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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.

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.

adventured 9y ago
NASA has an HST 2.0. Two of them. They're sitting in storage, and they cost NASA absolutely nothing out of its budget to develop.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Than why not launch them? I mean, isn't HST oversubscribed and wouldn't having 3x observing time a net boon for the science community?
  - adventured 9y ago
    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.
  - macintux 9y ago
    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. Fundamentally it’s much safer sitting in storage.
    - sjm-lbm 9y ago
      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.
      - macintux 9y ago
        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.
        sjm-lbm 9y ago
        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)
    - Rebelgecko 9y ago
      Storing a satellite in space is significantly cheaper and not that much riskier than storing it on the ground
      - zaarn 9y ago
- bryananderson 9y ago
  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.
  - adventured 9y ago
    > NASA is developing one of them into a telescope called WFIRST Yes, the Trump Admin just tried to kill that. Correct me if I'm wrong, the NRO telescopes are just as powerful and capable as the HST as telescopes, the difference is the field?
    - bryananderson 9y ago
      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.
    - InclinedPlane 9y ago
      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.
JesseObrien 9y ago
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.
- icegreentea2 9y ago
  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).
  - JesseObrien 9y ago
    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.
  - nerfhammer 9y ago
    L2 is about 4 times further away than the Moon, to be precise.
  - drag0nballz 9y ago
    Also, it's not being made to be serviceable.
    - batbomb 9y ago
      That was a feature after HST.
- mulmen 9y ago
  "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.
mikeash 9y ago
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.
Cacti 9y ago
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.
- lutorm 9y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > 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. -- [0] - "Stepping Stones: Economic Analysis of Space Transportation Supplied From NEO Resources". Found it on HN some time ago. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_final_report.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin... (warning: 140-ish MB); the diagram in question is on page 9.
kamaal 9y ago
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.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  Then we should apply that same logic to the military because they don't seem to care about just blowing money up.
aphextron 9y ago
>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.

adventured 9y ago

NASA has an HST 2.0. Two of them. They're sitting in storage, and they cost NASA absolutely nothing out of its budget to develop.

cromwellian 9y ago
Than why not launch them? I mean, isn't HST oversubscribed and wouldn't having 3x observing time a net boon for the science community?
- adventured 9y ago
  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.
- macintux 9y ago
  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. Fundamentally it’s much safer sitting in storage.
  - sjm-lbm 9y ago
    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.
    - macintux 9y ago
      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.
      - sjm-lbm 9y ago
        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)
  - Rebelgecko 9y ago
    Storing a satellite in space is significantly cheaper and not that much riskier than storing it on the ground
    - zaarn 9y ago
bryananderson 9y ago
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.
- adventured 9y ago
  > NASA is developing one of them into a telescope called WFIRST Yes, the Trump Admin just tried to kill that. Correct me if I'm wrong, the NRO telescopes are just as powerful and capable as the HST as telescopes, the difference is the field?
  - bryananderson 9y ago
    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.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    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.

JesseObrien 9y ago

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.

icegreentea2 9y ago
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).
- JesseObrien 9y ago
  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.
- nerfhammer 9y ago
  L2 is about 4 times further away than the Moon, to be precise.
- drag0nballz 9y ago
  Also, it's not being made to be serviceable.
  - batbomb 9y ago
    That was a feature after HST.
mulmen 9y ago
"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.

mikeash 9y ago

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.

Cacti 9y ago

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.

lutorm 9y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > 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. -- [0] - "Stepping Stones: Economic Analysis of Space Transportation Supplied From NEO Resources". Found it on HN some time ago. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_final_report.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/eso_fin... (warning: 140-ish MB); the diagram in question is on page 9.

kamaal 9y ago

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.

dawnerd 9y ago
Then we should apply that same logic to the military because they don't seem to care about just blowing money up.

aphextron 9y ago

>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.