Hacker News Reader

Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Hard part is done- now for the really scary part.

Hundreds of deployment steps will follow. Each one has to go perfectly. If it doesn't, the JWST fails and tens of billions of dollars and 30 years wasted (by some definition of 'waste').

But for every single one of those steps, an incredible amount of work has been done to ensure that it cannot fail.

But if any step fails, there's no repair mission possible for at least a decade or more.

View on HN

>there's no repair mission possible for at least a decade or more.

There's no repair mission possible, period. It only has enough fuel to keep orbiting L2 for around 10 years.

You don't think SpaceX would formulate an attempt to fix it?

Why is there this obsession for a private company to be the champion of public science? Am I the only one that hasn't bought SpaceX shares?

AFAIK there is the goal for NASA to work on a robotic refueling system, I don't know how official is that, but they have 10 years to come up with something.

Just watched "Don't Look Up" on Netflix last night. It's about a space mission designed to save the planet from a comet. It did a nice job of satirizing the misplaced faith so many Americans have in eccentric billionaires.

SpaceX is not a public company so almost nobody is able to buy shares

Ummm Maybe it’s because SpaceX is able to innovate faster than any government entity?

They can, but why does anyone think that they actually would, without an absolutely massive contract from NASA? It would be a total departure from what they are currently working on, and would basically be a one off mission. There is no reason to think they would want to do this.

Who do you think nasa would contract it out to if it wasn’t SpaceX?

Yes, somewhat stressful: "JWST has 344 single-point failures, 80% of which are in deployment systems"

I said it on a different thread...why not build two (while they're at it)?

Either it works and that would be a waste of additional billions, or it doesn't and there would be no guarantee the second wouldn't have the same critical mistake. This is not about rolling the dice, it's about putting every bit of effort and attention you can muster into one attempt - splitting that, even a little, reduces the odds of the main attempt working.

If it does end up failing, and let's pray to Bill's god and others it doesn't, we're better off trying something else in a few decades, or something simpler and more focused sooner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com