I really fear for this project. Because if it blows up on launch, misses an orbit, or has a failure to deploy, or some flaw, basically decades have been lost.
As another commentor said, the marginal cost of these things must be must cheaper. Why aren't they just launching new iterations like every year or so. Rather than starting from scratch after the HST, there should have been an HST 2.0, HST 3.0, a whole bunch of marginal iterations. This would create an efficient pipeline around producing many of these one-off specialized parts.
Building the mirrors would become a pipeline of incremental improvements instead of 2-decade redesigns.
I feel like if Elon Musk ran this project, he'd have built 5 different versions already, 3 of them would have failed, we would have learned something useful, and two of them would be in space delivering 2x the science.
There _are_ incremental improvements, in the form of 5 gamma ray, 6 x-ray, 5 UV, and 4 visible satellites. Actually, there are more than that since Hubble went up.
Unfortunately there are real physical limits to visible light telescopes, and there are not many ways to get around them without drastically increasing the size of the lens/mirrors, and drastic increases in size and weight are not something that plays well with our space capabilities.
I know it seems ridiculous from the outside, but do you really think thousands and thousands of astronomers, physicists, etc., wouldn't be exploring every single possible way to improve visible light telescopes? That the idea of "incremental improvement" never occurred to anyone? They are using the current approach because it is the only approach, at least for the time being. Perhaps in 10, 20, 30 years we'll be able to launch hundreds of smaller telescopes that can achiever a higher effective resolution, but, again, it's pretty damned hard.
All true. On the other hand, the current JWST is way less capable, and way, way more expensive, than what was initially planned. I think there's a very legitimate argument to be made that maybe, with hindsight, it would have been better not to put all that money into the very large bucket that it's ended up being.
It seems the way this goes is "we don't have money for more than one mission, so we have to make it count." But now you only have one mission, so you have to make really sure it doesn't fail, and the cost starts running away.
Also, after JWST started, NASA has pretty much completely changed their strategy away from grand missions into many smaller ones with the "faster, better, cheaper" motto.
> It seems the way this goes is "we don't have money for more than one mission, so we have to make it count." But now you only have one mission, so you have to make really sure it doesn't fail, and the cost starts running away.
This is recognized by NASA - in particular, I've recently seen one report[0] with a diagram explicitly mentioning this problem. It was called "The Tyranny of Space Transportation Costs", and depicts a spiral with nodes like "High Launch and Space Transport Costs" -> "Infrequent Launch" -> "Inability to Service" -> "Over Engineering" -> "Cost Growth" -> "Need for Extreme Reliability" -> "Higher Launch Costs" -> ...
That's one of the reasons NASA is interested in in-orbit mining & manufacturing - to enable rapid iteration on future missions. That seems to also be the reason why they've outsourced LEO transportation to private companies.
There are indeed very successful missions at smaller scales than Hubble/Chandra/JWST, but they are by necessity less powerful and more specialized. There are regular calls for a "balanced program" of large and small programs, but those run into the astropolitical reality that large missions have more "constituents" in science, government, and industry.
I want to believe there are very smart people studying these "strategic" issues, with mathematical models and stuff. That is : beyond the technical aspects, the implementation strategies, science return/cost ratios and whatnot.
NASA used to be good at implementing incremental approaches to projects, weren't they? I mean isn't the Apollo program a perfect example of it? If they seem less incremental in their approach to space observatories, I assume they have good reasons.
That's an annual cost averaging more than the entire program cost of the JWST. Of course Apollo spending wasn't very even over those 11 years; for example in 196 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program#Costs it cost
about $23 billion in 2018 dollars. So triple the entire JWST program cost in that one year.
If we were willing to throw this much money at the problem, sure NASA could build multiple iterations of things quickly, destructively test them to get lots of data, etc, etc.
I think so. The Space Shuttle was not incremental at all, it was supposed to be a great leap forward.
I think calling Apollo incremental is also a stretch. They build a rocket that's still the largest the world has ever seen and flew it twice before putting people on it a year later.
I'd say Apollo was pretty incremental. Hell, it was very much "move fast and break things", given how many things they designed and tested in the 12 years between Sputnik and the first Moon landing.
Yes, it was very incremental. They even sent the orbiter around the moon on a mission before even attempting to land. And there were a number of other tests (manned and unmanned), and even ones without an official Apollo designation.
I assume to have those two directions as two camps in your company, fighting each other generates the most optimal result. If you fail, the cautious camp wins and carefull analysis and slow methodic itteration become stronger.
If you win, the move fast team takes over and pushes towards new exploration data and scaling up towards new problem areas.
Pre-sputnik and pre-Gagarin, the US approach to space exploration was conservative, and my understanding is that Braun was pushing for a less cautious approach [1]. One issue was apparently a reluctance to lean too heavily on 'Nazi' technology. This caution contrasted with the US' approach to airplane development, which had a lot of moving fast and breaking things (and people.)
Ironically, if von Braun had got what he wanted then, there may have been no Moon race and no Apollo program.
[1] Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon, Mike Gray, ISBN 978-0393325133
Von Braun wanted to send people to the Moon (and he really wanted to get them to Mars), but I am guessing that if the US had adopted his plan to orbit a satellite with a modified Redstone rocket, and done so before Sputnik, followed by the first human orbital flight, there might not have been the impetus for a Moon race, no Apollo, and no Moon landing in 1969 or any time soon after. This speculation, of course, depends partly on how the USSR would have responded to these developments.
Von Brauns push for additional testing prevented the first human in space from beeing american.
"After the flight of Mercury-Redstone 2 in January 1961 experienced a string of problems, von Braun insisted on one more test before the Redstone could be deemed man-rated. His overly cautious nature brought about clashes with other people involved in the program, who argued that MR-2's technical issues were simple and had been resolved shortly after the flight. He overruled them, so a test mission involving a Redstone on a boilerplate capsule was flown successfully in March. Von Braun's stubbornness was blamed for the inability of the U.S. to launch a manned space mission before the Soviet Union, which ended up putting the first man in space the following month.[citation needed]"
I guess the story is more complicated than generalizations will allow. It is rarely obvious when decisions made in good faith will come back to haunt you, as with the decision to give the Apollo command module a sturdy hatch that could not be quickly jettisoned. For everyone saying the Shuttle booster 'O' rings were in danger of failing, there was someone saying that they had been fine so far.
In the case of MR-2, was the schedule to have an orbital flight before what turned out to be Gagarin's day of destiny? The response to Glenn's flight leaves little doubt that, in the popular view, it is orbital flight that counts as being 'in space', and the start of the Moon race might have hung on that perception.
Could the lens be made in situ from distilled, frozzen again moon-ice and a mirror be crafted from foil? Im sure, this would not be optically optimal, but given good enough camera software, learning about the physical flaws of the system, these flaws could be filtered out?
Well, filtering flaws works much better when you've got a strong prior on what you expect to see. Unfortunately, these priors infect what you think you're seeing, which is an even bigger problem when you're hoping to see new, novel things never seen before.
There's a much simpler plan for a moon-based telescope: ship a big vat of mercury to the moon and spin it. The centrifugal force would curve the mercury perfectly and elemental mercury is a really good mirror on its own.
Now, if you had a perfect simulation of fluid dynamics of mercury- you could use piezo-pumps and image correcting software to angle it partially and compose a image at a angle.
Actually- if you do know the fluid dynamics of mecury in openspace, and how to push it where you want it- you can do the same thing up there.
Screw my rotor idea, all you need is a way to influence quecksilber in space, push it and take a series of images - that is recomposed into one giant hiRes picture.
So, one needs a strong magnetic field to push the mercury into shape, a closed tube, able to withstand that magnetic force and a shielded camera. Or you spin the tube, while applying the magnetic force, thus getting the mercury to collect at the side. Also the mirror would be selfrepairing..
Wow, this would be how much weigth? Anyone with a engineering degree and a calculator nearby?
These crazy expensive one-off projects are the natural result of trying to spend as little as possible each year while completely ignoring spending in the long term.
I'm unsure why this is being downvoted. I think it's a completely fair assessment given what happened with Hubble. At that time we had the Shuttle to head up and actually fix things that were broken. I have doubts that SLS is going to be as quick as they want it to be, and crewed Dragon isn't operational yet either. By the time this thing launches we might see trials of both, but certainly there won't be something readily available for service operations on the JWT at the time it launches.
"What Would Elon Musk Do" is a tiresome theme. Mostly because the guy is a total anomaly.
He and his company have accomplished a lot but that does not mean NASA is wrong for running space programs the way they run them. This stuff is complicated, NASA doesn't always get it right but that doesn't mean they need to reinvent themselves in the image of a technocelebrity.
With regards to SLS, I do trust the NASA professionals; they originally argued against the system, and then were forced by direct Congressional mandate (pushed forward by representatives of places building the hardware) to develop the thing anyway.
JWT is suppose to be at Earth-Solar L2 Lagrange point. Anything that's not a failure in the initial earth orbit would require a repair mission that involves sending astronauts further than we've ever sent them (Earth-Solar L2 is significantly beyond lunar orbit).
Indeed! At minimum we would need the Mars Dragon or Orion with a long range trunk attached to carry supplies and repair pieces. It would be really interesting to see an orbital pairing (a-la the Lunar Module/Command Module) for an L2 repair mission.
>By the time this thing launches we might see trials of both, but certainly there won't be something readily available for service operations on the JWT at the time it launches.
Servicing the JWST with astronauts like we did with Hubble will be impossible, as it will be parked in one of earth's L2 points, not in LEO. Basically, everything has to work absolutely flawlessly on the first try, or that's it. Billions of dollars and decades of work gone.
>I really fear for this project. Because if it blows up on launch, misses an orbit, or has a failure to deploy, or some flaw, basically decades have been lost.
The thought of this literally keeps me up at night. Watching that thing launch is going to be incredibly stressful.
That's possible with a private company as the owner/CEO takes the blame and that goes as a part of profit/loss of some major stakeholder.
Its a lot more harder to do it when tax payers are footing the bill. If you have, say, more than a few failures people would be complaining and asking for less iterations and more of one-time-done-well projects.
This is not quite true. These telescopes were built by the military to look at things a few hundred miles away, not millions of miles away, so the optical dimensions are different. They are still useful, but they are not clones of Hubble.
Furthermore, they lack the expensive part: the one-of-a-kind scientific instruments. These will still have to be developed from scratch.
NASA is developing one of them into a telescope called WFIRST, and by some estimates, little to no money will be saved by using the donated military telescopes.
The NRO instruments are just optics, optics make up a tiny fraction of the cost of a space telescope. NASA was not gifted fully functional space telescopes they could just launch and then start observing. They still need all of the components to actually turn them into functional instruments, spacecraft systems, cameras, attitude control, etc. The estimated cost for WFIRST alone is $3 billion, only slightly less than if the instrument had been built from scratch, if at all.
Basically, yes. The mirror is the same size as Hubble, and the field is much wider. However, there are some technical differences that make it less useful for imaging extrasolar planets and the most distant galaxies. Details are harder to come by, as this is ex-military hardware, so certain things are still classified.
I doubt there's any way to easily estimate the cost, but the two HST-superior telescopes NASA was given by the NRO, need to be made science-ready. There are no instruments on them.
Say for example that the cost would be $500m to $1 billion over several years to get them ready, then another $1 or $2 billion over ten years to operate them both. If you're NASA and you have $23 billion to spend per year average over that time, do you invest into the two telescopes and divert resources, or stick with HST until its end and focus on Webb. Obviously if the US Government were behaving more rational, NASA would be given the resources to prep these telescopes and launch them. They're exceptional gear going to waste, surely we could task something interesting for them.
I was unaware we had more, so this is pure speculation, but I would imagine that having continuous coverage is considered critical, so if we launch another one and it experiences a failure soon after the current Hubble fails, we’ve lost that margin of error.
How would having the backup in orbit reduce the amount of coverage that an HST-type device could provide?
It seems like having another telescope in orbit could basically be a "hot-spare" for the highest priority tasks while continuing to do lower priory work in the mean time.
Because it's safer on the ground. If you put everything you have up in the sky, and they all fail for various reasons (solar storm, collision, wear & tear) then you're screwed.
Regardless, per another comment it sounds more like a budget problem, so my speculation was crap anyway.
Yeah, I guess I understand that, it just seems like most things that aren't a design failure are unlikely to affect more than one orbiting telescope.
In other words, to return to your example, it seems unlikely to me that a collision would happen to more than on telescope ever, let alone in a time window too tight for a third (or fourth, etc) telescope to be built and launched.
(and, anyway, it looks like you are right: this is all budgetary anyway, so whatever)
Satellites don't break significantly faster in orbit than in storage. Storage can easily cost $5 million a year, but on top of cost savings there's other benefits to sending your payload up early (assuming you've budgeted for a bit more battery wear, fuel consumption, etc.)
The most dangerous time for a satellite is by far the first couple months. This is when most design and QC failures become apparent. If you launch before you need your satellite, you can do your on-orbit checkouts and not be in a rush to deal with any anomalies. When your preexisting operational satellite dies, you can have one ready to go immediately instead of needing to beg borrow or bribe your way to a better position in a launch provider's manifest.
What really baffes me about megaprojects like the Webb telescope is that they do decades of research and design, build ONE and then disassemble the teams and jigs.
Since all the design and tool-up costs are sunk, why not build two or three? Even just as components.
Otherwise if we get to March 2020 and the launch fails, or the scope or shade doesn't deploy, that's $8 billion down the drain.
The reason is: the second one doesn't cost much less than the first. They are hand-built. It's structurally very complex, so building takes a long time. Pieces are sent cross-country multiple times to assemble more and more components ("integrate") and tested in stages. The assembly and vacuum test of one module uses the whole chamber, so you can't do two at once.
I'm using modest language ("very complex") - but the actual complexity is more like "uniquely mind-boggling". (I happen to know the MIRI cryocooler system engineer - just another Harvard PhD whose thesis required liquid helium.)
The cost of these flagship missions, and the all-or-nothing problem that you point out, has caused conflict in the Astrophysics community. It might be better to have a pipeline of lower-cost but more frequent missions.
A recent National Academy of Science report on exactly this question (https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24857/powering-science-nasas-lar...) concluded that the large missions did offer a unique benefit in pushing boundaries of what's possible. That report pinned the real problem on getting correct cost estimates, not the notion of large missions in itself.
Not really. The amount of scientific and technological developments that we get even from failed missions is substantial. When starting a new project, all the findings from previous projects are not ignored.
What you are proposing is not necessarily a bad idea but, if that was the case, I would expect some comment saying: why do they construct three equal telescopes when we could use all that money and man-power to build three different ones that would help us much more?
Perhaps it could be designed so that, if the first telescope reaches orbit and works, the extras could be partially dismantled and large subsystems repurposed in a new satellite. Take out the optics package and replace it with something else. Keep the power distribution, solar panels, and other things.
If nothing else the intelligence agencies could probably come up with a use for it.
Outside of cubesats and mass deployed sats like GPS and the European variant, almost every satellite is somewhat of a unique build.
Even cubesats and GPS sats are special, you can't simply take a GPS sat and repurpose it for a TV station. The requirements can be vastly different (geostationary vs LEO, precise orientation vs simple attitude control).
The same goes for space telescope. You can't just take a ST sat body, ram in a LEO weather satellites electronics and expect that to stay in orbit or work reasonably.
With space being so vast, and the telescope looking at such a tiny fraction of the sky, I'm sure scientists wouldn't mind having more than one. I'm not super familiar with this, but I remember hearing that getting time on Hubble for your experiment definitely wasn't easy. Getting three times the available time surely has to be a huge positive for research, no? Not only that, having a second source of data will be critical in making sure measurements aren't flukes.
That's a fair point regarding progress regardless of outcome. But starting a new project to build on that basis is going to be a lot tougher if there's no "look at the pretty pictures" Hubble-effect to sway budgeteers.
To extend it ab absurdium, it does remind me of the joke about the theoretical physicist going back to bed when he finds his house aflame, because he invested in a fire extinguisher so a solution exists.
> Since all the design and tool-up costs are sunk, why not build two or three? Even just as components.
a huge chunk of the cost of "building" a spacecraft is all of the testing, calibration, integration, validation, etc etc that goes on after the physical objects are assembled.
yeah, the machinists can crank out a second housing or structural element for nothing after they've made the first one. the electronics assembly techs make a handful of most every board, to start with.
but only one set of all of them is handed back to all the principal investigators to go through the months/years of prep work necessary to ensure the physical assembly that's been produced will function correctly, for years, on orbit.
From what I can tell, the general thinking in the government is "best-case scenario".
Rarely do we as citizens ever hear of their planning (if it exists) for alternative outcomes.
To be clear, I'm exempting disaster preparedness and stuff like that.
But if we look at all sorts for things, from wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, to legislation like Dodd-Frank or the ACA, all we ever hear about is the best case scenario.
I think your comment is spot on. The problem is the government only has one mode of thinking, and that has to increase waste tremendously.
If anyone here can corroborate or contradict my theory, I love to hear either.
I've wondered the same thing. Same with Mars rovers, instead/in addition to designing a completely new one couldn't we have built a few of the previous generation at a fraction of the cost. My experience in science is that it was easier to get funding for new and exciting than old and already been done even if there is very interesting science to be done in both circumstances.
The problem with the purest form of this suggestion ("build two") is that Mars missions are missions of exploration, so you learn things, and then the next mission needs different instruments. So you really don't want to build/test/integrate two.
But, I think your comment is getting at something very important, which is to have a pipeline of missions that run in some orderly way, so that you can build on prior knowledge and success.
Like the original Mars Pathfinder rover (1997) paving the way for Spirit/Opportunity (MER, 2004), and then Curiosity/MSL (2012) and next Mars 2020 (2020).
Disagree with your first note, as rovers are only able to cover a very small area over their lifetimes and there could be a large benefit to exploring more locations in general (higher chance to discover new compounds/geology, able to explore more areas around caves and poles and learn interesting things). And of course for probes we could definitely benefit from having a dedicated orbiter for each body in the solar system, or even multiple if it let us e.g. build a GPS system for Mars.
We did build two for MER, but then went back to one for MSL and for the upcoming M2020. The community provided input for this, so it's not an arbitrary decision. The definitive guidance on scientific thinking behind these plans is MEPAG, see: https://mepag.jpl.nasa.gov/reports.cfm.
Besides its most recent report from 2015, it links to an older National Academies report (the 2013 Decadal Survey).
Turning to page 160 of the (long!) Decadal Survey document (free!), we read:
"The committee carefully considered the alternative of several rover missions instead of sample return [for Mars]. It is the opinion of the committee that sample return would have significantly higher science return and a much higher science-to-dollar ratio. [...] Existing scientific knowledge of Mars makes it possible to select a site from which to collect an excellent suite of rock and soil samples to address the life and habitability questions..."
So, one way to reframe your objection is that we are in truth planning multi-mission coordinated observations, but in the context of sample-return. M2020 is going to select and store samples, and a subsequent mission is planned to return them. That's the kind of progression that seems to galvanize the science community.
Aside: Besides the above reports, which (I hope) provide reassurance that all options are being considered, there's also the context of the site-selection process for M2020 - see https://marsnext.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm. You might enjoy looking at the viewgraphs for the very last talk of the most recent (2017) workshop, which summarize some of the site considerations.
There's always plenty of other people's money for blowing other people's shit up on the other side of the planet. This is not patriotism, it's jingoism. And at one time war profiteering got people hanged. But now, militarism is a product like any other, and subject to a grand markup. It's a brilliant way to redistribute wealth, not least of which is the massive asset destruction involved ($1 million dollar bombs are assets, they blow up, and they blow up people's houses in places we don't give a fuck about - see all the bombs we're selling to Saudi Arabia who then bomb the crap out of people's apartments in Yemen.)
It's totally lost on Americans, but "Made in the USA" on the bombs other countries buy and then use against their adversaries is not lost on people who reap the destruction. Americans have forgotten how we ran out of shit to blow up during the Korean war, so we decided to blow up their dams in order to flood entire villages down stream. This is after the Geneva conventions were signed. The idea the United States is a peaceful country is very tenuous.
So I sent a note to my Congresscritter Cory Gardner, over a month ago about JWST and WFIRST with a really simple question, if he supported their continued funding to project completion. I included this link with it:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/02/20/canc...
The response I got was a POS canned non-response to the question. But at the same time he talked up how great Colorado aerospace is, pretty much making it sound like if the juice doesn't come to Colorado, he doesn't give crap about aerospace. But he doesn't have the integrity to actually commit one way or another to these two projects. It's disappointing.
Why do articles involving the space program always go on about cost? When the military develops a plane for more than a hundred times over that, no one bats an eye.
I have to wonder if the lack of exposure towards military spending is one of the reasons it gets so much funding.
In the 1990's, a survey was done and found that something like 60% of Americans thought that the NASA budget was 25% of the entire federal budget (it's like 0.4% today). This is done very specifically by propaganda just like you mention to make Americans think that science, space, research is stupid and expensive and we shouldn't do it. Republican politicians especially will use logical fallacies to try to justify reducing our understanding of the world and to justify falling economically behind other countries and powers.
It is a case of anti-intellectualism and a strong desire for guns, war, etc and to shun science and basic research. It is born from greed and selfishness and probably also fear of the unknown.
NASA is and has always been really really cheap for what it does. But there has been a multiple-decades-long battle to convince Americans otherwise.
That’s a bit too harsh. NASA supporters and detractors straddle party lines. There are many Democrats who feel that space exploration is a waste of money that would be better spent on social programs. And many Republicans that are very pro-NASA for bragging rights and national security implications if not other reasons.
> There are many Democrats who feel that space exploration is a waste of money that would be better spent on social programs.
That may be so, but I've never met one or heard from one. They would seem to me to be such a small minority I did not even know of their existence until today despite being both a democrat and a fan of space and science research.
> And many Republicans that are very pro-NASA for bragging rights and national security implications if not other reasons.
"For bragging rights?" But I'm talking about support for basic research and science in general. If they show support for NASA publicly for "bragging rights" but then vote party-line items on bills that hurt science research then they are not actually Pro-NASA or pro-science at all. I would even say that's true if they are not extremely vocal every single day about how bad most Republican policies are for science in general.
1980/1990s Republicans were pro-NASA to the extent that it proved America was the best country in the world. At that time, Democrats were mostly anti-NASA, believing the money could be better spent on other things. Then, both parties underfunded NASA, but Democrats tended to underfund NASA more severely than Republicans. In the mid 2000s, as Republican opposition to global warming and evolution grew, Democrats became more mixed on NASA, as Republican opposition to NASA could be spun as part of a larger "Republicans are anti-science" narrative (a narrative that remains popular today). Simultaneously, Republican concerns about the deficit grew.
Truth be told, the situation is not that different today than in the 80s and 90s. Twenty years ago, neither party funded NASA fully, but the Republicans were slightly more willing. Today, neither party will fund NASA fully, but the Democrats are slightly more willing. There are cynical reasons to think that greater willingness is political in both cases.
What's that supposed to mean? It does not show anything like Obama not supporting NASA, or being a Democrat who thinks space isn't a priority, or anything like that. Not sure what point that link is trying to make in this discussion.
> President Obama's 2011 budget request for NASA cut the agency's Constellation program completely, effectively canceling a five-year, $9 billion effort to build new Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets.
It's always sort of a misnomer that the President sets the budget... they really only get to approve/reject what congress lays out (but take all the credit/blame). Of course a president can wish for certain things, and veto a proposed budget that doesn't meet their political goals, but ultimately it's congress that sets the budget.
If I recall, it was the 2016/2017 budget proposal under Speaker Paul Ryan that sought dramatic increases in the NASA budget.
He supported increasing NASA's overall budget. Obama simply objected to specific programs.
And I agree both Orion spacecraft and Ares rockets where poor uses of Nasa's funding.
Cancellation of Constellation program
On May 7, 2009, the Obama administration enlisted the Augustine Commission to perform a full independent review of the ongoing NASA space exploration program. The commission found the then current Constellation Program to be woefully under-budgeted, behind schedule by four years or more in several essential components, with significant cost overruns, and unlikely to be capable of meeting any of its scheduled goals under its current budget.[26][27] As a consequence, the commission recommended a significant re-allocation of goals and resources. As one of the many outcomes based on these recommendations, on October 11, 2010, the Constellation program was cancelled, ending development of the Altair, Ares I, and Ares V. The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle survived the cancellation and was renamed the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), to be launched on the Space Launch System.[28]
He cut Constellation... and at the same time was a strong advocate for the CRS and CCDev commercial projects. If only he'd managed to kill SLS too, and direct its money to more effective space programs.
I don't know if this is the survey you meant to cite but the 2007 survey [1] has similar results. I disagree with your inference that "this is done very specifically by propaganda just like you mention to make Americans think that science, space, research is stupid and expensive and we shouldn't do it". I think this has more to do with people being very bad at estimating any large figures than people thinking NASA has no benefit. The survey itself notes that "public opinion is less focused the cost side of the equation and more oriented toward the benefits". NASA had a 68% approval rating in 2015 [2].
For better or worst, public approval and funding are not always strongly linked. In this particular case, I personally find it sad that funding is split on party lines. Like you, I wish I could reallocate some of billions of dollars going to the military to projects like this which somehow embody the human spirit.
His argument is really strange. He notes, correctly that Congress's job is to put together a budget. But then he talks only about the party of the President. What he should be talking about is which party has a majority in Congress. And, indeed, during almost all of Clinton's time in office, the Republican party had very strong control over Congress.
I don't have the time, but I would be really interested to see a chart showing funding changes for NIH, NASA, etc. by year with the party in control of Congress at that time. Seems like that would give you a much better picture.
Yes, because that's what the Democratic Congressional members demanded to get their vote for it. It was a bipartisan bill. The Republicans couldn't pass it on their own because the Freedom Caucus wouldn't toe the line, so they had to make concessions to the Democrats.
Yes, Republicans and Democrats do not always vote lock-step. That does not negate the fact that Republicans tend to fund the sciences more. I'm sorry if this doesn't match up with your rhetoric, but it's true. One of the biggest names out of NASA told you it was true. The Republican controlled Congress just did it again right in front of you. The fact they didn't do it unilaterally does not in any way negate the original premise.
Here's an article talking about the Obama administration recommended budget which cut funding to NASA. It's worth acknowledging here that Trump's requested budget ALSO cut funding for NASA, but the Congressional Republicans over-ruled him.
Occasionally the Republicans treat NASA well. They just got an extra $1.1 billion upgrade from the 2017 budget. By contrast the entire ESA budget is about $7 billion, so NASA is coming up on triple their budget.
[Mar 21] > The House Appropriations Committee released its version of the final FY2018 “omnibus” appropriations bill this evening. It provides $20.7 billion for NASA, an increase of almost $1.1 billion over FY2017. Almost all of NASA’s programs would benefit from the increase, but science, education, and a second mobile platform for the Space Launch System are big winners.
I'm unable to watch the video right now, I'll check it out in a bit. But I can say right away that you are not responding at all to what I said. I'm aware that Republicans love to fund science, but usually that only happens when it aligns specifically with industry, economics, business, revenue, etc. I very specifically wrote in my post about 'basic science' - that is, science research that is done for the purpose of science research and has no likely vision or anything to be commercialized. That research is extremely important, and is the kind that NASA does a lot (especially stuff like JWST) and is the kind of science that Republicans specifically do not like to fund.
The Republicans are the ones who think "volcano monitoring" is a ridiculous expense, and who regularly mock perfectly legitimate and useful research because they happen to appear a little weird.
Like the "shrimp treadmill" research that was purported to have cost $3 million and been useless research, but actually cost under $100 and was described by the scientist like this:
"Simply put, my colleagues and I were studying how recent changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections—an important question, given that the amount of bacteria a shrimp is able remove from its body is directly related to how much bacteria could potentially end up on seafood-filled plates. And since shrimp are active animals in nature, it was logical to study the immune response of shrimp during activity."
"It is disingenuous for the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to promote the idea that scientists are wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to run shrimp on treadmills based on a 30-second video clip. Given that every teaspoon of seawater can contain millions of bacteria, it does not take a mental giant to understand that the health of marine organisms and the safety of the seafood we eat are closely related.
The health of the organisms that inhabit the largest ecosystem on the planet and the potential bacterial contamination of the food we eat are serious and important questions. I, like many of my colleagues, are deeply concerned by the minimization and politicization of our work."
>That research is extremely important, and is the kind that NASA does a lot (especially stuff like JWST) and is the kind of science that Republicans specifically do not like to fund.
He specifically calls out NASA as getting more funding under Republicans.
Okay, but you're still missing my point. It's not about the specific amount of money that is spent. Ever.
It's about what the money is spent on and where it goes. I very much suspect that the Republicans who are in favour of increasing NASA's budget are doing it to secure 'jobs' in their own districts and are not doing out of the goodness in their hearts or their desire for more knowledge in the USA about science or space.
They often say as much in their speeches. "We will bring jobs!" etc. NASA is a means to an end for a lot of Republicans specifically, as they focus on economy and jobs from the spending bills, not the resources developed or the knowledge learned or the science experiments done or the kids they have inspired to become engineers or anything like that at all.
Republicans rarely support basic research, even at NASA.
> ...are doing it to secure 'jobs' in their own districts...
In 2004, the GWB administration created an initiative ("Vision for Space Exploration" = VSE, see [1,2]) that substantially refocused NASA on human spaceflight. Significant money was redirected from technology research to launch vehicle development. This is (partly) visible in the dip in the gray portion of the funding strip-chart in [2] ("aeronautics and science"). It looks small, but its effect was much larger.
The original VSE implementors were highly motivated, but attention wandered, after a few years the launch vehicle effort (Orion/Constellation) stalled, and the BHO administration cancelled Constellation.
Outside observers wondered whether the GWB administration really cared about the VSE, or just wanted to do a favor for the large manned spaceflight centers in Houston and Florida. It is probably not a coincidence that GWB is a Texan, then-House-Majority-Leader Tom DeLay's home district abuts Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Florida was in the GWB camp in the prior election by just 537 votes.
>NASA is a means to an end for a lot of Republicans specifically, as they focus on economy and jobs from the spending bills, not the resources developed or the knowledge learned or the science experiments done or the kids they have inspired to become engineers or anything like that at all.
So... they only fund science because they care about how investment in science improves our lives? I find it much harder to fault them for that than you do.
> So... they only fund science because they care about how investment in science improves our lives?
I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion from what I wrote. I wrote the opposite. Many Republicans are seemingly interested in funding NASA only because of misunderstood economics and logical fallacies.
Perhaps you arrived at the conclusion you did by thinking that by default, job creation and decisions based on expected economic outcome are things that "improve our lives"? But that simply isn't true. Jobs for the sake of jobs makes no sense and creates massive waste and inefficiencies in the world.
Republicans chanting "jobs jobs jobs!" are hurting their constituents, not helping them. This is especially true of the current batch of Republican politicians in power, who chanted about bring back the dying and polluting coal jobs for years and years. Those jobs and policies are not helping the people they claim to be.
Back to NASA. Sure, if someone gets a job that helps them out. But the policies in place are not meant to help that person. The policies in place are meant to entrench the Republican in power, for better or worse, and are not made while considering the actual well being of the people who live there.
This is evidenced more clearly in other policies, that keep the poor poor and the uneducated uneducated. The policies implemented by Republican politicians in the name of "jobs" are rarely good for the people who live there.
Being at the forefront of science and technology is what helps to maintain our position as a/the global financial leader. This is what Republicans understand and care about and why science is funded. Of course that's also viewed through the lens of wanting to make sure some of that funding happens in their own districts.
FWIW, the crazy "omnibus" spending bill that just passed by a Republican Congress included a $2 Billion increase to NIH and $1.3 Billion increase to NASA.
> Being at the forefront of science and technology is what helps to maintain our position as a/the global financial leader. This is what Republicans understand and care about and why science is funded.
Your post here specifically states that Republicans care about being #1 in the world financially, and you imply here it is not about helping their constituents live good lives or anything like that. The Republican apparatus here is specifically an attempt at a short-term money-making one, not one that improves lives or even makes money in the long run.
If you are right and Republicans are funding science because they want the US to be the global financial leader, that is massively fucked up and massively wrong. It will also backfire, because funding things for the reason of being a leader is like making a startup to try to become a billionaire. It will fail. You must work on the core things like basic science, quality of life, etc, to improve the country's stability and economics across the board.
You're seriously straw-manning here. You can remove the chip from your shoulder any time. They want their constituents to have good jobs. In order to do that they must support the sciences so that our economy can grow.
"In the 1990's, a survey was done and found that something like 60% of Americans thought that the NASA budget was 25% of the entire federal budget (it's like 0.4% today)"
Of the remaining 75% at least 50% is spent on foreign aid :-)
I know it was meant to be a joke, about "foreign aid", but if you haven't seen https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/13/17096732/v... you should. Turns out voters aren't as daft on "foreign aid" as is popularly believed by the political commentariat.
When I listen to my neighbor he thinks that welfare is around 60% of budget, foreign aid 20%, social security/medicare 10% and maybe 5% goes to defense.
The correct number for "defense" is 16-20% or so depending on how you count veterans' benefits. But again, it's worth asking yourself how much of that your neighbor is effectively allocating to "defense" and how much to "foreign aid". Because the US military sure doesn't spend that much time actually defending the US recently...
The "welfare" vs "social security/medicare" numbers there are off, of course (just about backwards, though if you count Medicaid as "welfare" that puts an 11% floor on the "welfare" number right there).
As someone who doesn't give two cents about 'national prestige', I sincerely hope some other country picks up the slack and does great things in space. The US is certainly not heading down a road that leads to renewed leadership in this area, but hey we'll have some border walls soon to keep out them nasty criminals!
Holy strawman batman. Yes everything is literally the fault of Republican politicians. You forget that Democrat politicians care just as little about NASA if not even less. Politicians care that its "made here". Support for NASA is entirely bipartisan with supporters and opponents on both sides of the isle.
I say your 98% wrong because you believe people even think about NASA and science at all. Only 2% of people actually spend time to care about these programs and believe that it is important to their day to day lives. Most people just push these things off the radar.
Republicans make the poor and working poor the enemy of the America's middle class. People are fine with CEOs making millions but you say $15 an hour and they will go crazy. Talk about trillions of dollars in debit and they believe welfare checks are the cause.
Before attacking huge swathes of the population especially about their ignorance, try doing the tiniest bit of research yourself. NASA has always had high approval ratings--just below the CDC:
I think you will find that people's ignorance about budget particulars are reasonable--it's simply not a day-to-day concern of anybody outside of the GAO or similar bodies. But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong. People are fond of the CDC and NASA, and if NASA's budget was wrongly said to be 25 percent, it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).
> Before attacking huge swathes of the population especially about their ignorance
Wait, what? I never did that! The closest thing to an 'attack' I can imagine anyone reading from my post would have to have been about
> Republican politicians
which is surely a few thousand people at the most, it has got to be like 0.001% of the population that I said something negative about.
> But to say that people are anti-intellectual is just wrong.
Some people are. Some very important, prominent and influential people are in fact anti-intellectual and that is not wrong to say. Many Republican politicians are proudly anti-intellectual. They even say that. The GOP in some states like Texas specifically call out education as a problem in their party platform documents. They are, as a group, overall an anti-intellectual group. That is not a false statement, that is composed of their own words.
> it probably reflects people's misunderstanding about the good government does
Yes, that's my point. People have been brainwashed over decades to assume that the government does no good.
> (that is, they think it does more good than in reality).
I'm not sure I follow - I've never met a person in my life who thinks the government does good overall, certainly not more good than bad.
> People of any party tend to be anti-scientific when the science in question contradicts their party line.
[citation needed]. That's just not true.
> Democrats are as guilty as Republicans.
More false words have never been spoken. You are incorrect. The current political situation should show that clearly. No Democrat has ever lied about so many things as the current Republicans in power: even simple, verifiable facts like crowd size are made into lies and distributed as propaganda by the current group of Republicans in power in the US House/Senate/Executive/etc.
It's likely not true that the left is as bad as the right on this matter, however the left has some big black marks on its record.
The anti-vaccination and anti-GMO crowd is overwhelmingly dominated by people from the left.
You see a lot of pop anti-science, anti-technology crap come out of both the fringe and mainstream left. That has been the case for the entire period post WW2. Anti-GMO is mainstream on the political left as one example.
Is it the Democratic Party's position that GMOs are bad and so are vaccinations? I hadn't heard this before and I think it's completely untrue.
You took my quote out of context. I was saying that it is mostly Republicans and not Democrats who tend to be anti-science "when the science in question contradicts their party line."
There is no party line to speak of with the Democrats and vaccinations and GMOs. Yes there are crazy people everywhere. It is not that these people are told by Democrat politicians to hate GMOs! That does not happen like it does with Republican politicians encouraging their constituents to think that high school education leading to further education is a bad thing.
It's entirely unnecessary for it to be a party position. Anti-GMO is an extremely widely held belief on the left.
"There's also a political difference. Republicans divide evenly on whether genetically modified foods are safe or unsafe. Independents rate them unsafe by a 20-point margin; Democrats, by a 26-point margin."
"Republicans are more skeptical of the theory of evolution, though by a surprisingly slim margin with 39 percent of them rejecting it as compared to 30 percent of Democrats. When it comes to other scientific matters, the waters are even muddier. For instance, Democrats and Republicans believe in the false link between vaccines and autism at roughly equal levels."
"Only 45 percent of Democrats support expanding the use of nuclear energy, as compared to 62 percent of Republicans"
"The poll also shows more Democrats (9 percent) and independents (10 percent) say the measles vaccine isn't safe than Republicans who say the same (5 percent)."
The anti-vax crowd is pretty well split actually, political extremism seems to influence those belief more than left vs right[0]. But those on the right are more likely to resist vaccination efforts.
A quote from the article: "As to whether liberals or conservatives are now more likely to be opposed to vaccination, some researchers have suggested that, while anti-vaccination beliefs have spread to libertarians on the right, the anti-vaccination movement originates and finds its strongest support in the political left. A later article by the same researchers similarly argues that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) evidence shows that states that voted for Obama in 2012 have higher rates of nonmedical vaccination exemptions.
Yet, other research suggests that it is in fact conservatives who are more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism, that it is liberals who are more likely to endorse pro-vaccination statements and that the more strongly someone identifies with the Republican Party, the more likely he or she is to have a negative opinion of vaccination."
I mean that's patently not true. People have been complaining about the cost of developing the JSF for a decade[0] and there are a lot of people up in arms about the Navy's LCS[1] or Zumwalt destroyers[2] going on right now.
First of all, everyone has been batting an eye about the F35 cost since its earliest days. It never gets discussed without the price tag being a key point of contention.
The R&D cost to develop the F35 isn't more than a hundred times $8 billion. You're making a bizarre comparison.
There's a big gap between saying the F35 program is too expensive (it obviously is), and comparing the 30 year cost of building and maintaing 3,500 planes to one telescope.
Oh, how about the F22? It's not 100x more the cost, but it was ridiculously expensive to develop (~$66bn), only ~200 were made, and it will almost certainly not be in service for 30 years.
The F22 will be in service for 25-30 years very likely, from the first build to the last flight. Look at how long we've been flying various F16s. Even if we move them to a domestic defensive role with the air national guard toward the later years.
The F22 is an extraordinary plane. Their primary mistake was not building several hundred more while the production lines were up and squeezing the production costs down if possible. The F35 is a dog by comparison to that plane.
With the F35, its cost projections are mostly a joke anyway. There's no scenario where even half the 3,500 estimate will ever be built. A thousand would be a surprising build number for the US. They're up to maybe 300 now. They'll pre-emptively shut the program production down and move on to the next thing.
I'm not so sure regarding the F-22: production costs are only one side of the equation. Its maintenance is very expensive, and there may simply have been no solution in sight to reduce these costs. I think the stealth coating in particular is very expensive to maintain. It's hard to find reliable figures, but it seems to be roughly $45,000/hour, compared to about $20,000/hour for an F-15.
Adding more F-22 would absolutely have reduced the per-unit cost of production. But unless you can lower the cost of flying them, it will just make the operational, ongoing cost of your fleet go way up.
> Their primary mistake was not building several hundred more while the production lines were up and squeezing the production costs down if possible
Well, yea, this discussion is about high-cost government programs, and the fact that they didn't do things like this to reduce production costs is kind of the point.. Nevermind that such an aircraft may not even be necessary.
A question for those close to the program or who work in tangential fields:
Did the F-22 program generate benefits to industrial manufacturing practices or increase knowledge within the material sciences domain with value beyond the tangible, per-unit costs?
> it will almost certainly not be in service for 30 years.
What makes you think that? Its predecessors (F-15/F-16) are both 40+ year old designs with most of the current airframes being 25-30 years old. They're all still slated to fly until at least 2030, IIRC. Then there's the B-52, which is a 70 year old design with all of the airframes being 50+ years old and no end in sight.
I think it's as simple as the fact that there's a much more embedded and longer running social norm that the government should be willing to spend a lot of money for the sake of national defense. Because of this norm people see the spending as justified. The norm of the government being a major contributor to science is more recent and not as deeply embedded in people's minds. So it seems more frivolous.
In a post SpaceX world, with cheap(ish) launches a reality, even for large payloads, how does this change the design parameters for instruments like this? I would imagine that since launches used to be so expensive, it put pressure to create exquisite instruments that (should) work perfectly and robustly for a long time.
But if launch costs are dirt cheap you can put up any old thing for a year or two, burn it up and launch an improved model with newer tech...repeat as long as needed, or launch dozens of instruments instead.
I feel like we're on the cusp of something here and mission profiles like this will feel like the ancient Phalanx-like relics of thought processes that no longer are relevant.
Darn. Well, I'm still very much looking forward to finding out what the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets are made of. Hopefully there isn't another attempt to kill the project politically.
This is pretty sad to hear. The Webb telescope is highly anticipated, not only becaue it has a 3x larger mirror than Hubble, but because it is capable of observing in the infrared range, something no earth based telescope is able to due to atmosphere absorption.
This would open a huge treasure trove for astronomy and cosmology.
I was referring to the mirror diameter. Of course, the area is even much larger. And infrared telescopes on high elevations are certainly better than telescopes on low ground, still the atmosphere is a big barieer. For that reason the SOFIA telescope was built into a 747, as the airplane gets up to almost 15 kilometers and thus the observation conditions in the infrared range are much better than any ground based observatory. Obviously, an airplane isn't the best platform to mount a telescope.
The Webb telescope should be able to provide a way better view into the infrared range than any telescope available so far.
In 2002, NASA awarded the $824.8 million prime contract for the NGST, now renamed the James Webb Space Telescope, to TRW. The design called for a descoped 6.1-meter (20 ft) primary mirror and a launch date of 2010.
If a project is delayed many times at work I usually think that something is fundamentally wrong with it and they can't figure it out. Could something like this be going on here?
Well, they have one shot at this so it has to be 100% perfectly correct because once it's gone it's gone.
I, for one, would much rather have them work out all the kinks on the ground than shoot it up into space before they're absolutely sure and then find out the thing is lost because they set a cotter pin at 28° instead of the required 32° so the heat shield didn't deploy.
Though I'm sure if they successfully get the thing where it needs to be and there is a problem they can just send up some robots to fix the thing in another 20 years or so...
As another commentor said, the marginal cost of these things must be must cheaper. Why aren't they just launching new iterations like every year or so. Rather than starting from scratch after the HST, there should have been an HST 2.0, HST 3.0, a whole bunch of marginal iterations. This would create an efficient pipeline around producing many of these one-off specialized parts.
Building the mirrors would become a pipeline of incremental improvements instead of 2-decade redesigns.
I feel like if Elon Musk ran this project, he'd have built 5 different versions already, 3 of them would have failed, we would have learned something useful, and two of them would be in space delivering 2x the science.