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It's funny how the excellent job of the French Ariane launcher is nowhere to be seen in this (and others) article.
by bestouff 5y ago
It's funny how the excellent job of the French Ariane launcher is nowhere to be seen in this (and others) article.
- abhiminator 5y agoArs Technica did a well-written story on it recently -- https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/all-hail-the-ariane-5-rocket-which-doubled-the-webb-telescopes-lifetime/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/all-hail-the-ariane-...
- macintux 5y agoIt got a lot of good press at the time, but agreed, it warrants a mention.
- tunap 5y agoThat is an interesting observation I never considered. If it were a SpaceX rocket, it would have been mentioned once per paragraph, minimum.
- arcticfox 5y agoIf it was a SpaceX rocket, it would be getting ready to fly again. Expendable rockets have been putting up payloads for 60 years at this point, SpaceX has been flying reusable rockets for less than a decade.
- raverbashing 5y agoNot necessarily. Larger payloads (and maybe some trajectories) forego the reusability of the rocket (even Falcon Heavy)
- arcticfox 5y agoGood point, but it's one major reason why SpaceX makes the news (also Crew Dragon) and Arianespace doesn't, even if it doesn't apply in every instance. If SpaceX was simply doing the same thing as everyone else has for 60 yrs, no one would care, I don't understand why people think they're the same thing
- wolverine876 5y agoYou don't think it has something to do with Elon Musk's self-promotion and large cult? Quick, who is the CEO of Arianespace? Who is heading up the SLS project?
- avmich 5y agoSomebody who'd lose if they try to get too much of a limelight? As both those organizations depend on governments way more than SpaceX.
- Dave3of5 5y agoActually Hubble was put into space by a (mostly) reusable system the space shuttle STS-31. That was about 30 years ago.
- nexuist 5y agoCalling the Space Shuttle "mostly reusable" is laughable. It cost 1.5 billion dollars per launch[1] whereas a reused Falcon 9 costs 50 million to launch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
- Steltek 5y agoI don't get the need to bag on the Shuttle program here. The Shuttle was designed nearly 50 years ago with drastically different requirements and stakeholders.
- pfdietz 5y agoIt's because people still defend it, or imply it was more worthy than it actually was. And because the same mistake is being repeated right now (SLS).
- mulmen 5y agoSLS isn’t the currently-in-development spacecraft that utilizes hundreds of ceramic tiles to aerobrake through the atmosphere. SLS is basically a modern Saturn V. A complete departure from the Shuttle, with the exception of-re-using the SRB design. On paper a very conservative choice. Starship looks a lot like Shuttle 2.0 to me. Except the landing is somehow even more terrifying. As far as I can tell the idea with Starship is to design a vehicle that can survive losing a few tiles because that’s inevitable.
- pfdietz 5y ago
- jvanderbot 5y agoThis is absolutely true but entirely uninformative in this context. It's also a bit hilarious as it reinforces GP's suggestion that you can't involve or invoke SpaceX without a breathless-sounding shower of accolades stealing the show from the main payload / mission.
- sumedh 5y agoBecause SpaceX made rocket launch interesting by having cameras on the rocket, did Ariane have cameras on their rockets?
- mnw21cam 5y agoIf you go to https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html then there are repeated statements about how the rocket did such a good accurate job launching Webb onto its intended trajectory that the telescope hasn't had to use as much of its own rocket fuel as they expected, so the fuel is now expected to last 20 years instead of 10.
- jamincan 5y agoShortly after launch there were quite a few articles talking about how well the launch went on the Ariane and how that allowed the mission to be extended to 20 years or so. I'm not sure who it was anymore (possibly Scott Manley on youtube), but apparently ESA had been setting aside the components for the Ariane 5 that tested best to be used for the launch of JWST to lower the risk of failure and that might explain in part why it was able to launch it so precisely - it was not your average Joe's Ariane 5.
- kortex 5y agoSo they essentially binned the rocket parts much the same way a chip fab would?
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoNo? This is a completely meaningless comparison
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jacobolus 5y agoIt’s the same idea. Instead of making a tighter spec and spending more resources making just the right number of parts meeting the specified tight tolerance, use a looser production tolerance and make a bunch of parts, and then (for an especially tricky use case) pick the parts satisfying a tighter tolerance after production, leaving the remaining parts for less demanding jobs.
- PetitPrince 5y agoThey selected the parts that were the most up to spec (not necessarily the strongest, but the most faithful to spec).
- manquer 5y agoChip binning or most complex systems QC also works that way ? If it doesn't behave as within parameters defined would the core/chip is binned. Complex systems can break in unexpected ways if any one parameter is outside range even if it actually better (say more clock speed) , you want to stick to spec.
- slim 5y agoAriane 5 was cool in 1995
- titzer 5y agoIt's amazing that they pulled this off without node and electron, you mean?
- ragebol 5y agoAnd now too, since it ~doubled the science/dollar output of the telescope by doubling the lifetime. I think that's cool
- arcticfox 5y ago"doubled" the lower bound on what was surely an extremely conservative estimate meant to avoid a perception of failure if things didn't go perfectly. The Opportunity rover had a "90-day" expected lifetime and lived until 15 years old. It's great that Ariane performed superbly but this "doubling" calculation is pretty silly.
- mrtksn 5y ago> The Opportunity rover had a "90-day" expected lifetime and lived until 15 years old. It's great that Ariane performed superbly but this "doubling" calculation is pretty silly. Yeah, no. JWST has a limited lifetime because of the finite fuel, that's completely different from building a machine for a purpose and the machine not falling apart at the end of the initial mission. When people say Ariane doubled the lifetime of JWST, they mean Ariane performed much better than the allowed margins, thus pushing the fuel efficiency to its limits. Think this, a Toyota has a lifetime of 100K miles but many get 200K out of it. That's completely different from achieving 80mpg on a car rated 40mpg. When someone tells you that they are driving so precisely that they are getting twice the milage, is it appropriate to say "So what, my car was supposed to last 100K miles but lasted 200K"? I think, no.
- 1125spacex 5y ago
- signatoremo 5y agoThis is one, among others, right after it was announced. Maybe you don’t follow space news as closely as you think you do? https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/all-hail-the-ariane-5-rocket-which-doubled-the-webb-telescopes-lifetime/?amp=1 https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/all-hail-the-ariane-...
- irrational 5y agoI’ve seen it mentioned tons of times in articles. Especially in regards to how well it did which which leads to fuel savings which leads to a longer life.
- js8 5y agoWorse, journalists often compare Webb with Hubble, but they mostly ignore the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory, which had a larger primary mirror (for example, https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.html https://webb.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index....). It's a very subtle form of American exceptionalism.
- CrazyStat 5y agoI'm not sure it's American exceptionalism, just that Hubble has been around a long time and is much more prominent in the public conscience thanks to iconic images like the Hubble deep field. If someone builds a big new ocean liner you know journalists are going to compare it to the Titanic. Same thing.
- dev_tty01 5y agoYes, Herschel was a great project by the ESA. It certainly got short shrift within the US press despite significant contributions from NASA and JPL. I hope it got plenty of love from the European press. Great work.
- justin66 5y ago> It's a very subtle form of American exceptionalism. Oh, bullshit. NASA spends an awful lot of money and effort on promoting its projects to the English-language press. Does the ESA make a comparable amount of effort?
- js8 5y agoI am not sure where we disagree. I am talking about the (false) perception that the U.S. is the #1 among world nations. Maybe it is caused by comparatively higher marketing budget, but that doesn't ultimately matter, because the point is, the perception is still false, and ignoring Webb's predecessor contributes to it. OTOH, I think Webb is amazing, and fairly, perhaps without the marketing it wouldn't even exist because of all the American deficit hawks.
- ur-whale 5y ago> It's funny how the excellent job of the French Ariane launcher is nowhere to be seen in this (and others) article. US ego is already badly bruised that they've had to launch this highly visible project on a foreign rocket, and now you'd want them to sing the frenchies praises? That's a huge ask.
- thepasswordis 5y agoHuh. I actually noticed the opposite: the ESA, and Ariane seemed to be featured much more prominently than I would have expected at the time around the launch.