An “incident” with the James Webb Space Telescope has occurred

Is the JWST in a state where they can open it up and inspect? Or are they just going to run simulations to see if the shock/vibration would cause any anomalies?

RUAG makes most of the "payload adapters" that integrate the satellite onto the top of a rocket. Based on the size of JWST they're probably using a 1666 model payload adapter.

RUAG's clamp-bands and separation system have a very well characterized Shock Response Spectrum [0, pg. 4], which would have been accounted for in the design of JWST. But the spacecraft and satellite usually separate after the initial shock of the explosive bolt and clamp-band de-tensioning, so they may need to investigate any coupling or recontact of the clamp-band.

If we're lucky they had some accelerometers running during integration and can review actual response data.

0) https://www.ruag.com/system/files/media_document/2019-03/PLE...

Is that like the difference between being inside a punching bag when punched and a bell when rung?

Right, in design shock and vibration are basically 2 separately requirements, analyzed and tested separately. Sometimes by analysis it is shown that vibration test levels "cover" the shock requirement, but a spacecraft that is the first of its type, and with many mechanisms is likely to undergo discrete shock testing.

Minor addition to your reply, design typically avoids similar natural frequencies to the launcher, but the design needs to be compatible with the loads resulting from vibration as

It sounds like the clamp band was accidentally released just after installation, thankfully in a position that didn't drop the spacecraft somehow. The input shock is more like 1000G for these things, usually the largest source of shock for a spacecraft. Of course, it's designed to be released by the same mechanism, although it would not be designed to be released an unlimited number of times. I would guess they already know the components which are critical for shock, and will inspect and/or function test those before proceeding. Since it was an unplanned event, even documenting that it happened and getting everyone to agree to proceed based on the spacecraft having been designed for that input shock, takes at least a few days.

It does not sound like a larger than design shock was somehow applied and they have to check everything at spacecraft level analysis. That would take at least several weeks.

RUD is quite a bit older than that game. The others are probably adapted, too, so maybe this one will catch on.

> The lack of doubles in space shows how exiting the field is because I'd rather have novel prototypes than another hubble.

There are some doubles though. Voyager 1 & 2, Spirit and Opportunity…

Good point. But doing two concurrenct desing would allow as backups for failures not in the telescope itself. For things like lauch, assembly, handling, etc.

If everything goes as planned, having two observatories sure would be appreciated by the scientific community.

Also, I assume, most the costs are associated with the project and setup of fabrication.

Without a complete and honest accounting of the risk profile, which is something NASA and its contractors have historically not been great at, it's hard to say whether test/backup hardware would have been warranted.

IMO "build two, launch one and see what happens" was absolutely not the right approach here. But the goal of the program is to get a functional JWST instrument into position, and if there's any relatively (wrt. the entire program) cheap way they could have substantially de-risked that outcome—by tooling up for a possible second production run, flying a "dumb" article to test the deployment procedure in situ, or whatever else—it should have been seriously considered.

Frankly, this sort of judgment is something I don't trust NASA to get right in practice, through no major fault of their own. Congress runs NASA like they run the rest of the country: setting them up to fail, blaming them when they inevitably do, withholding realistic funding for congressionally mandated programs while simultaneously helping their military-industrial cronies wring out every last dollar. The only way to get anything at this scale done is to lowball up front and beg for more money later.

This is engineer speak for "we dropped it"

Engineers at heart wouldn't let a single point of failure in in the design of it to let a pin drop unexpectedly. Is the vehicle insured for a do-over should it fail to launch unspectacularly and land in the water?

The Voyager 1 and 2 probes had this kind of strategy to cover for failure.

First rule in government spending - why build one when you can have two twice the price?

-- S. R. Hadden, Contact (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4sMJP9FmM)

They may not have the labor to build two of them. It's exceptionally difficult to put together the team necessary to build one of them.

The US isn't a serious nation any longer. The US is increasingly becoming a clown show. The response you'd get if you suggested to consider building two of them - for the reasons you mention - is that people would freak out (two boondoggles, $20 billion in cost, decades of time; that would be the flailing, screeching response).

The root problem with JWST was not being able to get the money in the first place. That led to budgeting shenanigans responsible for much of the project delay. The single telescope came within a whisker of being scrapped by Congress.

If you gave projects like Webb the kind of budget that now gets eaten by human space flight, you could have telescopes filling half the sky. But NASA has to work within the really severe funding constraints imposed by the white elephant that is ISS.

I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "manufacturing" and other development activities in this case. This sort of thing, an effort to build a single example of a device using a mountain of new technology, just can't follow the process of design the whole thing, then manufacture it, then we're done. Kind of like waterfall vs agile software development. They're probably constantly fabricating and testing subsystems in various ways, iterating on manufacturing technique to get quality good enough, making changes in other related subsystems as a result of things they found to be impractical with the first, making sure subsystems actually integrate with each other as expected, etc.

I think the difference is whether the vibration is expected. Vibrations from being launched are probably accounted for and tested numerous times, while an unintended vibration caused by a "sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band" could cause unforeseen damages to the instrument.

The probe is rated for that.

It is not rated for being dropped.

The statement does not actually say anything about the magnitude of the vibrations during this incident, let alone how they compare to those expected during launch.

I think the difference in G forces sustained during launch and when hitting the floor are few orders of magnitude off.

"Some vibration" doesn't give the same feeling in the reader as the techs and engineers on the floor felt when they heard a 10 Bn USD science project that millions of people are hoping to learn from crashes into the ground.

A committee decided that the potential danger from cold weather to o-ring gaskets wasn't too serious. That's how the Challenger blew up.

Maybe not serious at all -- there will be more vibrations when the rocket engine ignites, but when $10B are at stake no one would want to be careless.

Boeing thought their last launch delay was just going to take a small amount of time too. Then, as they dug into it, they basically put it on indefinite hold when they realized they had no idea on what to do about the issue causing the dealy.

Of course they will come out and say "just a short delay" immediately, but who knows what the actual delay gets to when they really start looking at it. Besides, how can they really know that it is okay without taking it down and putting it through all of the motions? A bent arm in a manner not visible while folded in launch config but prevents it from unfolding after launch is a very dumb reason to not have this thing work.

This is not Elon’s idea, there was much clamoring in the scientific community to spread the research dollars instead of having one flagship suck up all the funding. It’s a big gamble to be able to see what JWST is designed to see, no number of smaller projects would match it, whether it was the best use of our taxdollars remains to be seen

> Maybe Elon is right, and instead of spending tens of billions of dollars and decades on one bulletproof piece of jewelry

Musk is pretty much socially incompetent, proven so many times. On this topic he discounts the fact that the type of individuals needed to do this job have plenty of offers and nobody wants to work on something which will blow up and has very low odds of making it. Especially smart people who bathe in the concept of opportuinity cost with regards to their time and carrer.

Do you think that 20 cheap telescopes give the same benefit as one great one?

Like if I gave you 20 shitty 360p cameras to shoot a movie would it look as good as if I gave you one Arri Alexa?

Possible? probably. Lower complexity than the monstrosity that is JWST? Doubtful.

The question was never how to launch it or when but building and testing the telescope. SpaceX has no proven or even theoretical skill in building telescopes.

Building a giant space telescope where everything has to work right the first time is hard. Building a capital-intensive project like Webb on a NASA budget cycle is hard. I find the idea that everyone at NASA is a bunch of fools a pretty tiresome theme in these discussions.

Isn't SpaceX an example of the government deploying capital? Since they are a government contractor?

Yeah, as others have said: Is there anything in the private sector remotely close to the JWST in its capability and planned lifespan? If so, why hasn't it launched, or why hasn't another nation developed it?

> I don't think anything else could better express just how bad the government is at deploying capital than the sentence above.

Not really. This is a great expression of how hard it is to deploy capital in a one-off manner, to a strict budget.

Contrast this space telescope with the series of Earth-observation satellites launched by the National Reconnaissance Office. By amortizing development costs over at least half a dozen launches, the NRO keeps putting up classified payloads.

SpaceX's success isn't exactly organizational genius, it's that its plan from the outset has been to rapidly iterate with the expectation that the first half-dozen of anything will fail in interesting ways. Were JWT being built to a SpaceX standard, there wouldn't be one telescope -- there would be a dozen.

SpaceX put a telescope with a mirror 10x the size of Hubble's at the Sun-Earth L2 point? I missed that bit of news, but impressive!

SpaceX gets a ton of funding from the government, so is their success proof that the government is good or bad at deploying capital?

I don't believe the JWST effort is comparable to anything SpaceX is doing.

Falcon 9 first optimized for manufacturing cost for a well-proven category of product. Pretty much every aspect of orbital multi-stage rocket design is well explored, and they can surely hire people with experience in it. Optimizing for manufacturing cost is also an activity that many people have experience in. It's an innovative and risky business strategy, but nothing being done is physically or technologically risky - the only risk is they may not be able to optimize costs enough, which is only a risk to the business.

For the next innovation, first-stage landing, it was also very low-risk to their core business. If they screw up the landing stuff, then the first stage blows up somewhere, but they were all going to do that anyways, no risk to the primary payload. This let them iterate on it rapidly for very low cost and risk.

Building a brand-new space telescope of an original design with a dozen new and revolutionary technologies is a whole different ballgame. There's a ton of unknown unknowns that nobody can anticipate ahead of time, only one try per device, and it's either total success or failure. It shouldn't be too surprising that it overran expected costs and deadlines so far. It's more a statement on the Government contracting process that attempts to treat building revolutionary technology just like building the 10 millionth Jeep.

Are you implying that yearly launches would reduce cost through economies of scale or something? Or just that JWST costs less than the F-35 program?

While having a Starship sized fairing to put JWST in for launch would probably reduce some packaging complexity, I'm not sure the launch vehicle is the major source of cost in this case.

It's jaw droppingly low. That money would only buy you a couple miles of new subway in nyc today.

Then we could spend 10,000x on the launch? Nah, let's let the people managing the rocket science continue to do so.

...they'd mass too much to launch. But I'm sure they'd look neat mounted on plinths in front of the KSC parking lot!

We should add treads and a cannon while we're at it. Is outer space counted when we say "all terrain"?

Its about balancing between the needed properties, strength and weight. Similar thing for airplanes, a minor collision can ground a plane but would be a non issue for a tank.

No offence but that one of the dumbest comments I have seen in a while.

Have you considered what you are proposing?

They would have to send a spyglass if they made it rugged piece of technology not most advanced space telescope in history of humanity.

Any kind of extra shielding, extra rigidity takes away from the weight budget of the project.

>”Maybe, just maybe, if we stopped building telescopes like fragile porcelain dolls…”

It’s a pet peeve of mine but whenever I read “Maybe, just maybe” I instantly dislike whatever comes next. It’s an indicator that the post is sardonic and dramatically over simplified.

The real reason why the JWST is so delicate is because it’s a large satellite that had to be crammed into a tiny fairing. That means it has to be folded up like the worlds most intricate origami. All those moving parts, coupled with incredibly thin and weight saving components means that deploying it successfully is tremendously fraught with complexity. If we had a wider diameter rocket, JWST wouldn’t be nearly as complicated. But that simply wasn’t the case in 1997 when it was first designed.

Yes - Lagrange point L2 which is a waaaay different orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point

Yup - JWST will be way high up in space, much farther away than the Moon and plenty far from the debris we talk about in low Earth orbit. The telescope actually orbits the Sun, not Earth, at a point called "Earth-Sun L2", which is a point in line with the Earth. L2 is one of 5 Lagrange points in the Earth-Sun system, which are special spots objects can orbit around (stably or unstably) without there being a central body.

There is no current interest by anyone in destroying science telescope rather than spy telescopes.

Also, the JWT is at L2, 1.5m km from earth, whereas ASAT tests generally occur in LEO. Cosmos 1408 as you mention orbited at around 500km.

Although I’m certain we could blow up the JWT if we really really wanted to.

>where Russia just blows things up

Maybe you should name and shame everyone that done this same thing, even if you don't remember similar actions the comments on the Russia storied remind us that other assholes also did the same, some even blew up nukes in orbit causing malfunction to satellites.

Yeah, it is depression to think that lot of things are at the mercy of a few giants whims.

It's worth noting that Russia is not the only country that has done this. The US, China, and India have all blown up a satellite with a rocket from Earth.

Here a couple of Wall Street journal commentary (AKA opinion) pieces on the topic. They all talk about different aspects of it, the first being probably the most interesting around your point of view.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-space-treaty-to-stop-debris-a...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-space-front-rus...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/space-armageddon-and-putins-thr...

As always, you can plug these into http://archive.is to bypass the paywall.