I remember getting excited about this telescope a decade ago. I haven't heard of it since; but I thought it's budget was cut and it was over.
I'm excited NASA is finally going to get it up in space!
I'm excited NASA is finally going to get it up in space!
Edit; comparing the logic of a 'but for' vs a 'necessary' condition. Was the F-35 necessary for threat mitigation. No. Was it framed as the necessary for cost savings, yes.
So, the real question is if the F-35’s should have had fewer versions and thus been more capable in it’s remaining roles.
For the shuttle to get approved, it had to meet the demands of many masters. The fact that it had to meet DoD missions as well as NASA missions made it a bit of a boondoggle. Likewise, the JSF needed to meet the Marine Corps demands of VTOL to take the place of the AV8B.
It's hard to remain focused when you have so many stakeholders. As the saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee.
It just failed at reusability, it was more like refurbishability :) But many lessons have been learned from that.
I agree 100% that there are organizational causes to past mishaps. As to whether or not it was avoidable...I tend to think they are rooted very much in human psychology and we think about risk. The same issues occur today within NASA (EVA 23 is a good example [1], despite the 'organizational' fixes put in place after Challenger and Columbia). Humans are really, really good at rationalizing the answer we emotionally want.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Hansen_PressC...
I think we're saying the same thing. The argument is, "Was the F22/F18/Fwhatever/weapon-system necessary for threat mitigation? Yes."
With that said, if proponents of the F35 want to frame it as "threat reduction + cost savings" that's how they get the budget approved. But the point stands that without a threat, there's no basis for the cost savings argument. I'm not saying it was effective as cost reduction.
To circle back to the original point, it's much easier to get a budget approved when the basis is existential threat, rather than "science is cool."
Again, if there is no threat (perceived or real), there is no need for a weapons system, period. Think of it this way, if there was a proposal for a cost savings for an anti-spacecraft/anti-asteroid system mounted to the JWST? I'm saying no, because there is no credible threat that would prevent. You need the threat first, in order for the cost savings of a program to have meaning if the basis of the program is threat mitigation.
>Pretty much everyone at the time just wanted more F-22s
Not really, unless you're only talking about a specific branch. Only the Air Force wanted F22s. As was stated by another commenter, the JSF was needed because it was because it fulfilled desires that other services had that the F22 does not provide.
The JSF were sold around cost savings; half the price so you could buy twice as many.
The Navy and Marine Corps didn't, especially after development of the Naval variant of the F-22 was cancelled in 1991.
The stealth window of usefulness is closing anyway with improved radar.
It was canceled because the Navy said it wouldn't work, both because of cost and take-off weight of the proposed Naval variant relative to the capacity of then-current and in-development carriers.
The F-22 is an air superiority fighter. The F-35 is a multi role strike aircraft. The F-22 would never be allowed for export, because it has features we don't want to share even with allies. The F-35 was designed for export to allies from day one.
There's no scenario where just buying more F-22's made more sense than building the F-35. The F-35's project problems, primarily driven from the joint acquisition strategy are their own thing, completely independent of the F-22.
There's a Rand study on it. They concluded that the attempts at commonality didn't just fail, they proved counterproductive. They did a historical review of joint acquisition programs and found basically all of them hit the same flaw. As appealing as it may seem to congress, it's a bad strategy.
The F-35's problems as far as budget and schedule slippage were largely in the software section, and a lot of that goes back to structuring it as a single source cost plus contract. That incentivized LM to make the project as big and delayed as possible.
LM is infamous for this sort of thing. They turned Aegis into a clown circus of a billion different ship specific variants where they could charge N times to fix the same flaw in different nearly identical codebases. The Navy has been trying to extract themselves from it for like 2 decades now, with some signs of success finally showing up.
In short, LM is behaving in bad faith. This is unsurprising. They basically invented these tactics some decades back.
Back when Ash Carter was Sec Def, he called in LM and demanded they start hitting the promised numbers on marginal airframe costs. Reportedly the conversation went something like "do this or we'll curtail our buy" to which LM responded "by how much?" As replied "how about none?"
Suddenly they started hitting the numbers, surprise surprise.
We're about to have the same conversation about sustainment costs. I hope Austin drives as hard a bargain.
If you've read any of the limited info coming out about some of the AF's new projects like the B-21 or NGAD, it's pretty clear they took the lessons from the F-35 to heart and are using a very different approach, one where they hold the reigns of integration and can create competition at any time.
There is few worth from remote sensing unreachable (even in theory) objects. Kepler already proved theoretized Goldilocks Zone rocky planets and, in general, provided a lot of data for non-field research (less exciting than Hubble photos indeed). Last, but not least, what's the JWST's mission exactly?
Also, from taxpayers' money perspective Kepler's component quality was complete disaster.
So, I'd better invest in more Martian/Jovian probes than in revival of obsoleted project. Such revival is very similar to Russian GLONASS (a competitor to 1970s NAVSTAR) programme reboot.
This sort of proves my point, no one knows which exactly research JWST will do upon deployment, because original mission goals mainly became obsolete.
For example, Dr Christine Chen et al will be using JWST for at least 34.9 hours to study the Icy Kuiper Belts in Exoplanetary Systems using near infrared spectroscopy [1]
[0] https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra...
The research isn't a secret, JWST is already booked solid for like 18 months after it launches. You can see how that time is allocated across various projects here: https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra...
Just look at breakthrough chances from, for example, 5 days trans-neptunian object search or the pointing of instrument at largely unexplored Uranus system for petty 30 hours.
The money for projects like this, largely due to the sensitive nature of it all, still ends up staying local to the governments funding the projects, which means a significant minority of it still gets recouped in taxes two or three degrees down, and the balance that can't be recouped still ends up funding colossal technological advances, e.g advances in EM sensors, lensing, computing, electronic resiliency, power generation, the list goes on.
The reason governments spend on projects like this regardless of public opinion is because they're necessary to advance the state of science and engineeeing when investment returns are out of the question near-term.
Even defense spending operates this way, though the degree to which we pour good money after bad in defense is probably worth scrutiny. At least JWST will bring value, unlike the f35.
It seems clear the original estimate of $500 million was overly optimistic; actually, it was criticized almost immediately as such after publication. There's a lot of incentive to low-ball these initial cost estimates.