John Mather On the Building of the James Webb Space Telescope 78
Nancy Atkinson writes "Why is the James Webb Space Telescope (scheduled to launch in 2013) taking so long to build? Hasn't it had a huge cost over-run and several delays? Nobel Prize winner John Mather is the Project Scientist for JWST, and he addresses these questions and more in an in-depth interview, one of the few he's given about this next-generation telescope and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. Quoting: 'The hardest thing to build was the mirror, because we needed something that is way bigger than Hubble. But you can't possibly lift something that big or fit it into a rocket, so you need something that is lighter weight but nonetheless larger, so it has to have the ability to fold up. The mirror is made of light-weight beryllium, and has 18 hexagonal segments. The telescope folds up like a butterfly in its chrysalis and will have to completely undo itself. It's a rather elaborate process that will take many hours. The telescope is huge, at 6.5 meters (21 feet), so it's pretty impressive.'"
Re:Build It in Space (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Build It in Space (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with this idea is that you will have to send people to put it together. And you still need to launch all the pieces.
So you'll have combined cost launching the pieces and people. Whereas building it on earth, you have all the engineers to put it together and then put it up all in one shot.
Until there is a manufacturing base out in space which probably will not happen for a long long long time, you still have to design and test everything on the ground. This is because you can't afford to launch a faultly part, this is true if you are sending the whole thing up or putting it up in pieces.
Re:Build It in Space (Score:5, Insightful)
Aerospace is incentivized to be over budget (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who denigrate aerospace projects for being over budget and over schedule are either naive or disingenous.
The unfortunate reality is aerospace companies are strongly motivated by the Federal Gov't proposal selection process to bid too low and too fast for high-risk projects like JWST. While not truely "lowest cost" bidder selection, it's understood that a winning bid will be in a certain range, regardless of whether its realistic. And the schedule proposals must also target certain bogies to have a chance of winning, regardless of winning.
And so companies bid low and fast to meet the proposal expectations and requirements, knowing that they'll make it up in cost-plus overruns as the Program proceeds.
And those running the programs know this too.
And ultimately, each project such as JWST is a one-of-a-kind endeavor. New technologies, new manufacturing methods, new test techniques are invented during the course of the project. It's difficult to predict the budget and schedule for doing something never done before; much less keeping to an optimistic budget driven by political needs more than the technical.
To those on JWST, they are doing incredible work, putting in long hours, and coming up with creative solutions to very challenging problems. And everyone of them wants to see JWST succeed.
No comment? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to reply to this thread, seeing only 9 hidden comments so far. That's a bit sad, since the JWST will be one of the most important science events since the Hubble. It will be an infrared telescope like the Spitzer, but it will effectively be an optical telescope for the distant universe because of red shift! And it will be able to peer into the distant past unlike any telescope prior.
In the sense of being a "space race" this is one area where the US really shines. There's no other nation that really is in the running, although there are lots of international contributions (yay Canada!). Maybe it's because of the language barrier, but I can't think of a single Russian space telescope. I can name a half dozen US scopes and one or two from the ESA. (Be sure to look up the Chandra [harvard.edu], Fermi [nasa.gov], Spitzer [caltech.edu], XMM-Newton [esa.int])
But then it's not really a space race, it's about science, so maybe it's a little boring for the general public. I only hope Slashdotter's are more aware that this is one of the great scientific adventures of our time.
Re:Will Orion be able to service it? (Score:4, Insightful)
> ...having a multi-billion dollar spacecraft dependent on a foreign launch vehicle makes
> me nervous.
That's silly. Ariane V is just as reliable as anything the USA has that could launch the JWST. This is not some Russian war-surplus ICBM or Chinese knock-off of an old US design. It is a mature modern rocket with an excellent launch history.
Re:Build It in Space (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not a problem. Once this is built, other projects will present themselves.
And these projects are? The "build it and they will come" argument doesn't work in the complete absence of any knowledge of demand for this sort of thing.
Re:Build It in Space (Score:4, Insightful)
And for the next 20 telescopes? Vastly bigger and better than any we can build to launch from Earth?
How about the rest of the space industry, like pharmaceuticals, other zero-G/vacuum manufacture, and solar energy collectors, all for returning products to Earth. How about a Lunar base and factory from which to make and launch the rest of what we launch across the Solar System, including to Mars, and outside to interstellar space? A network of comms satellites for science and eventual travel, and perhaps industry among the other planets.
Especially solar power collectors/transmitters would be the next step after we understand the basic science behind space industrial engineering. The value of that, both in the energy and its geopolitical benefits (security, peace, minimal pollution, the pride of getting our of our energy/pollution dead end), is worth quite a lot of investment. Especially with an American or American-led brand on it.
This is the gateway. We are standing on the threshold of projects that are starting to be better performed in space, with the technology to do it. The first project is going to cost way more than that project will return directly. But it will get us started on the much bigger project of industrializing space, with its incalculable returns.
Or we can plod along. And let the military define space industrialization instead of consumer products and energy. Or let rivals like Russia, China or Europe do either - or both - while we're stuck in the 20th Century, in which we made the investments that got those rivals started to pass us.
Re:Build It in Space (Score:3, Insightful)
Assembling big things in space is a possibility. The ISS is an example. But we need to put people up there to do anything more than the simplest jobs. And we can't even keep our manned programs up to date.
The reason we got stuck with the aging shuttle is that there was no economic justification for the program in the first place. And as a result, no basis upon which to do a cost-benefit analysis (like when airlines scap their L1011s and buy 777s).
Anyway, even when such an analysis is done, its always going to be cheaper to do as much of the fabrication down here on earth. Until a moon base, complete with machine shop, mining and raw materials processing becomes competitive with earth, it'll be done here. Heck, we can't even underbid the Chinese. The moon settlers are going to be bitching about the same inequities. How the earth people undercut their prices, even if shipping costs more.