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NASA Space

James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Next Hubble, Delayed Yet Again (space.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the sounds-familiar dept.
The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months. Space.com reports: The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. "Webb is the world's most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we've worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year."

NASA officials attributed three months of this latest seven-month delay to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many NASA centers to impose mandatory work-from-home orders. "Risk reduction" work on complex Webb tech, such as the observatory's huge, foldable sunshield, added two more months. The remaining two months were added for "schedule margin," giving the mission some breathing room on its long road to the launch pad. But the schedule slip won't increase the 13,670-lb. (6,200 kilograms) Webb's hefty price tag, mission team members said. "Based on current projections, the program expects to complete the remaining work within the new schedule without requiring additional funds," Gregory Robinson, NASA Webb program director at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement.
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James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Next Hubble, Delayed Yet Again More

James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Next Hubble, Delayed Yet Again

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  • I hope whoever is still alive enjoys it more than they would 10 billion cans of beans.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      To you and I that's a lot of money. To the US Gov't it's a rounding error on the Military budget.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        That's real money even to the military! You can buy an aircraft carrier for $10B.

  • Obligatory xkcd (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Friday July 17, 2020 @03:06AM (#60299045)
    Here you go, still on track too [xkcd.com]
  • This thing is already 13 years late. If it had been launched on the original schedule (and worked as it was supposed to) it would have expired its design life 8 years ago and its "lets hope it lasts longer" goal back in 2017.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      The schedule is working perfectly. Remember, this is a cost plus contract. They $billions of taxpayer money stop flowing if they ever actually finish the thing. Judge by their actions, not their words: their goal was never to launch a telescope and do science, their goal is maximum taxpayer dollars to congressional districts.

      Sadly there's no real alternative. While it's true that corporations have no incentive to fund basic research, apparently our government has no incentive to actually accomplish basi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spitzak ( 4019 )

      It was designed to see the Big Bang, but due to the delays it will only be able to see 13 years after the Big Bang.

  • This is by far the strongest argument for a standardized spacecraft design.

    Design a standard, versatile exploration spacecraft bus and mass produce it. Make it hollow so that instrument packages can fit inside it, including telescope optics. Force all exploration projects to tailor their instruments to fit that bus. Funding will never be for a bespoke probe, only for individual instruments. Multiple instruments can be piggybacked on one bus, but if they're not ready by launch time then the bus launches with

    • That's already being done: for example, the Mars 2020 vehicle is a copy of Curiosity, some of the Ice Giants missions being proposed now are similar to New Horizons. Instrument reuse is common in Discovery-class missions.
      It has its limits though. Planetary exploration requires different spacecraft depending on where in the solar system you're going, with large differences in e.g. thermal design, radiation tolerance and power systems.

      And some missions require advancing the state of the art. JWST is one of th

    • This is by far the strongest argument for a standardized spacecraft design.

      Not even slightly. You've provided no evidence that the bits that could feasibly be standardized are the ones causing the trouble.

      Make it hollow so that instrument packages can fit inside it, including telescope optics.

      Great idea! Now you've limited the maximum size of the optics and therefore the resolution to a small fraction of the JWST. If you did that, the telescope would be of vastly inferior performance. And where would the su

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by necro81 ( 917438 )

      This is by far the strongest argument for a standardized spacecraft design.

      Just what standardized design could you come up with that could accommodate a 6.5-m telescope that needs to be kept extremely cold? It's not like there are a lot of other spacecraft - existing or even proposed - that come close to JWST in size and complexity.

      The delays in this program have nothing to do with the spacecraft bus. The basic infrastructure to keep a satellite running is pretty well understood. The scientific inst

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )
      Do you want a boondoggle, I mean Space Shuttle? Cause that's how you get a space shuttle. Standardization only adds value when you are doing relatively the same thing over and over again. Like, say, earth observation satellites. You can compromise on instrument design to fit a standardized bus relatively easily. If you have to design your "standard" to be able to accommodate things like a giant mirror then you have a standard that doesn't work well for anything else.

    • Respectfully, this is way off base, and is based on the assumption that design and engineering challenges have been the source of JWST delays.

      JWST has had technical delays as the contract award included a few "scheduled inventions", but these delays were tiny compared to those caused by congressional budgets changing and politically induced leadership chaos.

      The problem with JWST isn't the contractor or the engineering. The problem is that Congress funds and manages NASA as a state level jobs and political

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Well for some things you are definitely right, I'm not an expert, but orbital telescopes are not exactly numerous, so there has really been no point in developing a "standard space telescope platform", I would imagine that a space telescope has quite different hardware than say a geostationary coms satellite

  • Let's see here... JWST is 20 times over-budget and 14 years behind schedule (as of now... but of course this supremely incompetent and dishonest team of bloated defense contractors, corrupt bureaucrats, and astronomers are highly unlikely to suddenly become honest and competent, so they'll likely slip further and jack profits higher too).

    As I have previously predicted, every incompetent executive on Earth will blame all their failures on COVID this year. It's the best possible excuse available and it will b

    • Re: In 2020 all bad actors use COVID-19 excuse (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Friday July 17, 2020 @05:00AM (#60299139)

      Planning a budget and a launch date on something that had never been done before is already utterly ridiculous, and leads to exactly the bugs and "ripens at the customer" release of what are de-facto early betas of software, games, etc.

      Look, this is not an industrial revolution factory assembly line!
      You cannot plan what you do not know yet! That includes invention, creativity, and engineering. If it was known, it would not need that kind of work.
      And if you plan it anyway, you cannot plan its quality anymore. Which migh fly with your sleazy hairstyled cocaine addict suits in certain industries, but is a freaking bad idea if it's a super-complex telescope that will be insanely far away and impossible to repair once it's launched.

      I call it the innovation uncertainty principle.
      But the older saying is: "High speed, low price, high quality. Choose two."

      E.g. in the games industry, they just develop a prototype, look what is still missing, and develop another prototype, until that, let's be honest, completely arbitrary time or money, has ran out... then release.
      I don't want a crashing buggy telescope with zerp patchability.

      Let them take their time. And only say stop if you know it actually isn't worth the time or money anymore. (Ignorance does not count as knowing.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ytene ( 4376651 )
        "Planning a budget and a launch date on something that had never been done before is already utterly ridiculous, and leads to exactly the bugs and "ripens at the customer" release of what are de-facto early betas of software, games, etc."

        Accepting the truth of the above statement [and it is true] is, however, to miss the point. This is an argument based on non-equivalence.

        If it's true that "Planning a budget and a launch date on something that had never been done before is already utterly ridiculous..

        • I respectfully disagree. The telescope is a very important project. It goes way above e.g. all military/spying/corporate/economy/etc projects whatsoever. Only infrastructure, education and healthcare (if I didn't forget anything) go above research.
          The money also going to cronies is infortunate, but not an argument against NASA's research projects. You seem rather obsessed there.

          And I know from project planning experience, that some projects cannot be separated into chunks. Hell, often you cannot even separa

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ytene ( 4376651 )
            I totally, completely agree with you that the JWST is an important project - for me more important than military/spying projects, although I might draw a line at "economy" on the basis that without a thriving economy, the federal government can't raise the tax dollars the project needs.

            I also agree with the sentiment on commitment: "You can't cross a chasm with two small steps: sometimes you have to take a leap of faith..." (based on the quote from David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister).

            But here,

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lgw ( 121541 )

        Planning a budget and a launch date on something that had never been done before is already utterly ridiculous,

        No, it's not. You might not no how to do it; that's different from it being impossible, or even all that difficult. Sure, the estimates before the project begins can be off in a project with unknown unknowns, but the time and cost estimates should rapidly become more accurate over time. Even in a multi-year project, by the first year you should have a very clear understanding of your rate of progress and how to project that forward to an accurate completion date. That's just how modern project managemen

    • "Nothing seen in that telescope is real. "

      Without the telescope nothing is real either. When the light from that cute chick reaches your eyes, she's also no longer there where you see her and what you see are colored hair with extensions, a botoxed face with fake teeth, a fake nose, not to mention the fake titties, but at least the light from those reaches you a tiny little bit earlier than the face.

      In your place I'd give up seeing for good.

      • The info JWST will obtain will be CENTURIES out of date, and we're THOUSANDS OF YEARS away from being able to do anything practical with it. The same is [hopefully] not true for that "cute chick" you mention.

        Stuff within our own solar system is every bit as good as a subject for science, and there's an insane amount we still do not know about our own solar system. The stuff in our solar system, however, is accessible within our lifetimes. If we discover something truly amazing on Titan, or Neptune, or the M

  • If the rocket blows up while on its way, it will become the most expensive firework ever made by humankind.

  • The James Webb Telescope is like the SLS. Lots of pork barrel spending for hardware that may never actually fly.

    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.

  • JWST entered the "I hope I'm still alive to see this launch and return science data" phase for me some years back. And I'm not even in my 50s yet.

  • It went up and it didn't work! But, they managed to fix it and it became one of the biggest successes in Science.

    Let's hope things work out in the end for this one too.

  • The Just Wait Space Telescope is supposed to be launched by an Ariane 5. If they continue to delay they will have to find themselves another rocket and it will burden the budget even more. The Ariane 5 is free of charge from the ESA.

  • I believe this telescope will be even farther away from Earth than Hubble is. If something goes wrong, it will be nearly impossible to fix.

  • Why all of this delay nonsense?!? Let's do it the Open Source way -- LAUNCH early and often, or at lest early. We'll fix it once it's in orbit, NP. We'll get it running (barely limping) right now, and delta fix it over a few weeks. It works fine elsewhere else, why is in-orbit any different?

    Launch a few Spots [theverge.com] later on if necessary to turn a few screws and we're on the way to Mars!

    • We'll fix it once it's in orbit, NP. We'll get it running (barely limping) right now, and delta fix it over a few weeks. It works fine elsewhere else, why is in-orbit any different?

      That actually happens with software. It amazes me. Probes go up on the rocket with hardware complete and software unfinished.

  • It is based on technology already more than a quarter of a century old. Design one based on the advances of the last 25 years and, for goodness sake, do NOT name it after a bureaucrat who knew nothing about astronomy and space.
  • 25 years to get a telescope in space? And the man James Webb himself was expected to put a man on the moon in seven years? How fittingly ironic, given that Webb quit eight months before the moon landing that was faked because they couldn't meet the schedule.

  • The thing about such instruments is that you have only one shot and it has to work correctly from the first attempt.
    There will be no maintenance mission for this one, as it will be place at the L2 point.
    The targets it will look at have been there since before Homo Sapiens appeared and will be around for a long time still.
    The only thing that will change is that some of the astronomers that hoped to get data from it will have retired by the time it flies.
    The science derived from Tycho Brahe's data is still va

  • There are so many things that can go wrong with this project; it's so large; so complex and so many people have been involved that I feel it's likelihood of success is low. The Hubble space telescope had to be fixed before it really started working.

    We need to stop building these complex systems in "the gravity well" and launching them in a "fire and forget" mode. We have a working, manned space station. We should be utilizing it. Send the parts up, assemble them, test the whole damn thing, once everythi

    • Or at least get more creative than what we've been doing. How about separating the project into different launches, smaller payloads and connect hardware in orbit robotically. Mirror or mirror sections in one shot, booster in another, and so on. You could also use this for greater redundancy if one launch fails or a section of the telescope fails

      Not trivial by any means, but we need to start moving that direction if we want anything bigger than a minivan up there. Yes, ISS..I know.

  • Scrap it and give us our money back. I'm sick of the cost over runs and mismanagement.
  • Take your time, get it right. It's going into space, much better for it to take a little longer and everything is working correctly when it gets there.

  • Meh. (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )

    I want a square kilometre optical array in space. And a pink pony.

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