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I'm really waiting for @foone's reaction. foone is a retro hardware hacker who goes on these amazing threads on twitter, and is famous for running Doom on vari

I'm really waiting for @foone's reaction. foone is a retro hardware hacker who goes on these amazing threads on twitter, and is famous for running Doom on various things, including a pregnancy tester (though admittedly by replacing most of the internals), and his "Carthago delenda est" was on how the JWST was a boondoggle.

enkid 5y ago
I mean, of course it's a boondoggle? Isn't everything NASA does, outside of maybe climate science, a boondoggle? There was no real reason to put someone on the moon or build a space station. The Hubble has taken some pretty pictures, but doesn't really make people's live better in a measurable way. There's really no reason to want to see if you can fly a helicopter on Mars. The point is to do something challenging and cool and get some funding for science that isn't directly related to the military.
- mturmon 5y ago
  Increasingly, there are applications for NASA science data taken about the Earth: https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov Some of that webpage is a bit fluffy for the HN audience, but trust me, look underneath and there's a lot of real stuff there. For example, GRACE measures groundwater (https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater/ https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater/) and has been the main source of information about fast-depleting aquifers in India and California. Probably the best measurements we have of whole-atmosphere CO2 (as opposed to in-situ point measurements) come from Earth remote sensing (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov) -- you're right though, that is climate-related. Another one to take note of is MAIA (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/multi-angle-imager-for-aerosols-maia https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/multi-angle-imager-for-aer...), which will measure PM2.5/PM10 over various cities.
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  There are various thresholds of boondoggle. The doubt was whether the money invested in JWST could have been better invested in other discovery science projects of the same category as JWST.
- dekhn 5y ago
  What NASA does, and has done since Apollo, isn't normal science and does not really fall under the category of "boondoggle". it's special and different. NASA, and all the national peaceful space agencies, are about scientists using national pride to fund a wide range of projects, nearly none of which have direct impact on terrestrial applied science, but have captured the imagination of the public and leadership, and occasionally do provide practical terrestrial spin-offs (fewer than if we'd invested that money into terrestrial projects, but also very different from them). look at what the dutch and later the english were doing with merchant ship technology in the 1500s-1800s. It wasn't just good business, it was propaganda to build the power of the Dutch and English states, playing critical roles in th e rapid expansion of those countries into world powers. The US does what it does to prove that it can easily maintain space leadership (let's just pretend we didn't have to depend on Russia/Soyuz or Russian rocket tubes to put people into space). We can afford this (although, of course, people go starving).
lalaithion 5y ago
*their
- AceJohnny2 5y ago
  yep, sorry
sydthrowaway 5y ago
To be honest, who cares what some nobody hardware hacker thinks? They won’t accomplish a tenth of what the astronomers, scientist and engineers working on JWST will. The twitter nerd celebrity machine has gone topsy turvy
dekhn 5y ago
I was able to talk to some pretty powerful astronomers (one of whom had "fixed the hubble") and they did make a number of points about how JWST wasn't a boondoggle, but it did eat into the budgets of other legitimate projects. Realistically speaking, $10B for a world-class scientific instrument that will operate for 20 years without any human intervention, producing image results that we simply could not have created in any other technically accessible way, sounds like a reasonable budget to me. $25B would be "too much" and $50B would justify inventing a time machine and going back to shut the project down before it wasted too much money.

enkid 5y ago

I mean, of course it's a boondoggle? Isn't everything NASA does, outside of maybe climate science, a boondoggle? There was no real reason to put someone on the moon or build a space station. The Hubble has taken some pretty pictures, but doesn't really make people's live better in a measurable way. There's really no reason to want to see if you can fly a helicopter on Mars. The point is to do something challenging and cool and get some funding for science that isn't directly related to the military.

mturmon 5y ago
Increasingly, there are applications for NASA science data taken about the Earth: https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov Some of that webpage is a bit fluffy for the HN audience, but trust me, look underneath and there's a lot of real stuff there. For example, GRACE measures groundwater (https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater/ https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater/) and has been the main source of information about fast-depleting aquifers in India and California. Probably the best measurements we have of whole-atmosphere CO2 (as opposed to in-situ point measurements) come from Earth remote sensing (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov) -- you're right though, that is climate-related. Another one to take note of is MAIA (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/multi-angle-imager-for-aerosols-maia https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/multi-angle-imager-for-aer...), which will measure PM2.5/PM10 over various cities.
AceJohnny2 5y ago
There are various thresholds of boondoggle. The doubt was whether the money invested in JWST could have been better invested in other discovery science projects of the same category as JWST.
dekhn 5y ago
What NASA does, and has done since Apollo, isn't normal science and does not really fall under the category of "boondoggle". it's special and different. NASA, and all the national peaceful space agencies, are about scientists using national pride to fund a wide range of projects, nearly none of which have direct impact on terrestrial applied science, but have captured the imagination of the public and leadership, and occasionally do provide practical terrestrial spin-offs (fewer than if we'd invested that money into terrestrial projects, but also very different from them). look at what the dutch and later the english were doing with merchant ship technology in the 1500s-1800s. It wasn't just good business, it was propaganda to build the power of the Dutch and English states, playing critical roles in th e rapid expansion of those countries into world powers. The US does what it does to prove that it can easily maintain space leadership (let's just pretend we didn't have to depend on Russia/Soyuz or Russian rocket tubes to put people into space). We can afford this (although, of course, people go starving).

lalaithion 5y ago

*their

AceJohnny2 5y ago
yep, sorry

sydthrowaway 5y ago

To be honest, who cares what some nobody hardware hacker thinks? They won’t accomplish a tenth of what the astronomers, scientist and engineers working on JWST will. The twitter nerd celebrity machine has gone topsy turvy

dekhn 5y ago

I was able to talk to some pretty powerful astronomers (one of whom had "fixed the hubble") and they did make a number of points about how JWST wasn't a boondoggle, but it did eat into the budgets of other legitimate projects. Realistically speaking, $10B for a world-class scientific instrument that will operate for 20 years without any human intervention, producing image results that we simply could not have created in any other technically accessible way, sounds like a reasonable budget to me. $25B would be "too much" and $50B would justify inventing a time machine and going back to shut the project down before it wasted too much money.