NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Launch Delayed To December (space.com) 42
NASA's long-awaited and high-powered James Webb Space Telescope won't begin observations this year after NASA and its counterpart the European Space Agency (ESA) announced another launch delay. From a report: In coordinated statements, the two agencies announced that the observatory is now targeting a launch on Dec. 18, more than six weeks after its previously set liftoff date. The highly-anticipated project has racked up consistently escalating budget and schedule overruns since development began in the 1990s. "We now know the day that thousands of people have been working towards for many years, and that millions around the world are looking forward to," Gunther Hasinger, ESA's director of science, said in an agency statement. "Webb and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle are ready, thanks to the excellent work across all mission partners. We are looking forward to seeing the final preparations for launch at Europe's Spaceport."
It will never launch (Score:2, Interesting)
Too complicated and if by a miracle it ever DOES launch, it will be unreachable when it fails to deploy properly.
Re:It will never launch (Score:5, Funny)
By the time they get the damn thing launched, we won't need it because the universe will have already collapsed on itself.
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By the time they get the damn thing launched, it will be of no use as the universe will have expanded by so much all extrasolar objects will be beyond our event horizon so JWST won't be able to see them.
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I kind of liked "The telescope was designed to see back to the beginning of the universe, but due to the 20 year delay it can now only see back to 20 years after the universe began."
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It'll launch, eventually. But by that time it's entirely possible SpaceX will be routinely traveling to the Moon and back. Which by my guess would be in about ten to fifteen years. Maybe less if the regulatory hurdles don't stop progress from SpaceX altogether. It'll be plenty reachable. It just won't be EASILY reachable.
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Pokebot (Score:1)
They should send a "prod bot" with it to poke at parts that fail to unfurl. This thing is origami's devil child.
(It's what my parents did when I failed to wake up for school.)
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The repair crew will just buy tickets on the twice-daily SpaceX Starship route that passes by that neighborhood. The hardest part will be setting up the porta-potty at the job site.
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If it works, it'll be the single greatest technical achievement in the history of space exploration. And yea it's definitely complicated...
https://youtu.be/bTxLAGchWnA [youtu.be]
Many are too young to get this. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
And you're not!
What's the reason for the delay? (Score:2)
It's great that it's a coordinated message from NASA and ESA saying that the launch is delayed but why? I would think that's a critical question that needs to be answered so that people can understand if it's likely that the launch will take place on December 18th or if this is yet another in a series of technical issues that have plagued the project.
Re:What's the reason for the delay? (Score:5, Informative)
It's great that it's a coordinated message from NASA and ESA saying that the launch is delayed but why?
It was delayed because ArianeSpace needed to confirm they had fixed an issue with the Ariane 5 payload shroud jettisoning correctly (news article [spacenews.com]). They needed two launches to confirm the fix after pausing launches earlier in the year.
There'a also a certain amount of lead time to get the payload checked out after shipping and mated to the rocket at the launch facility in French Guiana -- it's not like they just hitch a truck to the telescope and drive off with it.
It's also not out of the realm of possibility that liquid oxygen shortages due to the pandemic could cause a delay; ULA and SpaceX have had issues, may not be as much of an issue in Guiana.
Re: What's the reason for the delay? (Score:1)
The ESA fails so hard at space. NASA really shouldn't have partnered with them.
No way!! (Score:1)
Really??
Can we guess... (Score:2)
Need To Get the Timing Right (Score:1)
Cleared to taxi (Score:2)
Hold for take-off. You are behind the fat guy in the red suit with the reindeer.
AWOL (Score:1)
If this turkey goes AWOL ex atmosphere, give Elon the salvage and repair contract.
It'll give them time to change the name (Score:3, Insightful)
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No matter how good a NASA administrator he was, he doesn't deserve a telescope to be named after him.
Yes he does.
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The paperwork to change the name will delay it another 5 years.
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Yeah how errand of him. We all remember the 60s were so open an inclusive. He really was a standout arsehole. Oh wait, no he wasn't. He was just a run of the mill ordinary person doing what ordinary people did in the 60s which we consider to be an arsehole move today.
I guess we better scrub all of history and start over, just remove all the names. Everyone was an arsehole to someone at some time in the past.
Jeesh imagine finding out a presidents owned slaves. Guess it's time to get a hammer and chisel and r
Re: It'll give them time to change the name (Score:2)
We'll get around to admonishing him for that right after we admonish Ghandi for being vehemently racist.
https://racistgandhi.org/ [racistgandhi.org]
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Oh, yes, and remember Sergei Korolev worked for Stalin so he was evil as well!
JFC, if you lived in Germany and wanted to work in rocketry you had to join the Nazi Party. If you lived in the Soviet Union and wanted to work in rocketry you had to join the Communist Party. Goddard didn't have a government interested in technology so languished in obscurity begging for drips and drabs of funding from millionaires, with the result that by 1940 the US was a distant third (or maybe fourth after Britain) in rocke
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People are more than a single boolean. They do a bunch of good things, they do a bunch of bad things. You have to evaluate their contribution to history based on the sum total of their actions and work. Disqualifying people from anything based on a single criteria makes you no better than the Nazi
No accolades for anybody! (Score:2)
I doubt you can find anybody from anything close to his generation that would completely stand up to today's light of day. He was born in 1906, for heaven's sake.
If you say, "Okay, nothing named after anybody, ever!" Well, okay. I can get behind that.
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People love to find individuals in history to blame for the sins of their ancestors, their parents, their grandparents. No your grandparents weren't racist, homophobic, and sexist, no, no, no, just James Webb.
People like James Webb didn't participate in such things in isolation, he did what he thought was expected of him by the organisation he led and the attitudes of the general public at the time. You can't blame James Webb for the failings of an entire society.
Your logic is problematic as by this yard
Duplicate (Score:5, Funny)
"We now know the day" (Score:1)
B.S. no you don't. This has been delayed so many times we won't "know the day" until the day it actually launches.
For Pete's sake NASA (Score:2)
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Just give it to SpaceX already. They'll have up there next week for you.
How? This is going to one of the earth/sun Lagrange points, not earth orbit. So, a falcon 9 won't do; you need a falcon 9 heavy. No problem there. But, this bird won't fit in the fairing of a falcon 9 or falcon 9 heavy. The SpaceX Starship isn't flying yet, so we can't use that. The JWST will fit in an Ariane 5. Because it was designed to do so. This observatory is so old that SpaceX, much less the falcon 9 didn't exist when the project started! Ariane 5 was a new upcoming rocket at the time.
The two canonical arguments against JWST (Score:2)
"JWST is only ten years away, and always will be."
"We already have a perfectly good space telescope, just 400 miles from Earth."
Still early by regression schedule (oblig. xkcd) (Score:2)
As long as it's operational by late 2026 we're golden. [xkcd.com]