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> A House subcommittee once voted to cancel it. Instead, the program was rebooted with a strict spending cap. ... The major change, said Jonathan P. Gardner, t
by hackuser 10y ago
> A House subcommittee once voted to cancel it. Instead, the program was rebooted with a strict spending cap. ... The major change, said Jonathan P. Gardner, the deputy senior project scientist, was to simplify the testing of the telescope.
Ugh, that does not sound encouraging. Organizations love to cut testing and QA. After all, all they do is cost money, cause delays, and 'create' problems. Cutting them is an obvious way to bring a project under budget and on schedule.
Does anyone know what changes were made to testing?
We're going to be unhappy, and the advancement of astronomy delayed a long time, if something goes wrong. I don't see the next President and Congress wanting to raise revenue and spend more on science.
- nothis 10y agoIs the top comment in this thread seriously someone claiming that "the telescope is "scriptable" using a (truly ancient) version of JavaScript via a really old implementation"? It's like the author of The Martian united with some oldschool C programmer to create a horror scenario.
- semaphoreP 10y agoI believe the initial estimates for the budget were extremely optimistic. I believe after Congress almost cut funding on it, they came up with a very realistic budget and schedule and have been following it very closely since. I know people who are working on the testing, and it seems like they aren't cutting corners. So I wouldn't worry more than normal for deploying a 6.5 m telescope in space.
- hackuser 10y agoThanks; that informs the discussion.