James Webb Space Telescope Will 'Absolutely' Not Launch In March (arstechnica.com) 56
The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's follow-on instrument to the wildly successful Hubble Space Telescope, will not meet its current schedule of launching in March 2021, according to the chief of NASA's science programs. Ars Technica reports: "We will not launch in March," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency's associate administrator for science. "Absolutely we will not launch in March. That is not in the cards right now. That's not because they did anything wrong. It's not anyone's fault or mismanagement." Zurbuchen made these comments at a virtual meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. He said the telescope was already cutting it close on its schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the agency and that the virus had led to additional lost work time.
"This team has stayed on its toes and pushed this telescope forward at the maximum speed possible," he said. "But we've lost time. Instead of two shifts fully staffed, we could not do that for all the reasons that we talk about. Not everybody was available. There were positive cases here and there. And so, perhaps, we had only one shift." NASA and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, are evaluating the schedule going forward. This will include an estimate of when operations can completely return to normal -- Zurbuchen said telescope preparation and testing activities are nearing full staffing again -- and set a new date for a launch. This schedule review should conclude in July. "I'm very optimistic about this thing getting off the launch pad in 2021," Zurbuchen said. "Of course, there is still a lot of mountain to climb."
"This team has stayed on its toes and pushed this telescope forward at the maximum speed possible," he said. "But we've lost time. Instead of two shifts fully staffed, we could not do that for all the reasons that we talk about. Not everybody was available. There were positive cases here and there. And so, perhaps, we had only one shift." NASA and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, are evaluating the schedule going forward. This will include an estimate of when operations can completely return to normal -- Zurbuchen said telescope preparation and testing activities are nearing full staffing again -- and set a new date for a launch. This schedule review should conclude in July. "I'm very optimistic about this thing getting off the launch pad in 2021," Zurbuchen said. "Of course, there is still a lot of mountain to climb."
*Sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
This telescope has been delayed so long that I'm beginning to think they should just rename it the James Webb Earth Paperweight. -_-
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Northrup-Grumman is tied in bureaucracy. Good people, but if you expect anything on tine, it won't happen (based on other companies I've worked for). I've worked for and contracted with Grumman - know they are bureaucratically tied and ship date unreliable, even with Covid-19.
Re:*Sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no more stark a demonstration of the difference between the government way and the SpaceX way of getting a project done.
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The James Webb Jobs Program provides a lot of white collar jobs. And delivers federal dollars to states.
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No, Evangelical. Telescopes are windows into a cosmos they fundamentally reject.
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A guy I knew at MIT is now the director of the Vatican Observatory.
He wrote what may be the best beginner telescope observer's guide ever: Turn Left at Orion.
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So is JWST evil now?
Apparently, only when it happens to orbit over Hawaii.
Better late than an asteroid (Score:5, Insightful)
The project took so long to develop, and the targets it will look at have been around for a very long time; they will be around for longer yet.
Delaying the launch to reduce the risk of failure makes a lot of sense.
You spend almost two decades building the telescope and then you get one shot at placing it in the right place.
If the launch goes wrong, two decades and billions of dollars go down the drain. Or the launch goes right, but then you discover a problem when you start observing, like it happened with Hubble.
As this telescope will be placed at the L2 point instead of Earth orbit there will be no way to service it, so everything must work correctly from the start.
Nothing is more expensive than failure.
Re: Better late than an asteroid (Score:2)
If I only had mod points right now...
I like "nothing is more expensive than failure."
Re:Better late than an asteroid (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, just keep spending taxpayer dollars forever with no results. Or, launch one that has an 80% chance of working, for 10% or the price, and if it fails, launch 5 more! The SpaceX way.
This is old-school NASA BS, with no interest in actually delivering, because if they deliver the pork stops flowing. Meanwhile the careers of many an astronomer wither and die as the promises of JWST go unfulfilled abd research can't be done.
, like it happened with Hubble.
Hubble's failure was a pure NASA failure as project leader. NASA failed to ensure proper communication and testing between contractor. Contractor A didn't understand how to properly install what Contractor B delivered, and so they got a warped mirror. But, hey, taxpayer money was successfully spread out among all the different campaign contributors, so the project was a huge success from the point of view of the congresscritters involved!
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There are eighteen 4ft/1.3m mirrors painstakingly carved from blocks of beryllium. This is not the kind of telescope you would make five copies of just in case.
Also some of the delay is a consequence of the Hubble problems you mention. If ensuring proper communication and testing between contractors is the absolute highest priority, then other aspects, like development speed, are necessarily lower priorities. It shouldn't be this bad, but it should be seen in context. The target wavelengths and the orbital
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There are eighteen 4ft/1.3m mirrors painstakingly carved from blocks of beryllium. This is not the kind of telescope you would make five copies of just in case.
Indeed, doing it the most expensive way possible is not the sort of thing you do 5 times just in case. That's sort of the point. There is 0 incentive for cost saving anywhere in the project, which to a non-engineer may seem like the highest quality, but an engineer knows redundancy is better.
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Sure, but just because something is hard is not a justification for ignoring cost, is the point. A point that SpaceX has proven quite well.
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That remains not even an argument. NASA indulges in "most expensive way possible" not because it's needed, even if something somewhat expensive is needed, but becuse spending taxpayer dollars is the goal, and moving science forward is not the goal.
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FFS, we're not talking about half-assing it! I'll explain one last time. There's probably a way to get the same quality of scientific instrument a lot cheaper. But no one is even looking, because that's explicitly not a goal of the project. Hell, if JWST is delayed much longer, the entire elaborate and expensive folding-mirror arrangement will become pointless because launch vehicles with larger fairing will be around, meaning a much more reliable system could have been used. Further, JWST has been del
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To be clear, about 20 comments ago you suggested that 4ft gold-coated beryllium mirrors might not really be necessary.
Nope, you made up that strawman and have now thrashed it senseless.
Also better to get something than to get nothing (Score:2)
I fully agree that such projects present ample opportunities for pork barrel politics, (and as much as I hate to use it, here it is) BUT:
- If you don't accept the pork barrel politics, you get no funding. So if you want any science results at all, this is what you have to put up with.
- If you build a telescope with 80% chance of working at 10% of the price, you'll get the money to build only one of them anyway. You won't get funding for 5. They launched 2 identical Mars rovers just because they lan
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Yes, it is. One group built the test instrument that was designed to ensure the mirror was perfect. They also designed a rod of exotic alloy to be the same length at all relevent temperatures to ensure the instrument was mounted at exactly the correct distance from the mirror. This was delivered to another group, who didn't quite understand the mounting directions.
Now, so far, that's the usual BS with multiple contractors in a large project. What should have happened, worst case, is the technicians mo
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Some things are in fact more expensive than failur (Score:2)
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It's also worth noting that although the summary says "wildly successful Hubble", HST was over time and over budget by lots and lots too: people were having this same discussion thread late in HST development. Well not on Slashdot, of course. In fact, they they were so slow that they scooped on the main science goal of the project (measuring Cephied variable stars in virgo cluster galaxies to nail down the distance scale) by the ground-based CFHT. And despite being over time and over budget they still f
xkcd (Score:4, Funny)
Re:xkcd (Score:4, Insightful)
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You don't understand how it works, do you? Idiots didn't see the fifteen+ year delay coming in 2000 either.
There is no way in hell it will launch in 2021.
If I was a betting woman, I wouldn't even take the under on 2026.
JWST Will 'Absolutely' Not Launch In March (Score:5, Insightful)
13 years late... so far... (Score:1)
Well, when you consider it was supposed to launch 13 years ago and still hasn't, I don't think this should come as a surprise at all...
NASA is completely and utterly incompetent from top to bottom.
JWST (Score:5, Funny)
It is the Just Wait Space Telescope.
Government procurement sucks (Score:3)
Name one major government building project, DOD system or NASA project in the past 50 years that hasn't been over budget and late.
The government sucks at everything except getting bigger and wasting your money.
SpaceX vs SLS is the epitome.
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Apollo. It wasn't over budget because they had a blank check and they beat the deadline "the end of this decade" with 5 months to spare.
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Okay, the last Apollo flight was from Dec 7–19, 1972, so 47.5 years.
Gee, you know you are getting old when you remember where you were during the first moon landing. Hell, I remember seeing Japanese Zeros flying over Honolulu. (But, if you corner me, I'd have to tell you it was the filming of Tora Tora Tora, not the real thing. It still makes a better story without the explanation.)
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The government sucks at everything except getting bigger and wasting your money.
The government is my wife?
Dead Wrong (Score:2)
You think the job of government procurement is to procure a product or service for use by the government.
And you are dead wrong.
The purpose is to procure a metric ass-load of money for the constituency of the criminal class aka Congress.
If it comes in on-time and on-budget, Congress and the parasites they feed consider it a failure.
Will it ever launch? (Score:2)
Same Thing (Score:2)
I'm beginning to think the people building this are the same ones building our Flying Cars.
Correction: Not Launch In 2021 (Score:4, Insightful)
But the actual purpose of those devices are to create jobs for companies in locations that line the re-election campaigns of their representative congressmen, who then send more Congressional money to those companies.
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The James Webb Telescope is like the SLS. Lots of pork barrel spending for hardware that may never actually fly.
And SSC [wikipedia.org], and SST [wikipedia.org] and another SST [wikipedia.org], and YMNWR [wikipedia.org], and ECCS [wikipedia.org], and AmTrak [wikipedia.org], and, and, and...
If it sits ... (Score:2)
Another failure by Trump (Score:2)
People were upset the Falcon rocket to the ISS didnâ(TM)t explode so this bad news helps.
Hope rational people prevail, still let it launch (Score:1)
Can you image the stupidity it would take to blame 5G cell towers for spreading COVID-19?
And then, to top it all off, destroy a 4G tower?
Makes me wish I could create my own country and prevent such people from getting, (or keeping), citizenship.
Any rich people out
Due to the delays (Score:2)
The telescope was designed to be able to see back to the start of the Universe, but due to the delays it will now only be able to look back to 12 years after the Univers started.