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I took my kid to see the James Webb space telescope at Goddard. A student of mine got us in to see a lot of the stuff they use to test the thing, including the huge sub woofers that ensure the instruments can withstand vibrations caused by the rocket, and of course the enormous space environment simulator was there. James Webb is designed to go out toward the sun at about double the distance as earth to moon, on the Lagrange point in line with Earth and Sun. Despite all it's sophistication, if anything goes wrong with deployment of instruments there won't be any fixing or upgrading as they did with Hubble. That's an expensive gamble for sure.
Well, off to a good start this morning! Got fingers crossed she makes it with no hitches and all instruments work!
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Well, off to a good start this morning! Got fingers crossed she makes it with no hitches and all instruments work!
The successful launch sent a chill up my spine.
As the New York Times describes the JWST's mission: "Its primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times larger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive. The Webb’s mission is to seek out the earliest, most distant stars and galaxies, which appeared 13.7 billion years ago, burning their way out of a fog leftover from the Big Bang (which occurred 13.8 billion years ago)."
Appropriately enough, my wife gave me as a Christmas gift a book entitled "Conquering the Pacific." It tells the story of the 1564-65 Spanish voyage across the Pacific from Mexico to Manila and return by Andres de Urdaneta. The voyage opened up the Pacific to Spanish trade with the Far East and laid the groundwork for the famed Manila Galleons over the next two and one-half centuries.
In a span of five hundred years we have gone from the Age of Discovery (primarily Portuguese and Spanish) to exploring the furthest reaches of the known universe. We were meant to explore the unknown and our place in the cosmos. Today was a great step in that endeavor.
Bill
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And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, With the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East."
I prefer my flamenco guitar spicy, doesn't have to be fast, should have some meat on the bones, can be raw or well done, as long as it doesn't sound like it's turning green on an elevator floor.
In 1613 Galileo wrote to Cantelli espousing the heliocentric theory of the solar system, and pointing out that the Bible was not a reliable scientific text. The letter was not formally published, but circulated widely, lending credence to the heliocentric theory and eventually figuring in the Church's persecution of Galileo.
Newton published Principia in 1687, 52 years after my first American ancestor arrived on this continent.
Maxwell read "A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field" to the Royal Society in December, 1864 while my great-grandfathers were still engaged in the Civil War. Faraday's experimental work at the Royal Society was quite significant in Maxwell's theoretical development.
Einstein proposed Special Relativity in a paper published September 26, 1905, a week and a half before my father was a year old. Eight years later Einstein and Grossmann proposed General Relativity.
The foundations of Quantum Mechanics were well developed by a number of physicists by the end of the 1920s.
Edwin Hubble first showed the existence of galaxies beyond our own in 1926, eleven years before I was born. Now there is some hope that within my lifetime astronomers will observe the earliest galaxies, as they emerged within 110-million years of the origin of the universe.
I just looked at the key goals of this insanity. Wikipedia says:
The James Webb Space Telescope has four key goals:
to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe after the Big Bang to study the formation and evolution of galaxies to understand the formation of stars and planetary systems to study planetary systems and the origins of life
What do we get after knowing this? Entertainment? Will it solve our problems on earth? No.
Humans should concentrate on their problems on earth first. 9.7 billion is crazy. It should have invested in reducing poverty, inequality, overpopulation, pollution and global warming - all the problems we face now and in future including Covid.
What do we get after knowing this? Entertainment? Will it solve our problems on earth? No.
You have no idea what new things come out of tech and search for knowledge like this. Blue tooth came out of this type of technology. If you want to save the world and solves problems, point your finger at the institutions supposedly designed to work those problems and ask them why they are failing! But the pursuit of knowledge and its costs are completely unrelated, so how dare you point your ignorant finger at anyone engaged in that noble activity?
Last, admin has been reviewing your comments for a good reason and this one slipped through the cracks. He just turned on this section you come in with a troll comment like that? I suggest you withdraw your comment and think about it for a minute longer.
That tour you took at Goddard sounds awesome Ricardo. I would love to see behind the scenes. Good shirt too.
It was fun. If you hunt back to my original post (in my quote box) about it on page 11, you can see the other photos of Webb front and back, also the huge subwoofers and the vacuum chamber. Also pics of my kid and Parker probe on page 16.
This is going on right now (presentation of the picture of Sgr A):
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
holy ****, how fast time flies by. I just checked when this thread started and it was 10 years ago.
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At present, there are just so many discrepancies. Telescopic viewing of an actual event horizon will help to know if were are even on the right track. Mean while we should still be careful using terms like "it can't be anything else, MUST be black hole" IMO.
That was my quote from 10 years ago. Since that day we have TWO black hole telescopic images. Pretty short time actually!!!
is 1000 times more entertaining than this silly image.
That is your second permitted kindergarten level troll comment on here. WTF is wrong with you?
Yeah, either ban the troll, or don't allow his troll comments, or lift any restrictions if real moderation is not feasible or too onerous; I don't see the point of his current 'moderation' if it doesn't moderate, just delays his posts.
Since that day we have TWO black hole telescopic images. Pretty short time actually!!!
I guess now they will be constantly taking pictures over time within the next years and put them together into a video so to say. Like interaction with gas and stuff.
Looking forward to James Webb’s first official images this summer!
Somewhere it was suggested that now the Sagittarius A black hole has been imaged, that Webb might be able to look there too, in the infrared obviously. Meanwhile, I found this discussion from before the successful launch that details some of the projects in store for Webb:
Denying human nature is what would have caused us to stay in caves forever. At that time, you could have argued, whats the point of looking outside my cave, will it solve my issues inside the cave? Only through the knowledge you gained outside your cave and the challenges your faced, you were able to advance and get out of that cave.
Later on thousands of years later, you could have asked, whats the point of sailing ship to the unknown? will it solve the issues in our village? Who cares whats out there in the horizon?
Now that the entire earth has been discovered, the next inevitable step is space. You can not deny your nature or else you would have been doomed to stay in the cave as a neanderthal forever.
All the issues you mentioned (poverty, inequality, overpopulation, pollution and global warming, and much more) can ultimately only be solved if we keep discovering beyond our horizon. In 100.000 years, the only solution might be just leaving earth and if today that quest of knowledge hadn't been started, then we might have been doomed to extinction when its time to do something. In fact, in couple billion years we will be dead here on earth anyways, because the sun will eat us. So if something is true on a galactic scale and timeframe, then the inevitable answer to the solution is that the answer to the solution must have started with small steps at some point in the past, and that past is now. Unless you are only interested in your insignificant life of 80 or 90 years which is completely irrelevant when it comes to humanity as a whole
An interesting read is The innovation delusion: how our obsession with the new has disrupted the work that matters most by Vin Diesel and Kurt Russel (ok, it's actually Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russel, but it should be Vin Diesel and Kurt Russel just for the sex appeal ^^). In a nutshell, they argue that the balance between innovation and maintenance/upkeep is completely out of whack, which then has detrimental effects on infrastructure, the economy and our societies at large.
It's not directly applicable to space exploration, but you can extrapolate some ideas from it. I'm not sure that exploration has anything to do with human nature, but if it does, it may be worth stating that it's not the only aspect of human nature. Perhaps the point would be that it may be misguided to think the solution will necessarily come from exploration, and that it is just one component of a larger system. It then becomes a question of balance. That being the case, I would personally be in favour of pouring more money into space agencies, as I think they are currently cruelly underfunded, but I can see how someone would argue the other way. Unfortunately, I don't think that's where the big money will be going though. The key word in the space sector these days seems to be "commercialisation" and the next step would essentially be to saturate LEO with commercial satellites. It's not all bad of course, and in fact there are a lot of benefits, but in essence to me it seems that we're heading less towards Star Trek and more towards an even crappier version of Ready Player One.
On a side note, I think the cost overrun on the James Webb Telescope (about double the price tag NASA had estimated when the building started back in 2009) shouldn't be overlooked. No matter how excited we are and how supportive we are of the project, that kind of overrun goes beyond what can be reasonably expected. It points to deeper issues. So I think that devilhand at least had a point on that. It's just that the conclusion shouldn't be "this was too expensive therefore let's scrap space research", but rather "this was too expensive so let's examine what went wrong to make sure it doesn't happen again". Some of those costs were unavoidable (like those related to covid restrictions. The space sector got caught up in that just like everyone else and it was impossible to anticipate), but others probably were avoidable. Ultimately it's the US taxpayer's money so I'm not affected by it. But if CNES or ESA had that kind of overrun, I wouldn't be too happy about it (I guess the European equivalent of a clusterfuck project is ExoMars. Same deal, some things were unavoidable (like covid or the war in Ukraine and Roscosmos pulling out of the project), but other things could have been avoided and just fall under the heading "shoddy management"). Dunno. It's normal to include contingency funds in the overall budget and it's also normal that that contingency be relatively higher for cutting-edge projects. But we're usually talking something like 5-10%. I don't think anyone would consider a contingency of 100% of the estimated cost-at-completion to be reasonable, and that's essentially what NASA would've had to have to cover James Webb without going over budget.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
The 10 billion dollar cost of development over a 15 years time span, is really not much if you take into consideration how much money is being printed, how that money is being used, both by the goverment and the people alike, specially in US.
In my opinion, the only question is if the 10 billion have been wasted or if the benefits justify the cost. Measuring these benefits might be much harder than let's say measuring ROI in a simple investment. These benefits may come at a much later point in time or in other technological advances on earth as a byproduct of space exploration or byproduct of development of more advanced telescopes, etc. or even a combination of many benefits together. I think the problem people have with stuff like this, is that they expect an immediate return on investment, just like with everything else they are used to, thus creating negative reactions if that isn't always the case. For example if the goverment prints 6 trillion dollars and hands these dollars to the people, that is viewed as "ok", it saved lives.
I would argue that a lot more money is being wasted and gambled elsewhere on a much larger scale, even if we take goverments and their often miserable money management skills out of the equation and if we look what many people were doing with their money, just look at the crypto gambling space this global greater fool casino had a 3 trillion dollars market cap an year ago (now more than half of it wiped out and worth 1.2 trillion). that is 3000 billion dollars just gambling and hoping for a greater fool to make you even more. I would argue that even the traditional stock markets have evolved more into casinos, than actual shares from companies allowing them to do good and people benefitting from the good.
Also, ultimately the answer to the only unanswered questions of human race, might be out there and pursuing to find those answers alone are worth couple out of thin air printed us dollars imo. Also, exploring space, finding unexpected things, could even unite humanity (at some point in the future), prevent wars among eachother and thus save MUCH more money than what we are talking about here
I can not comment on that book you mentioned, I would have to read it first, otherwise anything I say would be just uninformed. So give me more time with that, I might give it a read.
Agreed. As I said, personally I'm in favour of investing more into space agencies, so I agree with you on the benefits. What bothers me about the 9-10bn isn't the amount per se, but the amount relative to what they had originally estimated. It's just a routine complaint over budgetary management.
Agree on the rest. Which is why I personally see it as cause for concern that the next big steps into space will be taken by the likes of Musk, especially if we're expecting those endeavours to be some kind of solution to the social and environmental issues we face. There's a lot that could be done, and the expected explosion in the number of sensors to then use ground-sat integrated networks could help a lot on things like climate change. I just don't expect that that's what they'll be focusing on. My guess is that pointless gadgets like Zuckerberg's Metaverse will be front and center, while the important stuff will continue to lag behind. Sticking to that topic of climate change, personally I don't think that any amount of innovation will solve the problem as long as we don't also do the grunt work of improving the dreadfully low level of efficiency that characterises the industrial / post-industrial era, grunt work that doesn't require any kind of technological innovation at all.
Anyway, my point wasn't to minimise the importance of exploration. It's just to say that it's not necessarily the solution to every problem. Sometimes the solution is in the cave. Or at the very least, even if there is a solution outside the cave, you have to do the grunt work inside the cave to make sure you hold out long enough until that solution arrives.
And by the way, cave dwellings are awesome. Casa-cuevas for the win!
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
It's just to say that it's not necessarily the solution to every problem. Sometimes the solution is in the cave. Or at the very least, even if there is a solution outside the cave, you have to do the grunt work inside the cave to make sure you hold out long enough until that solution arrives.
yes, of course I fully agree.
my point wasn't to say that there is nothing to be done on earth and that space is the solution to all our problems ;)
What bothers me about the 9-10bn isn't the amount per se, but the amount relative to what they had originally estimated. It's just a routine complaint over budgetary management.
The proposal was from a long time ago (did you watch the video?), and just like you have an estimate in your mind about fixing your car, if you want the result to be seriously long term beneficial, well you did not do yourself any good thinking to go for the cheaper routes and replacements. I delt with this recently with new tires. Should have invested in the double priced option. What happened is, planning for a non serviceable mission, and learning from past mistakes on other projects, the TRUE costs of Webb started going up and up. That is not any one persons fault, least of all the person who first conceived of the project. Sounds like what YOU would like is to OVER budget for stuff (which would result in almost no projects getting done). That is what I always do and my wife hates that sh1t. But in the end I am always closer to the bottom line (she says I am a pessimist). The same goes for the movie industry, you have a grandiose idea for a project, and as things progress you realize what the true costs were, but if you had over budgeted then the movie never gets started.
I remember talking to some physicists who felt the Large hadron was the biggest waste of money ever…because on paper they were confident the Higgs existed. Now the string theory people (and other super symmetry folks) are all depressed because they now see that at those energy levels, it was indeed a waste of money. That was a Hail Mary of wishful thinking. But, there is still some good data coming out there and we never know what is around the corner. But whatever people think that money could have been good for instead, well, that too was probably wishful thinking.
Sounds like what YOU would like is to OVER budget for stuff
Not at all. In practical terms what I would want, if I were involved in the NASA side of things, is a thorough lessons-learned exercise to determine what went wrong and prevent it from happening again. I'd imagine they have already done it, or will do it sometime soon. It's routine procedure in European space agencies so I don't imagine it would be any different at NASA. At the very least you'd want to know when things really started to get out of hand. If it was already apparent in phases 0/A/B1, then the responsibility lies entirely on NASA. If it was only later, then it's shared responsibility with other stakeholders and they can try to identify measures to do better in the future.
I also think that, pragmatically, voicing criticism of that kind of cost overrun is the only sensible way forward, including for people at NASA. If you want to argue that NASA should receive more funding (as I would) while at the same time saying you don't have any problem with poor planning leading up to cost overruns of 100% of the estimated CaC, you just won't be able to sell that to any investors, in this case the representatives of US taxpayers. Increasing overall funding for NASA is contingent on NASA being able to show it is financially responsible. Clusterfucks like this one put the longer term funding prospects of NASA into jeopardy, regardless of whatever long-term benefits the project ends up providing. The message they should be sending isn't "these things can pay off in a bunch of unexpected ways so it's fine if their construction is an endless financial pit"; rather it should be "we've examined what happened and why the cost went up so much, and we've set up the appropriate measures to minimise the risk of those things happening in future projects".
The LHC was in a similar situation: IIRC estimates at the start were around half of what the construction ended up costing. The criticism isn't at all about whether the project leads to a dead-end or not. Those decisions should be made on scientific grounds. The criticism is about financial planning. And the result of their poor financial planning is the same: if and when CERN wants to create another megaproject (I've heard that a larger collider was being considered for around 2040), how they managed the LHC construction will directly impact their ability to get this future megaproject approved. At the very least they will have to convince funders that they've taken appropriate measures to stave off the causes of cost overrun that they had to deal with with the LHC.
Last point, while I'm not arguing that they should overbudget, it's worth noting that contingency funds are not necessarily used. That's kind of the point... You hope they won't be used but you know you have them at hand if ever you need them. At the end of the project, unused contingency can be carried forward into the next phase of the project (e.g. if they had ununused contingency on the development of the James Webb telescope, they could have transferred it to the contingency for the operational phase) or it can be transferred elsewhere (to other NASA projects that need funding). So even if they did increase the percentage of contingency funds, what it would mean isn't that nothing would get started. It would mean that NASA would have to run fewer projects at the same time, since more contingency means more "frozen" money that can't be used elsewhere while the project is running.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
Heck, what do you do if your NASA and spent 23 billion on a new rocket and now Elon does it better for half the cost!? This year for the first time I helped write a government contract (I’m a DoD employee). Just frustrating and It’s an inefficient system for productivity, no doubt. Everything has to be spelled out exactly before the project starts, but Life doesn’t work that way.
And All of this so some lucky guy can say Look Mom I’m on the Moon! Going to Mars is good, I guess? But I’d rather see that money spent on solving the mysteries of the universe. But also, rather it go to NASA than a lot of other things that tax money gets spent on!
Brian Greene’s channel is great. It’s pretty cool how anyone can apply for time on the JWST, ie don’t have to be a phd..
Heck, what do you do if your NASA and spent 23 billion on a new rocket and now Elon does it better for half the cost!?
You start using the cheaper rocket (while making sure to safeguard your own strategic interests). I guess the closer something is to market applications, the more likely it is that a private company will invest in it. Stuff like the JWST or the LHC are far removed from market applications, so I doubt there's any risk there.
I don't get the sense that private industry is willing to invest in pure research. Some notable exceptions, like Mandelbrot doing pure mathematics at IBM, but those are few and far between.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
The criticism is about financial planning. And the result of their poor financial planning is the same: if and when CERN wants to create another megaproject (I've heard that a larger collider was being considered for around 2040), how they managed the LHC construction will directly impact their ability to get this future megaproject approved. At the very least they will have to convince funders that they've taken appropriate measures to stave off the causes of cost overrun that they had to deal with with the LHC.
I guess you don’t get it. The budget overruns on these types of projects are not because of bad financial planing. They are the direct result of unforeseen problems that popped up along the way. UNFORESEEN, unknown variables that cost big money!!! How is that the fault of the financial planning??? Examples, Hubble Space Telescope went up and was dead in the water. Worthless waste of money. They had to send up a team on the Space Shuttle and budget an entire project and train unqualified people to do a repair job like eye surgery up there. How can you blame NASA and the financial planners of the project for that? Next the LHC…why the over budget and delay of turning it on??? The superconductor magnets leaked and destroyed equipment, it all had to be fixed and reexamined…that was not something they could have known would happen before. The Webb and other projects, same deal. If you watched the video, they open the sun shield as planned and it got all torn up. That was somebody’s fault? No man, they had to learn next how to fix it and get it to work correctly which cost tons of time and money. And so it goes. There has to be some open ended concept that we learn from so future projects will benefit from these errors and those seeming extra costs disappear from budgets in the future. Now these are the things you hear about as “problems” in the media, but you don’t hear about projects that go perfectly smooth, they learned nothing about technical problems, and had money left over. Those projects balance out the expensive ones we learn tons from.
Yes, i.e. bad planning... The unforeseen is kind of the whole point of planning... Two full phases of a mission's lifecycle are dedicated entirely to definition and planning. That's a lot of time and effort during which you try to bring the unforeseen into the foreseen. Excluding "act of God" events, doubling your cost at completion is a strong indicator of poor planning. Some level of overrun is normal. 100%? Hardly.
As a side note, it's a running joke in the European space sector that the reason Russians are so strict and finicky in joint projects is that if they mess up big they'll end up behind bars. Whatever the cause may be, Roscosmos has stricter pre-launch requirements than its European (and American) counterparts. If you have the right incentives, you'd be amazed at how good you get at identifying the "unforeseen".
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Those projects balance out the expensive ones we learn tons from.
Yes, but not entirely. Huge mishaps like this are enough to force a space agency to suspend other projects in order to maintain its overall budget balance. I'm sure if you rummage around you'll find plenty of projects that were cancelled or postponed due to the overrun on the JWST. It's ludicrous to think this would be without consequence. There's no doubt at all in my mind that over the course of this project there were tense and heated discussions between the various NASA Directorates.
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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