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Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment

343 points by hubraumhugo 4y ago

Pakdef 4y ago
Probably a better investment then the 8 trillions spent globally on the 20-year war on terror: https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
- cptcobalt 4y ago
  Probably? Categorically.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    I would be curious to have two timelines... I just don't know 100%
- carlmr 4y ago
  Or the other parts of the war on X franchise.
- dragosmocrii 4y ago
  Now imagine a world where every taxpayer can vote where their money goes, and there are institutions making sure that this money is spent where it's meant for, like: education, healthcare, local infrastructure, research, military, military operations, etc I wonder if things would be different..
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a popular vote, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than we already have? There are plenty of issues people don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. People also in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe.
    - MC68328 4y ago
      Yeah, it's not like wisdom of crowds or market efficiency are real phenomena. The non-experts elected by non-experts know better than the non-experts.
    - theptip 4y ago
      > Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably most people would delegate the details to an expert of their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert expert> budget because it reduces military spending and increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or implemented outside the allocation voting system). I do agree with your general point that direct democracy can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy might enable better decision frameworks though, specifically by enabling more options for delegation. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
    - elil17 4y ago
      Almost no politician has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a legislature, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than a popular vote? There are plenty of issues politicians don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. Politicians in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe. More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But I trust the average persons values way more than I trust those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn't get enough funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But perhaps the average person would put more money towards education and food and less towards war.
  - Pakdef 4y ago
    Something need to be done to give more power to the majority... But it isn't as simple as having a web app for having everyone vote on every topic even if you assume that the identity problem is solved.
    - bckr 4y ago
      No, not as simple. But goodness wouldn't that be at least more interesting than what we have now?
- pcurve 4y ago
  I wonder if that includes massive productivity & time loss due as a result.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fullshark 4y ago
Looks like the poll doesn't tell them how much it cost in the question.
- ryaan_anthony 4y ago
  now do a poll: would you rather spend 10B on a telescope or X?
paulmd 4y ago
It is - and that's $10b upfront cost for an asset that will operate for a decade. $1b a year is a steal for that compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on. I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.
- M3L0NM4N 4y ago
  Full agree. I'd have been okay if this telescope cost us $50bn
- imperio59 4y ago
  * at least a decade, right? Or are the batteries going to run out at some point?
  - l33tman 4y ago
    Current estimate is 2 decades (original worst case was 10 years depending on the accuracy of the launch, which turned out to be best case accurate!)
  - thekiptxt 4y ago
    Current estimate is closer to 20 years until fuel to keep it in the Lagrange point is exhausted. Originally planned for 10, but the deployment was precise enough to leave enough fuel for many more years :)
  - paulmd 4y ago
    I thought some of the instruments would run out of helium after a decade. Other instruments may be able to run longer of course. Even better.
  - danny_codes 4y ago
    The supply of coolant is finite. At the time of mission planning there was no spaceship capable of resupplying at the Lagrange point. As I understand it the coolant onbaord is good for 10 years. However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.
patrickthebold 4y ago
I'm going to go a little rant just from the headline: Think about all of humankind — our ancestors in the past, us in the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel, GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really goes on and on. Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what we have received from our ancestors, but maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.
- pavlov 4y ago
  Anything we can realistically give them by investing in science will be dwarfed by the toxic legacy of climate change. It’s like your dad leaving you a really nice suit and one billion in debt in your name with no option for bankruptcy.
  - agloeregrets 4y ago
    The best choice would have been to curb climate change, yes...but we are materially beyond the point of no return now. We could maybe give one more generation a better life with cuts, but putting a team together to find answers to big questions is much much easier than to make billions of people change their actions. It is far more efficient.
  - klodolph 4y ago
    That's an age-old question. "Should we solve other problems besides what we think are the most important problems?" One problem with answering this question is that we don't know what avenues of research will produce important outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century scientists and engineers. Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to understand climate change without the use of satellites!
    - agloeregrets 4y ago
lbriner 4y ago
A few comments saying it is cheaper than X which is much worse than a space telescope but to me, that is irrelevant. They are proposing to spend this in addition to all the other garbage they spend money on so the comparison is not logical. By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for clean water and sanitation etc. If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.
causi 4y ago
Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has been?"
- agloeregrets 4y ago
  Is that actually materially different? Foundationally, if it was supposed to cost $10B and it was worth it and if it ended up costing 10B when it wasn't supposed to and was worth it, is that actually different? It's still a $10B project. Yes it overran it but, worth it.
  - causi 4y ago
    The survey participants were not informed of the cost at all. The JWST is absolutely worth ten billion dollars, but I'm not naive enough to think most Americans would agree with me, and I think that NASA contractors extracting twenty times their original grant from the taxpayers with no consequences is a major problem.
    - daveslash 4y ago
      Agreed. I think a better headline would be "Most Americans still think Space is Cool as Fuck, still embody some childlike wonder about the universe, and are excited about JWST" But I bet that if you asked Americans "Was the $10bn cost of JWST worth it?" and then asked them to describe what the "it" was and re-iterated the first question after they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice in a row.
bowsamic 4y ago
It has actually become somewhat cultlike. I watched someone on twitter get completely torn apart for asking the very reasonable and scientific question: "What will we learn from this telescope?". They got absolutely demolished, people going through his tweets and personal details and making fun of him. I decided to ask a few of them what new stuff we expect to learn about the universe using this new telescope. Only one person managed to answer me, and they were not one of the people to mock the original guy. My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an interesting look into how the general public relate to science, compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would ask, not something to be mocked EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate limited.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Their first mistake was using Twitter. Twitter actively encourages people being toxic to each other since that is what gets the most likes. I remember back when I used it was during the Pewdiepie vs T-Series meme, and people kept calling me a fascist just because I watched his videos.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I had the absolute privilege to regularly attending lectures at the DC air and space museum. These were held partly as an educational tool for congressional staffers, to demonstrate the hard value of NASA science mission funding. They were deep yet accessible. We get so much out of our science funding! These missions do have primary science goals and in order to book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and prioritized accordingly. The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights and models. Twitter and the general population understands none of this, but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the funding flowing. But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks? Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet detected!
baltimore 4y ago
Hot take / prove me wrong: Space telescopes, astrophysics, and other "big" science have not yielded and are not likely to yield NEARLY as much practical benefit for mankind as biology, medicine, nuclear physics, and other "small" science.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  We don't do science for the secondary technology benefits, we do it because in our society we believe that the goal of learning about the universe is justified inherently
  - BudaDude 4y ago
    Agreed. OP is looking at the capitalist value instead of the value to humanity.
  - Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
    Who is this 'we' ? First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can have a discourse about philosophy. Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all. The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..) They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering huge practical benefits.
    - gnulinux 4y ago
      > The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..) This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data that was collected before them. If you ever want to give the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how science works, you observe the world, you build a model that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to explain observations that cannot be predicted by other models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.
aaa_aaa 4y ago
As long as not funded by voluntary donations, such an extremely over budget investment is waste with little to no actual gain for humanity.
prpl 4y ago
Now do SOFIA - the telescope most astronomers agree that, while unique, it is not a good investment and, by itself, contributes significantly to the carbon footprint of astronomy. Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to get it killed
_greim_ 4y ago
> ...JWST’s total costs account for 0.0095 percent of all US spending between 2003 and 2026. I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is disingenuous.
- matthewmacleod 4y ago
  It's not to make it seem small – the point is that the first contract was awarded in 2003 and the project is funded through to 2026.
- bradlys 4y ago
  Considering it’s a 20+ year project in the making and has an expected operation of 5-20 years… I don’t think it’s entirely ridiculous to look at it this way.
- outworlder 4y ago
  Can't even buy a third of twitter with that amount.
m3kw9 4y ago
There is a lot of side effect when needing to push tech limits so hard to achieve this. The tech that was invented likely will be used. And to lead the world is also a big statement to the world that USA is where cutting edge things is still happening
Imnimo 4y ago
This is a weird question, because they don't tell the participants how much it cost, and I imagine most people who don't actively follow space science news wouldn't know off the top of their head. It's like simultaneously asking people to estimate how much a space telescope might have cost, and then also whether they think that estimate would have been a good investment.
gnicholas 4y ago
How will they feel when they find out that the telescope has already sustained "significant uncorrectable damage" from micrometeoroids? [1] Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images. 1: https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-significant-uncorrectable-damage-to-james-webb-space-telescope-12655489 https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-signific... EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news, and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they’d included the NASA link!
- Sparkle-san 4y ago
  While the damage to the mirror segment itself can't be corrected, the effect on the JWST as a whole is negligible and it is still operating within performance limits. Just telling someone that it received "significant uncorrectable damage from micrometeoroids?" seems intentionally worded to incite a negative response directed towards NASA.
- mturmon 4y ago
  It's hard to see through the fog of breathless reporting in that link. Here's one closer to the source: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-endure-micrometeoroid-impacts/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en... It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
- AnonMO 4y ago
  Its not rare per se NASA expects an impact about every month. this one was larger than their calculations, but that "significant uncorrectable damage" won't affect the pictures or the scientific work. also all damage to the telescope is uncorrectable due to the location of the telescope. If you read NASA report and not sky news which doesn't even link the report you would know. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf
uhhhhuhyes 4y ago
Most Americans aren't net taxpayers.
- bckr 4y ago
  Yeah, the govt is subsidizing their employment. The economy depends on the poor at least as much as the rich.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cbanek 4y ago
I think it's great how much that NASA advertised this telescope, and the name. They really piggy-backed off the love of Hubble, of astronomy picture of the day, etc. Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do likely know about Hubble and now Webb. Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined. It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel them after a regime change.
- pradn 4y ago
  I’m certain people know about the Mars landings at least.
  - cbanek 4y ago
    Excellent point, another great set of press for some great science!
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
So how about the overlap between this, and the people who think the U.S is heading for a civil war?
noidiocyallowed 4y ago
This article gives zero information. It gives noise. There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers, physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.
nextstep 4y ago
This is cheap compared to a lot of what the US government spends money on, and it won’t kill anybody! So really quite a non-issue.
throwaway64643 4y ago
People forget things fast. JWST as a telescope is great, but as a project, is catastrophic. Massive budget overrun, delay after delay. It's certainly the sign/result of project mismanagement. Unless they figured out what's wrong on this run, there won't be the next 'JWST', like ever.
- greedo 4y ago
  I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the JWST. A publicly funded project of this complexity will almost always have budget overruns and delays.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    So much of the complexity and cost overrun of the Webb was because we lacked a heavy rocket with a large payload fairing. The need to fold the telescope so delicately and intricately was the biggest challenge. Hopefully the larger rockets in development mean that future telescopes will not suffer from such constraints.
    - greedo 4y ago
      Exactly. Having a sclerotic space launch industry has really hampered NASA in many ways. I have hopes that Starship will be able to change this.
amriksohata 4y ago
Investment? If we are looking for ROI an understanding of the universe with images will never return us anything even if it increases our understanding there is no tangible ROI. Yes it gives us knowledge but is it usable to help us in anyway that would have been useful to Neanderthals millennia ago?
kosyblysk666 4y ago
chernevik 4y ago
"YouGov released an online poll" -- stopped reading right there
j0hnyl 4y ago
Why would anyone think it's not? $10B is pennies within the context of the US's frivolous spending.
TedShiller 4y ago
If you think it’s a good investment then I have something to sell you
dmd 4y ago
I did a poll of ~200 (University of Pennsylvania) undergraduates about 15 years ago, asking them (among many other questions) what percent of the federal budget NASA gets. The median answer was 15%, which is 30x more than the correct answer of one half of one percent.
- Yajirobe 4y ago
  Also, for comparison, the US military budget in 2021 was $700-800 billion.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  That’s quite ridiculous an answer to be honest, but is a good example of how terrible people are at understanding federal funding, and unfortunately undergraduates are no exception. How much did they estimate the defense budget at, 150%?
  - dmd 4y ago
    Median was 40%.
luigibosco 4y ago
They must have healthcare.
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
burlesona 4y ago
It’s merely the cost of a few miles of urban freeway. Which IMO reflects well on NASA and poorly on our infrastructure spending.
credit_guy 4y ago
What bothers me is that most pro-science people don't even consider the price tag when they state that a project is worth it. JWST may be a great investment at $10 BN, but would it still be at $50 BN? Or $50 TN? Those who "love science" claim that no number is too high, because the society "benefits".
- pradn 4y ago
  I do wonder about that question. Once people see the images, you have to ask them what percent of the federal budget they’d be willing to put up for it. I bet it would be an order or magnitude more than it actually cost. $10 billion in my mind isn’t much at all for a civilization-scale science project. If you ask me, I’d put up $250 billion a year, putting it at about 6% of the federal budget. (I’m just thinking aloud here.)
ztjio 4y ago
I love science. I fully support the desire to answer big hard questions that may be answered with this tool. I absolutely am 100% behind spending this money on this telescope. I, however, do not believe it will ever provide any kind of substantial return beyond possibly helping to answer some esoteric questions about the universe that nobody alive today or in 10000 years will benefit from. Life isn't an investment, or it's a really terrible one, as the final return is oblivion no matter what. Making all decisions on the basis of "investment" is stupid. Why? We all will eventually die, the planet incinerated, all of this is pointless. Even if the JWST helped lead to interplanetary travel that only changes the timeframe, the heat death of the universe being inevitable. If your only basis for doing something now is some material return in the future then you've totally lost the plot. So yeah. I think it's a bad investment and I'm glad we spent the money on it.
- hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  The heat death of the universe is a theory that has never been observed. Theories like it depend entirely on our understanding on "esoteric" aspects of reality, which contrary to your belief have brought fantastic benefits to nearly everyone alive today, including you and I, right now sharing our thoughts through magical telepathy, the result of some new instrument finding some new "esoteric" phenomenon like radio waves some time ago.
  - marnett 4y ago
    Thanks for the reality check. It is so easy to take the product of our science for granted.
yrgulation 4y ago
We should have an organisation like nato where each member state contributes a certain share of their gdp to space research. For instance asteroid mining is the natural way to go if we want to keep our planet fully clean and if we want less reliance on authoritarian states for rare minerals.
nojvek 4y ago
10B is peanuts to how much we spend on the military complex. JWST is an insanely complex telescope, puts humanity at the forefront of exploring the universe. Not only created new jobs but inspires a generation. We ought to spend more. A lot more on science and tech.
andrew-dc 4y ago
Somewhat related (pardon my jumbled transcription): "Sciences generally are divided up into two types: Pure, or Applied sciences. Applied sciences obviously undertake things that improve society. Pure science exists pretty much to satisfy human's curiosity. Astronomy is perhaps the purest of sciences; like music, you could live without it. You don't need it for your daily life. And for that reason it is important that the results of astronomy, this pure science, be put before the public. I feel that very strongly. Frequently we are asked, 'So, in a world where there is hunger, why study astronomy? Why devote funds to astronomy when those funds could be used to improve mankind?' My answer is that if you define an ideal society in which everyone has food, clothing, shelter (a roof over your head), basic medical care -- in fact such societies exist: your local prison, or jail. Each inmate has food, clothing, shelter, and medical care (not the greatest). When the doors are opened, do people rush to get into that ideal society or do they rush to get out? (chuckling) We know what the answer is: they rush to get out. Why? Because as important as these necessities are, the fact that you are not free to follow your desire (so to speak) is even more important than having food on the table. And astronomy is that [following your desire]. There is an inborn curiosity, I think, in all of us to address these questions of what's our relationship with the global environment? How did we get here? To what extent has the universe evolved in such a way that life has sprung forward? And I think that is something that is fundamental - so I think that public outreach for astronomy is something that is really crucial." -Dr. Robert Williams, Astronomer, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) from 1993 to 1998. Father of the Hubble Deep Field project. source: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Vka_9VzEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Vka_9VzEw)

343 points by hubraumhugo 4y ago

Probably a better investment then the 8 trillions spent globally on the 20-year war on terror: https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar

cptcobalt 4y ago
Probably? Categorically.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  I would be curious to have two timelines... I just don't know 100%
carlmr 4y ago
Or the other parts of the war on X franchise.
dragosmocrii 4y ago
Now imagine a world where every taxpayer can vote where their money goes, and there are institutions making sure that this money is spent where it's meant for, like: education, healthcare, local infrastructure, research, military, military operations, etc I wonder if things would be different..
- yakubin 4y ago
  Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a popular vote, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than we already have? There are plenty of issues people don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. People also in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe.
  - MC68328 4y ago
    Yeah, it's not like wisdom of crowds or market efficiency are real phenomena. The non-experts elected by non-experts know better than the non-experts.
  - theptip 4y ago
    > Almost no voter has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. That's true as far as it goes. However if we had the ability to individually vote on allocations, presumably most people would delegate the details to an expert of their choosing, while taking a stance on high-level classes of expenditures, for example "I will vote for the <insert expert> budget because it reduces military spending and increases healthcare spending", or whatever your policy preference is. Basically Liquid Democracy[1] of some sort (whether the partial delegation is built into the system or implemented outside the allocation voting system). I do agree with your general point that direct democracy can be problematic, particularly when a binary choice is presented rather than a continuum of options. E.g. see the CA ballot measure system which often results in "choose A&C or B&D"-type choices which exclude certain preferences from being expressed. I think a more granular direct democracy might enable better decision frameworks though, specifically by enabling more options for delegation. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
  - elil17 4y ago
    Almost no politician has the expertise to accurately allocate resources in a country. Why would a legislature, where expertise means nothing, result in anything better than a popular vote? There are plenty of issues politicians don't even know exist, but are nonetheless essential. Politicians in general do not know how much is necessary to maintain infrastructure of a whole variety of things. I'd expect a catastrophe. More seriously, I don't think our current decision-makers are informed and the average person wouldn't be either. But I trust the average persons values way more than I trust those of a politician. Maybe we still wouldn't get enough funding for roads and bridges. We don't get that now. But perhaps the average person would put more money towards education and food and less towards war.
- Pakdef 4y ago
  Something need to be done to give more power to the majority... But it isn't as simple as having a web app for having everyone vote on every topic even if you assume that the identity problem is solved.
  - bckr 4y ago
    No, not as simple. But goodness wouldn't that be at least more interesting than what we have now?
pcurve 4y ago
I wonder if that includes massive productivity & time loss due as a result.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fullshark 4y ago

Looks like the poll doesn't tell them how much it cost in the question.

ryaan_anthony 4y ago
now do a poll: would you rather spend 10B on a telescope or X?

paulmd 4y ago

It is - and that's $10b upfront cost for an asset that will operate for a decade. $1b a year is a steal for that compared to the other shit the US wastes federal money on. I'd personally vote to 10x or 100x our hard-science funding in general, we spend an absolute pittance compared to military funding or corn subsidies or whatever other bullshit.

M3L0NM4N 4y ago
Full agree. I'd have been okay if this telescope cost us $50bn
imperio59 4y ago
* at least a decade, right? Or are the batteries going to run out at some point?
- l33tman 4y ago
  Current estimate is 2 decades (original worst case was 10 years depending on the accuracy of the launch, which turned out to be best case accurate!)
- thekiptxt 4y ago
  Current estimate is closer to 20 years until fuel to keep it in the Lagrange point is exhausted. Originally planned for 10, but the deployment was precise enough to leave enough fuel for many more years :)
- paulmd 4y ago
  I thought some of the instruments would run out of helium after a decade. Other instruments may be able to run longer of course. Even better.
- danny_codes 4y ago
  The supply of coolant is finite. At the time of mission planning there was no spaceship capable of resupplying at the Lagrange point. As I understand it the coolant onbaord is good for 10 years. However, if starship is successful that situation will change and resupply becomes possible. So I suppose we'll see.

patrickthebold 4y ago

I'm going to go a little rant just from the headline: Think about all of humankind — our ancestors in the past, us in the present, and our descendants in the future. Think about how much value we have inherited from our ancestors: Fire, wheel, GPS, electricity, farming, materials like steel, the list really goes on and on. Now, of course, there's no rule that says we _have_ to give to our descendants anything at all, or anything comparable to what we have received from our ancestors, but maybe we should think a bit selflessly when deciding to invest in science.

pavlov 4y ago
Anything we can realistically give them by investing in science will be dwarfed by the toxic legacy of climate change. It’s like your dad leaving you a really nice suit and one billion in debt in your name with no option for bankruptcy.
- agloeregrets 4y ago
  The best choice would have been to curb climate change, yes...but we are materially beyond the point of no return now. We could maybe give one more generation a better life with cuts, but putting a team together to find answers to big questions is much much easier than to make billions of people change their actions. It is far more efficient.
- klodolph 4y ago
  That's an age-old question. "Should we solve other problems besides what we think are the most important problems?" One problem with answering this question is that we don't know what avenues of research will produce important outcomes. Historically, we have been very bad at it. The mathematicians working on group theory in the late 19th century had no idea how important it would be to 20th-century scientists and engineers. Spaceflight, in particular, is an important part of the specific problem of solving climate change. Imagine trying to understand climate change without the use of satellites!
  - agloeregrets 4y ago

lbriner 4y ago

A few comments saying it is cheaper than X which is much worse than a space telescope but to me, that is irrelevant. They are proposing to spend this in addition to all the other garbage they spend money on so the comparison is not logical. By the same logic, I can say that we shouldn't spend $10B on a telescope when we could invest it in one of many humanitarian exploits like micro-finance for developing countries, systems for clean water and sanitation etc. If the question was, "should we spend $10B of the military budget on this instead of tanks?", then fair enough.

causi 4y ago

Most Americans think NASA’s $10B space telescope is a good investment My god The Verge has an atrocious standard of reporting. The headline is clearly written to communicate that most Americans believe the JWST was worth its 2,000% budget overrun. That was not the survey question at all. The survey question was "How good an investment do you think the James Webb Space Telescope has been?"

agloeregrets 4y ago
Is that actually materially different? Foundationally, if it was supposed to cost $10B and it was worth it and if it ended up costing 10B when it wasn't supposed to and was worth it, is that actually different? It's still a $10B project. Yes it overran it but, worth it.
- causi 4y ago
  The survey participants were not informed of the cost at all. The JWST is absolutely worth ten billion dollars, but I'm not naive enough to think most Americans would agree with me, and I think that NASA contractors extracting twenty times their original grant from the taxpayers with no consequences is a major problem.
  - daveslash 4y ago
    Agreed. I think a better headline would be "Most Americans still think Space is Cool as Fuck, still embody some childlike wonder about the universe, and are excited about JWST" But I bet that if you asked Americans "Was the $10bn cost of JWST worth it?" and then asked them to describe what the "it" was and re-iterated the first question after they qualified the it.... I doubt you'd get a "yes" twice in a row.

bowsamic 4y ago

It has actually become somewhat cultlike. I watched someone on twitter get completely torn apart for asking the very reasonable and scientific question: "What will we learn from this telescope?". They got absolutely demolished, people going through his tweets and personal details and making fun of him. I decided to ask a few of them what new stuff we expect to learn about the universe using this new telescope. Only one person managed to answer me, and they were not one of the people to mock the original guy. My impression is that people don't have a clue of why we want to do this, in fact, a lot of them explicitly seem to think that the high-res image in the press release was the main point. $10b projects don't get launched simply just for the reason "why not?", they have purpose and intention behind them. It is an interesting look into how the general public relate to science, compared to how scientists relate to it. For a scientist, "why are we doing this?" is one of the very first questions you would ask, not something to be mocked EDIT: I want to point out that I am a physicist and technically an astronomy (GW interferometry) myself, so I know that there are answers to these questions. I just think that it's interesting how not only do people not know the answers to them, but they think it is rude to ask. I can't reply to comments, as I'm rate limited.

danjoredd 4y ago
Their first mistake was using Twitter. Twitter actively encourages people being toxic to each other since that is what gets the most likes. I remember back when I used it was during the Pewdiepie vs T-Series meme, and people kept calling me a fascist just because I watched his videos.
dougmwne 4y ago
I had the absolute privilege to regularly attending lectures at the DC air and space museum. These were held partly as an educational tool for congressional staffers, to demonstrate the hard value of NASA science mission funding. They were deep yet accessible. We get so much out of our science funding! These missions do have primary science goals and in order to book time on the instruments, proposals are submitted and prioritized accordingly. The science being done is absolutely wild stuff, formation of new planets, stars, universe and everything. With a telescope like this you can watch the evolution of all matter in the universe, from near the beginning of time up to now in all its trillions of permutations. You get this amazing data on everything and can spend decades analyzing it for new insights and models. Twitter and the general population understands none of this, but NASA understands that a few pretty pictures will keep the funding flowing. But what thing could we learn that will really wow folks? Composition of exoplanet atmospheres, of course. Class M planet detected!

baltimore 4y ago

Hot take / prove me wrong: Space telescopes, astrophysics, and other "big" science have not yielded and are not likely to yield NEARLY as much practical benefit for mankind as biology, medicine, nuclear physics, and other "small" science.

bowsamic 4y ago
We don't do science for the secondary technology benefits, we do it because in our society we believe that the goal of learning about the universe is justified inherently
- BudaDude 4y ago
  Agreed. OP is looking at the capitalist value instead of the value to humanity.
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
  Who is this 'we' ? First we consume stuff, then after we have grown so tired of stuff that we can't even fanthom acquiring more stuff we can have a discourse about philosophy. Learning about the Universe really is philosophy after all. The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..) They are showing the way by minimizing costs and delivering huge practical benefits.
  - gnulinux 4y ago
    > The only philosophers of that kind that produced an advancement in terms of stuff being consumed are the ones who did it all inside their heads and the only expense they needed was paper and pen (Einstein, Feynman, Bohn, Maxwell..) This argument -- which is brought up in every sophomoric conversation about the nature of science -- is extremely poor and unjustified. Of course Einstein, Feynman, Bohn and Maxwell relied on observations. Their theories fit the data that was collected before them. If you ever want to give the next Einstein a chance to build an even more useful theory, you need to observe more data. Period. This is how science works, you observe the world, you build a model that predicts it, rinse and repeat. There is no such thing as "purely pen and paper" in science and it categorically can never be. The idea that Einstein came to relativity through pure reasoning is silly, his theory was formed to explain observations that cannot be predicted by other models. Of course it involved tons of pure reasoning and mathematics, but the basis was only empirical observations.

aaa_aaa 4y ago

As long as not funded by voluntary donations, such an extremely over budget investment is waste with little to no actual gain for humanity.

prpl 4y ago

Now do SOFIA - the telescope most astronomers agree that, while unique, it is not a good investment and, by itself, contributes significantly to the carbon footprint of astronomy. Luckily it is almost at an end, finally, after years of trying to get it killed

_greim_ 4y ago

> ...JWST’s total costs account for 0.0095 percent of all US spending between 2003 and 2026. I think it was a good investment, but 10 billion is a lot of money in absolute terms and comparing it to "all US spending between 2003 and 2026" just to make it seem small is disingenuous.

matthewmacleod 4y ago
It's not to make it seem small – the point is that the first contract was awarded in 2003 and the project is funded through to 2026.
bradlys 4y ago
Considering it’s a 20+ year project in the making and has an expected operation of 5-20 years… I don’t think it’s entirely ridiculous to look at it this way.
outworlder 4y ago
Can't even buy a third of twitter with that amount.

m3kw9 4y ago

There is a lot of side effect when needing to push tech limits so hard to achieve this. The tech that was invented likely will be used. And to lead the world is also a big statement to the world that USA is where cutting edge things is still happening

Imnimo 4y ago

This is a weird question, because they don't tell the participants how much it cost, and I imagine most people who don't actively follow space science news wouldn't know off the top of their head. It's like simultaneously asking people to estimate how much a space telescope might have cost, and then also whether they think that estimate would have been a good investment.

gnicholas 4y ago

How will they feel when they find out that the telescope has already sustained "significant uncorrectable damage" from micrometeoroids? [1] Hopefully this was a rare event that happened to occur right after it was opened up. But there's a decent chance that this is will be a common occurrence that will happen again in the near future and continue to degrade the accuracy of the images. 1: https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-significant-uncorrectable-damage-to-james-webb-space-telescope-12655489 https://news.sky.com/story/meteoroid-hit-has-caused-signific... EDIT: thanks for the links! This was shown to me on google news, and I clicked on the link for more headlines but none of them looked more authoritative (The Hill?). I sure wish they’d included the NASA link!

Sparkle-san 4y ago
While the damage to the mirror segment itself can't be corrected, the effect on the JWST as a whole is negligible and it is still operating within performance limits. Just telling someone that it received "significant uncorrectable damage from micrometeoroids?" seems intentionally worded to incite a negative response directed towards NASA.
mturmon 4y ago
It's hard to see through the fog of breathless reporting in that link. Here's one closer to the source: https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-endure-micrometeoroid-impacts/ https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/06/08/webb-engineered-to-en... It seems like they have 4 impacts that are consistent with expectations and one outside expectations. The first 4 can be be mostly corrected by fine-tuning the deformable optics.
AnonMO 4y ago
Its not rare per se NASA expects an impact about every month. this one was larger than their calculations, but that "significant uncorrectable damage" won't affect the pictures or the scientific work. also all damage to the telescope is uncorrectable due to the location of the telescope. If you read NASA report and not sky news which doesn't even link the report you would know. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2207/2207.05632.pdf

uhhhhuhyes 4y ago

Most Americans aren't net taxpayers.

bckr 4y ago
Yeah, the govt is subsidizing their employment. The economy depends on the poor at least as much as the rich.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cbanek 4y ago

I think it's great how much that NASA advertised this telescope, and the name. They really piggy-backed off the love of Hubble, of astronomy picture of the day, etc. Don't get me wrong, it's great science, but great science doesn't always mean great PR. I feel like if you ask people about what NASA has done recently, they'll be like, I dunno. (last answer would have probably been the Shuttle, while ISS has some good coverage it doesn't seem as exciting to people). But they do likely know about Hubble and now Webb. Which is great, because the amount that the population thinks NASA gets in terms of tax payer dollars is grossly overimagined. It's less than 1%. But in the US you need great PR to get the funding for projects, not only to start, but also to not cancel them after a regime change.

pradn 4y ago
I’m certain people know about the Mars landings at least.
- cbanek 4y ago
  Excellent point, another great set of press for some great science!

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

So how about the overlap between this, and the people who think the U.S is heading for a civil war?

noidiocyallowed 4y ago

This article gives zero information. It gives noise. There are only a handful of people amongst those 340 million who can judge whether it was a good investment or not. Why ask the general populace who only see the nice pictures, but they mostly don't know anything at all about this topic. Ask researchers, physicists whether it was money burned or money well spent.

nextstep 4y ago

This is cheap compared to a lot of what the US government spends money on, and it won’t kill anybody! So really quite a non-issue.

throwaway64643 4y ago

People forget things fast. JWST as a telescope is great, but as a project, is catastrophic. Massive budget overrun, delay after delay. It's certainly the sign/result of project mismanagement. Unless they figured out what's wrong on this run, there won't be the next 'JWST', like ever.

greedo 4y ago
I think you might be underestimating the complexity of the JWST. A publicly funded project of this complexity will almost always have budget overruns and delays.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  So much of the complexity and cost overrun of the Webb was because we lacked a heavy rocket with a large payload fairing. The need to fold the telescope so delicately and intricately was the biggest challenge. Hopefully the larger rockets in development mean that future telescopes will not suffer from such constraints.
  - greedo 4y ago
    Exactly. Having a sclerotic space launch industry has really hampered NASA in many ways. I have hopes that Starship will be able to change this.

amriksohata 4y ago

Investment? If we are looking for ROI an understanding of the universe with images will never return us anything even if it increases our understanding there is no tangible ROI. Yes it gives us knowledge but is it usable to help us in anyway that would have been useful to Neanderthals millennia ago?

kosyblysk666 4y ago

chernevik 4y ago

"YouGov released an online poll" -- stopped reading right there

j0hnyl 4y ago

Why would anyone think it's not? $10B is pennies within the context of the US's frivolous spending.

TedShiller 4y ago

If you think it’s a good investment then I have something to sell you

dmd 4y ago

I did a poll of ~200 (University of Pennsylvania) undergraduates about 15 years ago, asking them (among many other questions) what percent of the federal budget NASA gets. The median answer was 15%, which is 30x more than the correct answer of one half of one percent.

Yajirobe 4y ago
Also, for comparison, the US military budget in 2021 was $700-800 billion.
stingraycharles 4y ago
That’s quite ridiculous an answer to be honest, but is a good example of how terrible people are at understanding federal funding, and unfortunately undergraduates are no exception. How much did they estimate the defense budget at, 150%?
- dmd 4y ago
  Median was 40%.

luigibosco 4y ago

They must have healthcare.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

burlesona 4y ago

It’s merely the cost of a few miles of urban freeway. Which IMO reflects well on NASA and poorly on our infrastructure spending.

credit_guy 4y ago

What bothers me is that most pro-science people don't even consider the price tag when they state that a project is worth it. JWST may be a great investment at $10 BN, but would it still be at $50 BN? Or $50 TN? Those who "love science" claim that no number is too high, because the society "benefits".

pradn 4y ago
I do wonder about that question. Once people see the images, you have to ask them what percent of the federal budget they’d be willing to put up for it. I bet it would be an order or magnitude more than it actually cost. $10 billion in my mind isn’t much at all for a civilization-scale science project. If you ask me, I’d put up $250 billion a year, putting it at about 6% of the federal budget. (I’m just thinking aloud here.)

ztjio 4y ago

I love science. I fully support the desire to answer big hard questions that may be answered with this tool. I absolutely am 100% behind spending this money on this telescope. I, however, do not believe it will ever provide any kind of substantial return beyond possibly helping to answer some esoteric questions about the universe that nobody alive today or in 10000 years will benefit from. Life isn't an investment, or it's a really terrible one, as the final return is oblivion no matter what. Making all decisions on the basis of "investment" is stupid. Why? We all will eventually die, the planet incinerated, all of this is pointless. Even if the JWST helped lead to interplanetary travel that only changes the timeframe, the heat death of the universe being inevitable. If your only basis for doing something now is some material return in the future then you've totally lost the plot. So yeah. I think it's a bad investment and I'm glad we spent the money on it.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago
The heat death of the universe is a theory that has never been observed. Theories like it depend entirely on our understanding on "esoteric" aspects of reality, which contrary to your belief have brought fantastic benefits to nearly everyone alive today, including you and I, right now sharing our thoughts through magical telepathy, the result of some new instrument finding some new "esoteric" phenomenon like radio waves some time ago.
- marnett 4y ago
  Thanks for the reality check. It is so easy to take the product of our science for granted.

yrgulation 4y ago

We should have an organisation like nato where each member state contributes a certain share of their gdp to space research. For instance asteroid mining is the natural way to go if we want to keep our planet fully clean and if we want less reliance on authoritarian states for rare minerals.

nojvek 4y ago

10B is peanuts to how much we spend on the military complex. JWST is an insanely complex telescope, puts humanity at the forefront of exploring the universe. Not only created new jobs but inspires a generation. We ought to spend more. A lot more on science and tech.

andrew-dc 4y ago

Somewhat related (pardon my jumbled transcription): "Sciences generally are divided up into two types: Pure, or Applied sciences. Applied sciences obviously undertake things that improve society. Pure science exists pretty much to satisfy human's curiosity. Astronomy is perhaps the purest of sciences; like music, you could live without it. You don't need it for your daily life. And for that reason it is important that the results of astronomy, this pure science, be put before the public. I feel that very strongly. Frequently we are asked, 'So, in a world where there is hunger, why study astronomy? Why devote funds to astronomy when those funds could be used to improve mankind?' My answer is that if you define an ideal society in which everyone has food, clothing, shelter (a roof over your head), basic medical care -- in fact such societies exist: your local prison, or jail. Each inmate has food, clothing, shelter, and medical care (not the greatest). When the doors are opened, do people rush to get into that ideal society or do they rush to get out? (chuckling) We know what the answer is: they rush to get out. Why? Because as important as these necessities are, the fact that you are not free to follow your desire (so to speak) is even more important than having food on the table. And astronomy is that [following your desire]. There is an inborn curiosity, I think, in all of us to address these questions of what's our relationship with the global environment? How did we get here? To what extent has the universe evolved in such a way that life has sprung forward? And I think that is something that is fundamental - so I think that public outreach for astronomy is something that is really crucial." -Dr. Robert Williams, Astronomer, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) from 1993 to 1998. Father of the Hubble Deep Field project. source: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Vka_9VzEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Vka_9VzEw)