14 ms·

I remember when this telescope was first launched and deployed, and how its initial lackluster performance was a great source of mockery and derision of "govern

I remember when this telescope was first launched and deployed, and how its initial lackluster performance was a great source of mockery and derision of "government overspending for nothing" and a general disdain for space-based science. Since then, it has absolutely revolutionized our understanding of the universe and provided untold inspiration for millions (The famous Deep Field image being the prime example). It is a crowning achievement for NASA and should be used as an example any time some elected official questions the spending on research instruments like this.

patrickthebold 5y ago
I'm still anxious about the James Webb Space Telescope though. Fingers crossed.
- HenryKissinger 5y ago
  If the rocket explodes on the launch pad, it will be a bad day. At the same time, it shouldn't take twenty years to build a space telescope, especially since it's not like it's the first one ever. The first atomic bomb was built in 4 years.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    The first atomic bomb was nowhere near as precisely-built as the James Webb telescope has to be.
  - scrozart 5y ago
    It's not the first space-based observatory, but it's still a _wholly novel_ device, containing instrumentation designed by scientists and engineers in concert to leverage every piece of bleeding edge technology available at the time, and some throughout the process. Everyone of the flagship observatories is moon shot. It's not a mass-produced helicopter or missile. This project in particular is easily one of the wildest feats of science and engineering _ever_ just like Hubble, Cern, and LIGO. Regarding the bomb, we were trying to end a global conflict, so the comparison couldn't be further off base.
    - airstrike 5y ago
      Plus the bomb was built with the literal opposite purpose of the JWST: blowing up! Worst case scenario it doesn't blow up exactly right and you just build another one?
      - cmpb 5y ago
        I see your point, but you could also argue that worst case scenario for atomic bomb malfunction is much more awful than worst case for JWST
        lazide 5y ago
        With the mindset at the time, the worst case scenario for the atomic bomb would have been it not going off in anyway way, and then they just handed their greatest enemy dud version if a top secret weapon. Since it likely would have just blown up (fizzle) even if it didn’t fully detonate that is a pretty remote possibility. Second worst would be it went off on a base somewhere and nuked a US base. Considering the location of these bases and the nature of the war at that point, it would have been a footnote causality wise, but embarrassing.
      - retzkek 5y ago
        The worst case considered at the time was an uncontrolled chain-reaction annihilating the planet. It was calculated to be impossible, but it still weighed on the minds of many scientists involved, even well into the hydrogen bomb era. https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmosphere-on-fire https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmos...
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - dekhn 5y ago
    there has never been and never will be anything like the Apollo or Manhattan projects. They had levels of productivity that are not normally seen.
    - sebzim4500 5y ago
      If the Starship program succeeds in reaching the moon in the next few years then I think that is comparable to Apollo. Ofc it is easier to do things the second time than the first but safety standards are higher and this time it will have been done at an enormously reduced price.
    - Swenrekcah 5y ago
      Well, there were the Egyptian Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Roman Aqueducts and a whole bunch of Great Projects in the past and I certainly hope there will be lots more in our future.
      - spenczar5 5y ago
        Those projects took centuries to complete.
        delecti 5y ago
        As far as I know, the pyramids were each constructed for a single pharaoh, and during their single lifetime. I don't know about all of them, but that's at least true of Great Pyramid of Giza.
        DLWormwood 5y ago
        Or just a few turns, depending on your difficulty setting. (-;
        dmos62 5y ago
        We don't know how some of the Egyptian pyramids were constructed, or when, or how long it took.
  - gumby 5y ago
    It took 25 years to replace the SF Bay Bridge, a much less complex endeavor. It’s simply how things are done around here these days.
    - m0llusk 5y ago
      That is not a good comparison. The SF Bay Bridge replacement project was conducted as a competition. The design that won was so much more complicated than all the other entries that at first it was not clear that it could be built and in fact the finished product is flawed with cracks and other failures. There is nothing particularly complex about the basic problem and the simple viaduct design that was advocated by the Governor at the time was expected to involve an order of magnitude less cost and time of construction but was rejected for being too simple and not beautiful enough. This management structure and these considerations have not been used for any space missions.
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    It is a completely novel design for a space telescope though. On top of that there's no capability [0] to go patch up a sloppy job like we did with Hubble. [0] Currently at least. Starship could I guess but it was planned way ahead of Starship even being a glimmer in Musk's eye. Do they have any grapple points on it as insurance? I would at this point, just put one of the posts they use on the ISS for Canada Arm to grapple.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      And that is the problem with 20 year (30 year?) product lifecycles. A lot can change in 20 years. For example the ability to service it might now be feasible. But since it’s almost entirely built, good luck making it serviceable!
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      There is a docking ring on the JWST.
    - dr_orpheus 5y ago
      Yeah, there is a docking ring as a "maybe we can design something to use this in the future". Since JWST is going out to a Lagrange point it would definitely be robotic servicing at this point unless our human spaceflight capabilities expand very significantly. The Nancy Grace Roman (formerly WFIRST) space telescope also has grappling points for robotic servicing so it is something that is being considered in designs for programs of record.
- belter 5y ago
  Keep in mind its an orbiting Infrared Observatory so not an alternative to Hubble. Of course it will be an amazing scientific instrument and we should hope that nothing happens during launch.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  One reason JWT has taken so long and is so expensive is that launch costs used to be "astronomical". In the SpaceX era of reusable rockets, those costs become 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller, and I expect a flurry of simpler space telescopes in the nearish future. That's the theory. Does anyone know if such things are being worked on?
  - terramex 5y ago
    Not to my knowledge. Actually, it was said that lack of smaller space projects was catalyst for creation of Starlink. They expected tons of launches once launch prices dropped but it never materialized so they decided to become their own biggest client.
  - henrikeh 5y ago
    Who’s theory? JWST costs upwards to 9 billion USD. An Ariane 5 launch maybe 200 million. Just because the launch is cheaper doesn’t make the rest of the project less complicated and costly.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      JWST costs $9B when NASA does it. I think other actors can do similar things much cheaper and faster.
      - qayxc 5y ago
        > I think other actors can do similar things much cheaper and faster. Think again. JWST was criticised for being too ambitious and rightly so. It uses technology that was (and in some areas still is) cutting edge. It baffles me how people always seem to assume that some company can miraculously solve scientific and engineering challenges quicker and cheaper than the teams that are working on it. JWST was designed with no serviceability in mind, that is, unlike HST it absolutely has to work. Every detail, from the folding mirror, to the sun shield, to the computer systems to the instrumentation. ZERO room for error and no "fail early, fail often"-option here. Most of the delays have been caused by engineers and scientists wanting to make 100% sure they get it right, because there's no STS servicing for fixing imperfect mirrors or switching out hardware.
heresie-dabord 5y ago
> mockery and derision of "government overspending for nothing" and a general disdain for space-based science. But nary a word from such commentators when a major commercial software product demonstrates yet another catastrophic security failure.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  You can pick another commercial software vendor. With government, you can only complain. So you do.
  - harry8 5y ago
    >You can pick another commercial software vendor. With what's left of your budget, which is now very, very negative. Better to redefine abject failure as success to minimize the chances of it ending your career if you're involved in firm purchasing in any way. It's not like boards of directors have a clue. The big consulting firms will assist pulling the wool and priming the press so they can move onto the next mark. It's impossible to by cynical enough.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    Software vendors like Oracle and SAP do everything in their power to lock you into their services while doing the absolute minimum to fulfill any contract. It took our IT over 4 years to migrate away from Siebel to Salesforce and it's going on 3 years since. I just learned the other day we still have a Siebel DB lingering around as a dirty little secret. We move away from Lotus Notes over 10 years ago and we still have some Notes Apps used by our Legal Department.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - antifa 5y ago
    It's getting more common than not that they all remove the same popular features and add the same dark patterns.
- renewiltord 5y ago
cowmix 5y ago
So I worked on a contract for STScI (the peeps who wrote all the Hubble software). The turnover there is insanely low. As of a few years ago, almost ALL the people I worked with had been there since the initial launch of the Hubble. Anyway, as you walk around the cubes in their offices, many had copies of the political cartoons from the time which mocked the Hubble as a total failure. They are all mission focused, took the initial failure very, very seriously.
- saganus 5y ago
  Any particular reason that they stay for so long at their jobs? Obviously working on such cool projects must be a major factor, but it's probably not the only one.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    Government job. Low pay. Much stability.
  - cowmix 5y ago
    They all really, really believe in the mission. Many are well into their 60s and are waiting for JWST to launch to finally retire. It was supposed to launch YEARS ago, so they are (as a group) getting antsy. The project I worked one was migrating data from their in house ticket tracking system to Jira. I was importing tickets from 1985 into Jira which obviously didn't exist at that time.
    - saganus 5y ago
      Interesting. Thanks for the insight! I guess it IS very different to believe, for decades, in a mission that includes space telescopes than in the latest SaaS or productivity app or something more "mundane". Not that there's anything bad working on those kind of projects, but it sure has a different scope (no pun intended)
      - elliottkember 5y ago
BurningFrog 5y ago
Hubble is 30 years old, and was probably based on a military spy satellite (KH-11) design. I agree it was a milestone for astronomy, but it's been very long without any progress since. Why don't we at least have 4 more Hubbles in orbit?
- wedesoft 5y ago
  The James-Webb telescope is supposed to launch this year: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- cptskippy 5y ago
  Apart from the continued devaluing of Science in our country and severe underfunding of any scientific institution?
  - adventured 5y ago
    > severe underfunding of any scientific institution NASA is well funded, not underfunded. It receives over three times the funding of ESA by comparison. Why aren't the Europeans funding their scientific institutions better? Because the combination of soaring entitlement costs and stagnant growth robs them of the necessary tax revenue for that. Which is exactly what's happening in the US, and it's going to get a lot worse yet. The US has a bit less of an excuse, seeing as it could safely cut $200b off of its military. However, that $200b spread around to every squeaky wheel still won't go very far (it's equal to a mere ~2.3% of total government spending), you might be able to fairly boost NASA's budget by $3b per year if you slashed the military. Back in reality, that $200b in cuts should probably be entirely allocated to healthcare, which brings us right back to the central issue of priorities; and the Europeans know that quite well, which is why ESA is poorly funded.
    - cptskippy 5y ago
CWuestefeld 5y ago
My grandfather worked on the Hubble's mirror - the part with all the controversy. It was, simultaneously, both what he was most proud of and most ashamed. One thing he would point out, that I never see discussed, was that at the time they built the mirror, there was an expectation that it may not be perfect, on account of how the Earth's gravity would slightly deform the mirror during manufacturing. As he tells the story, they'd tried to factor that into the design, but had less confidence in it. This, of course, was not the reason for the eventual problems, but to illustrate that this kind of thing was understood. The big picture of the failure relates to the Shuttle program as well. At the time Hubble was being developed, its mission was supposed to allow for a lot more around the "shuttle" aspect: not just that it could be reused, but that it could be reused in an actual shuttling capacity, like an orbital pickup truck. So it was supposed to be possible to bring the telescope up into orbit (away from gravitational stresses), see how it worked, and if necessary, bring it back down for corrections. Since the end result of the Shuttle design cut down significantly in its capabilities in this regard, the Hubble program was left without its "Plan B".
- walrus01 5y ago
  In the end it turned out that for the life of the shuttle program, each launch ended up costing between 700 million and 1.2 billion, so the 1970s goal of an economically reusable spacecraft was definitely not achieved.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  It still amazes me that one, the mirrors are sensitive enough to the deformation of Earth's gravity to have an effect and two, that we are now very good at compensating for this now. Also consider that the mirrors on James Webb space telescope need to account for both deformation from gravity when they are manufactured but also that they are manufactured at room temperature and will be operated at cryo temperatures. But JWST is also special since they have actuators to put stress on the mirror segments to be able to reshape them slightly on-orbit to focus.
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    To be fair, Kodak made a sister mirror that wasn't chosen to go up, and when the issue on Hubble was found out, Kodak's mirror was found to be perfect.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jordan314 5y ago
I can't believe the shuttle chased down a satellite to fix it in five spacewalks. How many satellites have had service missions like this?
- reportingsjr 5y ago
  The public doesn't really know. The shuttle did a handful of secret missions that could have involved satellite service. There is also a sort of mini shuttle that has launched a number of times in the last decade called the X-37B which some have speculated might be used for servicing satellites. It's definitely an interesting concept! The way you say the shuttle chased down satellites makes me laugh, as if the satellites were trying to escape and were zig zagging around! In reality, every mission to the ISS does the same thing as the shuttle rendezvousing with the Hubble.
elihu 5y ago
People underestimate the costs of these kinds of programs, but they also underestimate the benefits. In the end it kind of works out. (I came across this idea in a Tom DeMarco book called "Why Does Software Cost So Much?": basically people complain about the high costs of developing new software, but then for some reason they keep paying to develop more software. Even though the initial cost estimates may turn out to be fiction, it's still worth it because the benefits are so big.)
WalterBright 5y ago
Once the engineering of the telescope was complete, making multiple scopes shouldn't have cost that much more. Launch 'em all.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Unfortunately they're mostly pointing the wrong way
mbrodersen 5y ago
It’s always amusing to me that people carefully don’t mention the thousands of times large private companies “overspend for nothing”. The problem is not government. The problem is large organisations and the complexity of what they are trying to do. Things will go wrong.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
People who question these things don't care about space pictures though. They care about return on investment. What does this do for actual working class Americans? I worked in defense and had a coworker who thinks that NASA should be abolished and the US should cease all spending on space. Thinks it's all a waste of money.

patrickthebold 5y ago

I'm still anxious about the James Webb Space Telescope though. Fingers crossed.

HenryKissinger 5y ago
If the rocket explodes on the launch pad, it will be a bad day. At the same time, it shouldn't take twenty years to build a space telescope, especially since it's not like it's the first one ever. The first atomic bomb was built in 4 years.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  The first atomic bomb was nowhere near as precisely-built as the James Webb telescope has to be.
- scrozart 5y ago
  It's not the first space-based observatory, but it's still a _wholly novel_ device, containing instrumentation designed by scientists and engineers in concert to leverage every piece of bleeding edge technology available at the time, and some throughout the process. Everyone of the flagship observatories is moon shot. It's not a mass-produced helicopter or missile. This project in particular is easily one of the wildest feats of science and engineering _ever_ just like Hubble, Cern, and LIGO. Regarding the bomb, we were trying to end a global conflict, so the comparison couldn't be further off base.
  - airstrike 5y ago
    Plus the bomb was built with the literal opposite purpose of the JWST: blowing up! Worst case scenario it doesn't blow up exactly right and you just build another one?
    - cmpb 5y ago
      I see your point, but you could also argue that worst case scenario for atomic bomb malfunction is much more awful than worst case for JWST
      - lazide 5y ago
        With the mindset at the time, the worst case scenario for the atomic bomb would have been it not going off in anyway way, and then they just handed their greatest enemy dud version if a top secret weapon. Since it likely would have just blown up (fizzle) even if it didn’t fully detonate that is a pretty remote possibility. Second worst would be it went off on a base somewhere and nuked a US base. Considering the location of these bases and the nature of the war at that point, it would have been a footnote causality wise, but embarrassing.
    - retzkek 5y ago
      The worst case considered at the time was an uncontrolled chain-reaction annihilating the planet. It was calculated to be impossible, but it still weighed on the minds of many scientists involved, even well into the hydrogen bomb era. https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmosphere-on-fire https://www.insidescience.org/manhattan-project-legacy/atmos...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- dekhn 5y ago
  there has never been and never will be anything like the Apollo or Manhattan projects. They had levels of productivity that are not normally seen.
  - sebzim4500 5y ago
    If the Starship program succeeds in reaching the moon in the next few years then I think that is comparable to Apollo. Ofc it is easier to do things the second time than the first but safety standards are higher and this time it will have been done at an enormously reduced price.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    Well, there were the Egyptian Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Roman Aqueducts and a whole bunch of Great Projects in the past and I certainly hope there will be lots more in our future.
    - spenczar5 5y ago
      Those projects took centuries to complete.
      - delecti 5y ago
        As far as I know, the pyramids were each constructed for a single pharaoh, and during their single lifetime. I don't know about all of them, but that's at least true of Great Pyramid of Giza.
      - DLWormwood 5y ago
        Or just a few turns, depending on your difficulty setting. (-;
      - dmos62 5y ago
        We don't know how some of the Egyptian pyramids were constructed, or when, or how long it took.
- gumby 5y ago
  It took 25 years to replace the SF Bay Bridge, a much less complex endeavor. It’s simply how things are done around here these days.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    That is not a good comparison. The SF Bay Bridge replacement project was conducted as a competition. The design that won was so much more complicated than all the other entries that at first it was not clear that it could be built and in fact the finished product is flawed with cracks and other failures. There is nothing particularly complex about the basic problem and the simple viaduct design that was advocated by the Governor at the time was expected to involve an order of magnitude less cost and time of construction but was rejected for being too simple and not beautiful enough. This management structure and these considerations have not been used for any space missions.
- rtkwe 5y ago
  It is a completely novel design for a space telescope though. On top of that there's no capability [0] to go patch up a sloppy job like we did with Hubble. [0] Currently at least. Starship could I guess but it was planned way ahead of Starship even being a glimmer in Musk's eye. Do they have any grapple points on it as insurance? I would at this point, just put one of the posts they use on the ISS for Canada Arm to grapple.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    And that is the problem with 20 year (30 year?) product lifecycles. A lot can change in 20 years. For example the ability to service it might now be feasible. But since it’s almost entirely built, good luck making it serviceable!
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    There is a docking ring on the JWST.
  - dr_orpheus 5y ago
    Yeah, there is a docking ring as a "maybe we can design something to use this in the future". Since JWST is going out to a Lagrange point it would definitely be robotic servicing at this point unless our human spaceflight capabilities expand very significantly. The Nancy Grace Roman (formerly WFIRST) space telescope also has grappling points for robotic servicing so it is something that is being considered in designs for programs of record.
belter 5y ago
Keep in mind its an orbiting Infrared Observatory so not an alternative to Hubble. Of course it will be an amazing scientific instrument and we should hope that nothing happens during launch.
BurningFrog 5y ago
One reason JWT has taken so long and is so expensive is that launch costs used to be "astronomical". In the SpaceX era of reusable rockets, those costs become 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller, and I expect a flurry of simpler space telescopes in the nearish future. That's the theory. Does anyone know if such things are being worked on?
- terramex 5y ago
  Not to my knowledge. Actually, it was said that lack of smaller space projects was catalyst for creation of Starlink. They expected tons of launches once launch prices dropped but it never materialized so they decided to become their own biggest client.
- henrikeh 5y ago
  Who’s theory? JWST costs upwards to 9 billion USD. An Ariane 5 launch maybe 200 million. Just because the launch is cheaper doesn’t make the rest of the project less complicated and costly.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    JWST costs $9B when NASA does it. I think other actors can do similar things much cheaper and faster.
    - qayxc 5y ago
      > I think other actors can do similar things much cheaper and faster. Think again. JWST was criticised for being too ambitious and rightly so. It uses technology that was (and in some areas still is) cutting edge. It baffles me how people always seem to assume that some company can miraculously solve scientific and engineering challenges quicker and cheaper than the teams that are working on it. JWST was designed with no serviceability in mind, that is, unlike HST it absolutely has to work. Every detail, from the folding mirror, to the sun shield, to the computer systems to the instrumentation. ZERO room for error and no "fail early, fail often"-option here. Most of the delays have been caused by engineers and scientists wanting to make 100% sure they get it right, because there's no STS servicing for fixing imperfect mirrors or switching out hardware.

heresie-dabord 5y ago

> mockery and derision of "government overspending for nothing" and a general disdain for space-based science. But nary a word from such commentators when a major commercial software product demonstrates yet another catastrophic security failure.

BurningFrog 5y ago
You can pick another commercial software vendor. With government, you can only complain. So you do.
- harry8 5y ago
  >You can pick another commercial software vendor. With what's left of your budget, which is now very, very negative. Better to redefine abject failure as success to minimize the chances of it ending your career if you're involved in firm purchasing in any way. It's not like boards of directors have a clue. The big consulting firms will assist pulling the wool and priming the press so they can move onto the next mark. It's impossible to by cynical enough.
- cptskippy 5y ago
  Software vendors like Oracle and SAP do everything in their power to lock you into their services while doing the absolute minimum to fulfill any contract. It took our IT over 4 years to migrate away from Siebel to Salesforce and it's going on 3 years since. I just learned the other day we still have a Siebel DB lingering around as a dirty little secret. We move away from Lotus Notes over 10 years ago and we still have some Notes Apps used by our Legal Department.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- antifa 5y ago
  It's getting more common than not that they all remove the same popular features and add the same dark patterns.
renewiltord 5y ago

cowmix 5y ago

So I worked on a contract for STScI (the peeps who wrote all the Hubble software). The turnover there is insanely low. As of a few years ago, almost ALL the people I worked with had been there since the initial launch of the Hubble. Anyway, as you walk around the cubes in their offices, many had copies of the political cartoons from the time which mocked the Hubble as a total failure. They are all mission focused, took the initial failure very, very seriously.

saganus 5y ago
Any particular reason that they stay for so long at their jobs? Obviously working on such cool projects must be a major factor, but it's probably not the only one.
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  Government job. Low pay. Much stability.
- cowmix 5y ago
  They all really, really believe in the mission. Many are well into their 60s and are waiting for JWST to launch to finally retire. It was supposed to launch YEARS ago, so they are (as a group) getting antsy. The project I worked one was migrating data from their in house ticket tracking system to Jira. I was importing tickets from 1985 into Jira which obviously didn't exist at that time.
  - saganus 5y ago
    Interesting. Thanks for the insight! I guess it IS very different to believe, for decades, in a mission that includes space telescopes than in the latest SaaS or productivity app or something more "mundane". Not that there's anything bad working on those kind of projects, but it sure has a different scope (no pun intended)
    - elliottkember 5y ago

BurningFrog 5y ago

Hubble is 30 years old, and was probably based on a military spy satellite (KH-11) design. I agree it was a milestone for astronomy, but it's been very long without any progress since. Why don't we at least have 4 more Hubbles in orbit?

wedesoft 5y ago
The James-Webb telescope is supposed to launch this year: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/webb/main/index.html
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cptskippy 5y ago
Apart from the continued devaluing of Science in our country and severe underfunding of any scientific institution?
- adventured 5y ago
  > severe underfunding of any scientific institution NASA is well funded, not underfunded. It receives over three times the funding of ESA by comparison. Why aren't the Europeans funding their scientific institutions better? Because the combination of soaring entitlement costs and stagnant growth robs them of the necessary tax revenue for that. Which is exactly what's happening in the US, and it's going to get a lot worse yet. The US has a bit less of an excuse, seeing as it could safely cut $200b off of its military. However, that $200b spread around to every squeaky wheel still won't go very far (it's equal to a mere ~2.3% of total government spending), you might be able to fairly boost NASA's budget by $3b per year if you slashed the military. Back in reality, that $200b in cuts should probably be entirely allocated to healthcare, which brings us right back to the central issue of priorities; and the Europeans know that quite well, which is why ESA is poorly funded.
  - cptskippy 5y ago

CWuestefeld 5y ago

My grandfather worked on the Hubble's mirror - the part with all the controversy. It was, simultaneously, both what he was most proud of and most ashamed. One thing he would point out, that I never see discussed, was that at the time they built the mirror, there was an expectation that it may not be perfect, on account of how the Earth's gravity would slightly deform the mirror during manufacturing. As he tells the story, they'd tried to factor that into the design, but had less confidence in it. This, of course, was not the reason for the eventual problems, but to illustrate that this kind of thing was understood. The big picture of the failure relates to the Shuttle program as well. At the time Hubble was being developed, its mission was supposed to allow for a lot more around the "shuttle" aspect: not just that it could be reused, but that it could be reused in an actual shuttling capacity, like an orbital pickup truck. So it was supposed to be possible to bring the telescope up into orbit (away from gravitational stresses), see how it worked, and if necessary, bring it back down for corrections. Since the end result of the Shuttle design cut down significantly in its capabilities in this regard, the Hubble program was left without its "Plan B".

walrus01 5y ago
In the end it turned out that for the life of the shuttle program, each launch ended up costing between 700 million and 1.2 billion, so the 1970s goal of an economically reusable spacecraft was definitely not achieved.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
It still amazes me that one, the mirrors are sensitive enough to the deformation of Earth's gravity to have an effect and two, that we are now very good at compensating for this now. Also consider that the mirrors on James Webb space telescope need to account for both deformation from gravity when they are manufactured but also that they are manufactured at room temperature and will be operated at cryo temperatures. But JWST is also special since they have actuators to put stress on the mirror segments to be able to reshape them slightly on-orbit to focus.
- downrightmike 5y ago
  To be fair, Kodak made a sister mirror that wasn't chosen to go up, and when the issue on Hubble was found out, Kodak's mirror was found to be perfect.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jordan314 5y ago

I can't believe the shuttle chased down a satellite to fix it in five spacewalks. How many satellites have had service missions like this?

reportingsjr 5y ago
The public doesn't really know. The shuttle did a handful of secret missions that could have involved satellite service. There is also a sort of mini shuttle that has launched a number of times in the last decade called the X-37B which some have speculated might be used for servicing satellites. It's definitely an interesting concept! The way you say the shuttle chased down satellites makes me laugh, as if the satellites were trying to escape and were zig zagging around! In reality, every mission to the ISS does the same thing as the shuttle rendezvousing with the Hubble.

elihu 5y ago

People underestimate the costs of these kinds of programs, but they also underestimate the benefits. In the end it kind of works out. (I came across this idea in a Tom DeMarco book called "Why Does Software Cost So Much?": basically people complain about the high costs of developing new software, but then for some reason they keep paying to develop more software. Even though the initial cost estimates may turn out to be fiction, it's still worth it because the benefits are so big.)

WalterBright 5y ago

Once the engineering of the telescope was complete, making multiple scopes shouldn't have cost that much more. Launch 'em all.

mhh__ 5y ago
Unfortunately they're mostly pointing the wrong way

mbrodersen 5y ago

It’s always amusing to me that people carefully don’t mention the thousands of times large private companies “overspend for nothing”. The problem is not government. The problem is large organisations and the complexity of what they are trying to do. Things will go wrong.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

People who question these things don't care about space pictures though. They care about return on investment. What does this do for actual working class Americans? I worked in defense and had a coworker who thinks that NASA should be abolished and the US should cease all spending on space. Thinks it's all a waste of money.