An 'Incident' With the James Webb Space Telescope Has Occurred (arstechnica.com) 149
A short update on the projected launch date of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope came out of NASA on Monday, and it wasn't exactly a heart-warming missive. From a report: The large, space-based telescope's "no earlier than" launch date will slip from December 18 to at least December 22 after an "incident" occurred during processing operations at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. That is where the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency. "Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket," NASA said in a blog post. "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."
Hope some of them were sitting on the floor (Score:2)
JWST (Score:5, Funny)
Just Wait Space Telescope.
Cool but too much (Score:5, Interesting)
JWST has unfortunately trained a generation and a half of astronomers and engineers that it is acceptable to demand tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on open-ended speculative projects, to the exclusion of a larger number of smaller speculative projects or a small number or high-yield, high-cost, but less speculative projects.
A 25+ year start-to-ioc timeline is just about too long for any scientific or technical continuity considering that it is mid-career people initiating the work who almost certainly won't be around to see the result. This guarantees an ever-evolving design by committee which leads to few good places. New Horizons was conceived in the mid 90s, launched in the mid 2000s, and generated spectacular results by the mid 2010s. The original people behind the project (Stern, Binzel, et al) are still around to streer the program and advocate for it. That was also the cade with Hubble to some extent but just won't be the case with JWST.
Kepler, TESS and similar smallish missions also got from conception to launch in under a decade and yield lots of good science and training opportunities for young astronomers and engineers at a fraction or the cost and drama of JWST.
And Hubble is still cranking out good science too. Imagine if half the resources sunk into JWST had been used to make sure there were 2 or 3 Hubble clones floating up there now and for another 20 or 30 years.
Yes it's cool. But I hope it's going to be the last 500 lb gorilla of space astronomy for a good long while.
Re: Cool but too much (Score:2)
You just wait for the apologetics..apologists..those that say it's only a drop in the sea of whatever and that we should be thankful etc etc..
Re:Cool but too much (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Cool but too much (Score:2)
Hubble was built around an existing spy satellite platform. The only new secret sauce on it was ultra-stable pointing capability for long exposures. And if challenger hadn't happened, it would have met its goal.
The fact that it was only 15 years from conception to launch helped politically with paying for the optics fixes. Imagine what would have happened if it was 25 years from conception to launch, the original science team was near retirement, and then they turn it on and oopsie the mirror is wrong and t
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Re: Cool but too much (Score:3)
Okay dude. It was supposed to launch in 07 but the mirrors didn't leave the optical shop until the mid 2010s and the heat shield deployment mechanism wasn't integrated until 2 or 3 years ago.
An extra year or two for launch vehicle delays is like complaining about getting billed for the couple dollar gasoline charge for your surprise $2k ambulance bill.
Re: Cool but too much (Score:2)
What did I tell you...
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Is there a way they could have launched multiple smaller scopes and digitally "glue" the results together? It seems they put all their eggs in one giant fragile basket.
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Re:Cool but too much (Score:5, Informative)
Is there a way they could have launched multiple smaller scopes and digitally "glue" the results together?
No.
Telescope resolution increases proportional to the the mirror diameter, and light gathering power increases as the mirror diameter squared. Seeing faint stuff at high resolution requires large mirrors.
Yes, interferometers exist, but to do this at optical wavelengths means you need to control the precision of the location of the mirrors relative to the target to a fraction of a wavelength of light.
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Ground based optical interferometers use "analog delay lines". I am not sure i translate well from French "Ligne à retard".
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Pretty simple - if you have 10 telescopes to hook together, and the furthest one is 1000m away, then every telescope is plugged into the central processor with a 1000m cable - even the one that's only 150m away. That way, the signals all take exactly the same amount of time to arrive (though some may be dizzy from spiraling around inside the extra coiled length of cable) and you can blend them together correctly.
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That's potentially doable if you build in a modular fashion, as you can control the framework used to fasten the telescopes together and can use UV lasers to range-find the assembly. But attaching the pieces without humans there to do the assembly would be beyond the ability of current robotics.
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Is it really? Most vehicles that dock with the ISS currently do so under fully automatic control, IIUC. Seems like you could do the same with a framework designed to connect two or more telescopes.
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YES.
There has been a lot of investigation on formation flying telescopes that operate much as ground-based interferometry astronomy, except that (a) the baselines are on a much, much, much larger scale, and, not unrelatedly, (b) they're in space. I've personally met someone who was working at JPL on designing such a system. If you look up "formation flying telescope" in Google, you'll find lots of examples. Here's one page from the ESA that lists Formation Flying projects:
https://sci.esa.int/web/sci-ft.. [esa.int]
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"Seeing faint stuff at high resolution requires large mirrors." True, but what about seeing brighter stuff at higher resolution? In which case the interferometer approach makes sense. And controlling the position of two or more smaller mirrors a few hundred meters apart is certainly a different problem than building and launching into space a single telescope with a ten meter mirror. And maybe easier; I'd like to see the problem attacked, because what you could do with that kind of resolution seems real
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Interferometry using multiple telescopes is something that can* be done to get images that are "sharper" than their geometry would normally allow. But light gathering power is directly proportional to the area of the mirror, so if you're interested in looking at very distant, faint objects (i.e. really anything from the early universe) you'll need a big mirror and long exposure times. The JWST mirror has 7+ times the area of the Hubble...
*So far nobody has flown an interferometer in space. It has challenges
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You can combine individual mirrors to get more light gathering power too. JWST sort of does this with its segmented mirror, except the combining is done optically instead of electronically.
None of it is simpler and less prone to failure than a nice telescope where everything is conveniently bolted together though.
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Again, what if you're interested in brighter objects? Maybe objects in orbit around nearby stars. Now they're not bright, but I don't think they're likely to be as dim as galaxies ten billion light years away.
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It's not the costs that were the problem, it was that it was reliant on too many low TRL [nasa.gov] components.
They should've funded smaller projects to test the unknown design elements before committing funding to a large project that used them.
Heliophysics put a lot of money into SDO, but it wasn't built around unproven stuff. Hell, they even replaced one of the PI teams a year after the award, because they weren't hitting their deadlines.
(The original telescope package was supposed to be built by NRL, who was also
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JWST has unfortunately trained a generation and a half of astronomers and engineers that it is acceptable to demand tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on open-ended speculative projects, to the exclusion of a larger number of smaller speculative projects or a small number or high-yield, high-cost, but less speculative projects.
A 25+ year start-to-ioc timeline is just about too long for any scientific or technical continuity considering that it is mid-career people initiating the work who almost certainly won't be around to see the result. This guarantees an ever-evolving design by committee which leads to few good places. New Horizons was conceived in the mid 90s, launched in the mid 2000s,
That was also the original timeline for JWST [wikipedia.org]:
Development began in 1996 for a launch that was initially planned for 2007 and a $500 million budget,[16] but the project had numerous delays and cost overruns and the programme underwent a major redesign in 2005.
[...]
In the "faster, better, cheaper" era in the mid-1990s, NASA leaders pushed for a low-cost space telescope.[16] The result was the NGST concept [JWST], with an 8-meter aperture and located at L2, roughly estimated to cost US$500 million.
I don't know
Re: Cool but too much (Score:4, Informative)
The specifics were roughly that large beryllium mirrors and the deployable structures holding the mirrors and sun shield in place are very hard to build to the tolerances needed for telescopes.
This was known, or should have been known, in the 90s. And a responsible plan would have flown a series of smaller telescopes capable of generating some science but with progressively larger physical dimensions to gain confidence and experience of manufacturing these things for use in space.
This would have been a moderate risk, but high reward program given the shorter feedback cycle to the engineers and scientists and more opportunities to train a cadre of people to stay with the program.
Instead we got all the eggs in one basket and the risk-averseness and need to do extensive unit and assembly and simulation tests that comes with doing something big and untested.
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And a responsible plan would have flown a series of smaller telescopes capable of generating some science but with progressively larger physical dimensions to gain confidence and experience of manufacturing these things for use in space.
How would it been responsible to launch a series of smaller telescopes that would not have done the same job? That's just wasting more money. The main reason JWST exists is no other telescope can do what it does, not even Hubble.
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Instead they could have ordered various parts of the projects as technology developments. For example the sun
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From nasa.gov web site:
The demand for time on Hubble is so great there are typically six times as many observing proposals for the telescope as those that actually are selected. This is because Hubble can do breakthrough astronomical research that simply can’t be done from ground-based telescopes.
Having a mini-James Webb (Hubble sized mirror at 2.4 meters diameter instead of the full 6.5 meter diameter, so some 1/7 of the surface) a decade earlier (even if in Earth orbit and not Lagrange point) would
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In 2011, the NRO donated two KH-11 Key Hole spy satellites to NASA, with the intention of them being used as space observatories. They're very similar to Hubble in size/shape/function (and use the same size of mirror), though as configured they have a wider field of view. So they would have been quite useful for science, but not the exact same science that Hubble is used for, not unless they were modified. It's a moot point, though, because NASA didn't have the budget to do anything with them, and they've s
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JWST isn't a big Hubble. The telescopes have different capabilities. Hubble is primarily a UV and visible telescope, with a bit of infrared capability. JWST is an infrared scope with a little bit of visible capability on the red side.
In astronomy, these things are often connected. Things that are farther away appear dimmer, smaller, redder, and further back in time. So when you start building big enough telescopes to see smaller and dimmer things, it's advantageous to shift their sensitivity to longer wavel
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They do do a job. That job is risk reduction. Perhaps they can also di some science. But buying diwn risk on the ground with little tolerance for remaining risk costs more and takes longer than flying a prototype does.
So you propose building a bunch of satellites that do not do the job that JWST does because they "perhaps" could do "a job". Have you thought about your proposal?
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The better question is:
If we could have launched a $500 million, simpler telescope 10 years ago (so built and launched in 10 years from 2003 to 2013), would the observations done by it be worth it? (we're not talking about "technology demonstrator" or "development milestones" or whatever else, only how much could such a "mini" James Webb Space Telescope do).
As of now, we're one decade later, billions of dollars later and we have nothing, and what we might get is in an _possible_ future.
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But I hope it's going to be the last 500 lb gorilla of space astronomy for a good long while.
It won't be if the pork farmers in DC have anything to say about it. Honestly though, as far as "wasteful spending" goes, I'd rather it be spent on something like this.
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paying people money to sit on their couch and watch porn all day
Gotta do something to placate the masses and distract them from how bad they are getting screwed by those in power.
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"panem et circenses"
Give them bread, and give them scandals, and they won't throw the government
Re:Cool but too much (Score:5, Insightful)
considering that it is mid-career people initiating the work who almost certainly won't be around to see the result.
... I plant trees, too.
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Isn't that exactly the attitude that led to the dust bowl conditions of the Great Depression? :-)
(I have no idea how that applies to the overall analogy, but at least it applies to vegetable gardening. If you just care about next year's vegetable garden, you may be setting your soil up for blowing away in a couple of decades.)
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We don't really have to imagine much. The Hubble design is straight out of a NSA playbook for mid-century film-based shuttle-requiring spy cameras designed to look down, not out. After all, since the technology went out of style, the NRO just up and gave NASA the old spares [space.com].
James Webb is a traditional Cathedral Project, complete with the homilies a
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And Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. Mentioning it as their most interesting fact about them each time they are invoked would be and is just as moronic.
Get a life and don't center your existance on hating some dead guy whose actions and deeds are very much immutable history at this point forward.
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Your thoughts on the military budget?
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Wars are won with Privates not Generals. You can hire 10x more Privates than Generals for the money. However you need good Generals to win the war.
Even though a Good General is not 10x better than a Private we need to pay the price, even if it not the best value to achieve the objectives.
While the net amount of Science done is greater with small projects, We do need big projects to advance our understanding of science. As these big projects like JWST, and the Large Hadron Collider come at the expense of
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Sometimes a project takes a long time (and consequently a good bit of money) to get the technology right. Gravity Probe B was proposed in 1961, and didn't launch until 2004. The mission and data analysis wasn't completed until 2011.
It's not like Hubble was cheap to build or operate. Also Hubble doesn't "see" in the same wavelengths as the new telescope, so no matter how many Hubble clones you built and launched, they wouldn't be able to do the same research.
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(*) When the ice satellite (don't remember its exact name) crashed on takeoff after 10 years to build, it took only one year to build another one and launch it.
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Allocate the $11B to astronomers and let competing commercial telescopes rent time. Astronomers will pick the best platform for their study.
Probably have first light in under five years on the ones that succeed.
After 25 years we don't even know if Webb will ever be operational at this point. Especially if they're dropping it.
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I bet that sounds impressive to the ill-educated... But the educated grasp that JWST is emphatically not a Hubble replacement. They don't operate in the same wavelengths and they don't have the same science goals. They're not interchangeable.
Re:Cool but too much (Score:4, Informative)
Notice how NASA was able to fund Kepler, TESS and JWST simultaneously.
Also, JWST advances the state of the art in multiple fields. That takes R&D, which takes time and money.
Missions like this are not done on a whim. They don't go "wouldn't it be cool to build a $10B telescope and take 20 years to do it".
These missions starts with specific scientific questions that the community decides it wants answers to. JWST is designed to answer questions related to the early universe, which requires observations at a distance of 13 bn lightyears, where starlight is redshifted so much you need to work in IR. That dictated a mirror size, which dictated the complex folding design, along with cryocooling (to keep the observatory in operation for far longer than earlier IR telescopes which would run out of liquid helium coolant eventually).
2 or 3 Hubble clones cannot answer these questions because they can't see this far into IR. Small IR scopes cannot answer these questions because they don't have sufficient resolution.
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We'll need them to launch satellites ... because they're putting so much low-orbit highly reflective crap in space that they're screwing up ground based observatories:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandno... [wbur.org]
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Was it an explosive bolt going off? (Score:2)
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Aside from the "Right Stuff" reference, I don't think they'd want to risk the optics on anything remotely explosive.
Engineer speak (Score:2)
"A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."
So they dropped it?
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So they dropped it?
They nearly dropped it.
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Scrap it. (Score:2)
Just scrap it and go with something that's not a giant monolith that could be taken out by a piece of Russian debris from an ASAT. Yes, I know JWST is supposed to be parked in orbit around the Sun but still getting there will be a butt-clenching experience.
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decades of cost overruns, billions of dollars, schedule delays and it's still yet to produce one piece of science. Yes it's done a great job funding government contractors. It's called pork politics.
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It's going to L2, way beyond the moon. No space junk is going to get it there. Space rocks maybe. And yeah, too many single points of failure in this thing, so lot's of butt-clenching anyway.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/un... [nasa.gov]
Don't drop the satellite (Score:2)
Verbiage (Score:2)
I'm amused!
"caused a vibration throughout the observatory."
Nice way to say it hit the floor.
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"Fell off the back of a truck."
I expect a telescope sale any day now.
Re: Verbiage (Score:2)
My thoughts exactly. Apparently "dropped" is not in their vocabulary.
Sort out the issues! (Score:2)
Better to be really sure that all 'issues' are resolved pre-launch than to rush it and risk a failure. Even if it takes another year.
What they really mean (Score:2)
"A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band" and "caused a vibration throughout the observatory" Engineering speak for "we dropped the JWST and it made a really loud noise"
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In other words ... (Score:2)
"A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band -- which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter -- caused a vibration throughout the observatory."
They dropped it. NASA speak -- "unplanned release" -- geesh. :-)
Attack all rythmic vibrations (Score:2)
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Nothing, because the Webb is goiing to be almost out of Earth orbit.
Obligatory XKCD (Score:3)
Incident description might mean they dropped it? (Score:2)
Presumably the launch vehicle and telescope is rated for some vibrations. But dropping it could cause more Gs? “Unplanned clamp release” might do this.
Ok, where are the euphamisms? (Score:2)
Ready? GO!
Looking forward to launch... (Score:2)
...sometime in 2026 [xkcd.com]
James Webb? (Score:2)
I'd say Edward Murphy Space Telescope.
Re:renamed in honor of greatest procrastinators (Score:5, Funny)
That would be, um, let me get back to you on that...
Re: renamed in honor of greatest procrastinators (Score:5, Insightful)
I has me wondering just how hard they dropped it, for it to require such a close inspection
imo, a delay is better than it not working when it gets to Lagrange point
Re: renamed in honor of greatest procrastinators (Score:2)
Re: renamed in honor of greatest procrastinators (Score:2)
Re:It's launching SOON (tm) (Score:5, Insightful)
Telescope should be renamed in honor of one of the world's greatest procrastinators.
George R.R. Martin?
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Well played.
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Annnnd he's off on another tangent
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
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Re:Management speak (Score:5, Insightful)
It's amazing what with how these instruments are so sensitive and delicate that they can even survive being launched into space.
Go engineers! Do us proud!
Re:Management speak (Score:5, Insightful)
A MMA Fighter knows how to block a punch being thrown at him. They can deflect a punch at full force with a light slap at a 90 degree angle of the punch. The force the opponent is giving is in the horizontal direction and giving just enough vertical force to keep the hand to go onto target. So a light slap is enough to cause the fist that is punching to drop.
I say this, because a you can design something that can handle extreme forces from one direction, but be extremely fragile if it goes into an other direction.
A good engineer will not over engineer, especially for a spacecraft, because it needs to be light. So designing it to withstand out of spec forces will just make it heaver and harder to lift off.
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Your argument goes to the art of engineering. I concur.
After all, if you do not master the subtleties, your design can't deflect the blow, so to speak
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Any payload going to space will experience significant vibrations in all directions. It's only sustained g-force loading that is limited to a single axis on launch. The description makes it sound like the vibration is the concern, but it's probably not what they're concerned about.
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Summaries, and articles for that matter, can rarely be taken seriously in their details.
If the telescope was subjected to g forces in an unexpected direction (such as deceleration upon hitting the floor) or in an unexpected configuration (shade or solar panels deployed) it would pay to spend a few days inspecting it really carefully before launching.
Shame to waste a quarter century and billions of dollars because one of the shade support struts got bent a bit.
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On the hand, I wonder how this compared to the pain it endured sure the vibration tests?
Re:They need to speak to SpaceX (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm guessing they don't know why the collar which held it up slipped or broke, but I'd put money on them replacing it as a matter of course while it's on the ground.
Also, where it hit the ground might be damaged and they'll need to assess whether that has any impact, or whether whatever hit the ground can be replaced.
I can't see SpaceX or anyone else taking that risk to just launch it anyway so close to launch date if they've got a spare that they can fit easily. Sure it's going to be taking a lot of vibra
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NASA are a proper bunch of drama queens which is why they get nothing done and why Bezos, Branson and Musk are making them look foolish.
There's nothing foolish about protecting a very sensitive piece of gear that is two orders of magnitude more expensive than anything the people you listed have flung into space.
No idea why they're delaying the launch just because of an unplanned vibration.
Maybe because they don't have the opportunity to simply explode it over and over again like Musk, or maybe being off trajectory like Branson would cause the entire mission to be lost, or maybe losing control of the craft completely like Bezos.
You are truly a moron.
Re: They need to speak to SpaceX (Score:2)
Do you know the magnitude of g's that the craft experienced during this incident, and how they compare to g's during launch? That seems like critical information to know before declaring the people in charge of a >billion dollar object drama queens.
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There is a small amount of truth to this. But NASA has talent that no one else has. With a mission like JWST there isn't any margin for error, this means that thousands of people have to do their job perfectly. That costs money.
They didn't "experience a vibration". They dropped the JWST after something slipped, probably not a big deal since a rocket launch can be a lot more violent. They'll have to do a reality check and see how bad it was (it could have not been very minor but they have to check everything
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Ah, the Boeing approach to aerospace engineering.
Did you remember to set the clock? Huh, what clock?