't forget we have a Space Force now to protect our space assets.
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I still maintain that dashed line is plotting an asymptote and not an intercept.https://xkcd.com/2014/
A long time ago, someone put together a very similar figure for Hubble. But he fit the data with a parabola as well as a line. For the second order fit, the time until launch never went to zero.
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danielravennest
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Hubble was basically a spy satellite that looked up instead of down. The spacecraft bus (Lockheed) and optics (Perkin-Elmer) were made by the same people as built the KH series spysats. Sure, there were some unique requirements (zero thermal expansion, replaceable instruments), but a large part of it was built by people with experience.
The foldable mirror and thermal shield for Webb makes it more complex and new.
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I'm always a bit nervous for any launch, especially with humans on board. But I will be a vibrating mess when JWST is launched. And the launch is just the beginning of many weeks of nail-biting anticipation. So many maneuvers after to launch have potential to void the mission. This will be a long-term, space-age high-wire act.
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Wasn’t there a big SNAFU a couple years back when Northrup was assembling (or reassembling) part of JWST and found they had leftover bolts at the end?
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normally butters
Ars Praefectus
I'm fascinated by the fact that JWST requires maritime transport to Guiana Space Center because the road from the airport has bridges that can't support the weight of its specialized shipping container -- which is called the Space Telescope Transporter for Air, Road and Sea (STTARS).
There's so much to unpack here. That the shipping container has such a prideful name and yet is the root cause of inconvenient transport logistics. It could have been just a STTAR. The precious NASA-grade acronym would still work if they'd come up with a way to avoid the sea voyage. The nagging question is whether anybody suggested reinforcing the road bridges between the airport and the launch complex. Would that be more reasonable? Maybe too reasonable?
There's so much to unpack here. That the shipping container has such a prideful name and yet is the root cause of inconvenient transport logistics. It could have been just a STTAR. The precious NASA-grade acronym would still work if they'd come up with a way to avoid the sea voyage. The nagging question is whether anybody suggested reinforcing the road bridges between the airport and the launch complex. Would that be more reasonable? Maybe too reasonable?
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danielravennest
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Given Starship, we can do on-orbit assembly of a larger telescope. ISS proved we can do orbital assembly. Assemble it in LEO using Starship as the delivery system. Do orbital checkout, then move it to the operational orbit, wherever that is.
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It's not a curse, it's just shitty project management. "What's the most super-duper-over-the-top space-telescope we could conceivably build? Lets bet everything on that" is a shitty starting point, that's how you end up with an irreplaceable, unriskable bird that will never meet schedules and blows though all the budget overruns you can imagine and more.
By the time it finally launches - it's already obsolete. Development started in 1996 with half a billion dollar budget, had they concentrated on getting on some results on time rather than chasing a pie in the sky they would have had time and money to launch an entire fleet of progressively more advanced telescopes and by now they would be way ahead from where they actually are at the moment.
Technology development is a process of baby-steps, giant leaps are prohibitively expensive and prone to failure, you shouldn't plan for one unless you have no alternative or you are perfectly ready to write it off as a bad job if it doesn't deliver as expected. JWST can still fail utterly and what's the plan B if that happens, stick your fingers in your ear and go la-la-la-this-did-not-just-happen? There is no plan B, there is no next iteration in the pipeline, no fixing it, no replacement to be launched, nothing.
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normally butters
Ars Praefectus
They were lifting part of the spacecraft and several unfastened bolts fell to the floor.
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Maybe when the pirates find out it's plated in 100 nanometers of gold they'll up their game.
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I think it's less about "pirates stealing your space telescope" than "pirates irrecoverably damaging your space telescope." And by "irrecoveraby damaging", I mean "blowing up", "shooting bullets at", "spraying with salt water", "dropping overboard", or any other number of cheap, low-tech methods that a small number of boarders could employ to effectively destroy the telescope unless they receive a ransom. Just cracking the STTARS seals outside of a clean room facility runs a risk of contaminating the telescope’s optics with ambient particulates and aerosols, never mind what a shaped IED could do.
(edited to rephrase things a bit)
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you got a giant mirror on a boat, piracy problem solved by Archimedes a long time ago!
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I didn't realize the final assembly and testing was in CA. It makes sense. I thought I recalled some testing being done in Louisiana. At 5m, it's just over the limit of what could truck safely. CA allows a variance permit of 17' maximum height.
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And funny enough, they have near-zero assets to use in this situation. Useful, no?
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That was the second half of my post that you cut out in the quote...
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
They were just trying to improve the mass budget - 'adding lightness'.
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You can't tell me we aren't doing shake down or training cruises on something right now always.
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Wait a minute, if the pirates steal a space telescope does that mean they are officially making the transition to becoming... space pirates? Finally, a job for the Space Force!
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As others have noted, French Guiana is a department of France. That means the health care system is the same as the health care system in metropolitan France, the local language is French (although most people also speak local creole languages) and, for what it's worth, the local currency is the Euro. I suspect the only obstacle to the US supplying vaccines would be political. The French government would be offended by the US stepping in and taking over their responsibilities to their citizens, just as they would if we wanted to supply vaccines to Bordeaux , or as we would be if the French wanted to supply vaccines to Miami.
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So the real question is - will the hog explode before the feed runs out? I mean - how big can that government fed hog get?
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I'm not sure about the sunshield, but it does seem pretty delicate for astronauts to mess around with (EVA suit gloves are pretty clumsy.) And a failed deployment might damage it beyond repair. But for just about everything else, servicing isn't possible. HST was designed for maintenance, and that means things like modules and instruments designed to be easily removed and replaced (and held in place with wing nuts several inches across, to make those suit gloves less of a problem.) JSWT wasn't designed that way. To do something like replace a failed gyroscope, you'd have to basically disassemble it.
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Seems kinda strange that French Guiana can't get their people vaccinated since it's basically a province of France with all the same laws as Paris. Can the French not get vaccinated?
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Well, companies with experience. The same people weren't necessarily involved. In fact, there was a thermal expansion problem with the original solar arrays. Going from sunlight into the Earth's shadow, and vice versa, caused some thermal expansion which made the whole telescope wobble for something like ten minutes. Not much, but enough to preclude astronomical observations. That was fixed on one of the early servicing missions. But it was also a known problem based on experience with the KH satellites. Unfortunately, the people who knew about it couldn't warn anyone, because operational details of spy satellites are seriously classified.
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Vaccination is ramping-up in France, now it is open to everyone, til last month elders had priority.
Vaccination coverage in Guyane is much lower than rest of France, due to general distrust of the population and fake news. There are more shots available than people wanting to get the vaccine :
https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/malad ... 32933.html
It is very worrying, particularly as the neighboring Brazil has a resurgence of its COVID variant.
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I didn't hear about that. But Juno launched with a lost nut rattling around somewhere inside it. Nothing bad happened as a result. So this sort of thing isn't too uncommon. And I remember some really scared engineers and project managers, the first time someone put a camera inside a payload shroud during launch. There's plenty of loose junk flying around, much more that people expected.
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Fun little story from the Atlantic on the dangers of shipping telescopes:
Full article: Who Would Kidnap a Space Telescope?
Full article: Who Would Kidnap a Space Telescope?
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It's not just bad project management (not that JWST hasn't had more than its share of bad project management.) It's also what the scientists told the managers to do. The astrophysics Decadal Surveys seem to assume, and many astronomers I've spoken to seem to agree, that if the next generation big telescope isn't an order of magnitude better than the previous one, it isn't worth building and flying. The managers were basically directed to take a giant leap rather than several baby steps.
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Historians have tested that. It only works if the ships are wooden, with lots of rope and canvas sails, and most importantly if they are sitting still at anchor. (The Romans apparently stopped doing that after the first few fires. That's also why Archimedes grappling-hook-and-winch-to-capsize-boats idea only worked the first few times...)
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So the next space telescope will need ~250 square meters and will need to be in Sagittarius A* orbit adjacent to the solar system?
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I think it was Texas (Houston) not Louisiana, but some work was done on the gulf coast. If memory serves, they had trouble finding any thermal vacuum chamber big enough to test JWST's telescope assembly with the mirrors fully deployed.
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That is what worries me. Our defenses are impenetrable for surface ships. Kaiju are not surface creatures.
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As far as the name goes, it's done. The next big orbital telescope NASA is developing is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (formerly WFIRST.) But the fact that this one is named for James Webb is a bit ironic. Regardless of his views, he's generally regarded as the most competent manager NASA's ever had as its administrator. So they named what is, arguably, NASA's worst managed project after him.
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