I didn't realize the JWT will need to burn fuel in its steady state. Its pretty disappointing that this took 20 years to build and we will only get 20 years of use out of it.
20 years is still a rather long time. Expect something else fragile to fail before then. And that's still double the target life time! (And unless they've made it almost maliciously difficult to add fuel, I'm sure there will be some Space Bro who'll offer to refuel it for likes / tax reasons.)
Except we launch well over 1000 satellites a year. The JWT is clearly a bigger deal than that. This has been advertised as NASA's magnum opus. The fact that it was only supposed to last 10 years makes it feel much less significant...
I'm worried that NASA has spent all its money and political will (and then some) getting JWT over the finish line.
I mean, we'll still have some big terrestrial infrared 'scopes. And we'll be coming off 20 years of very good space infrared scope data... And we'll have had the smaller Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope up in L2 also (launching in 2027, nominal life 5 years).... ESA is launching an exoplanet-focused infrared scope to L2 in a similar timespan... Presumably other "smaller" infrared scopes will fly by 2042. So...
There's so many wavelengths and different possible space telescope missions. Let's not replace JWST (assuming it gets a normal mission life)-- let's keep some infrared capability and do something else.
wonder if we could put a telescope on the moon for $10B though.
Most of JWST's wavelength coverage is energies that terrestrial telescopes can do (just less well). It's not like Herschel which went into the far, far infrared (and had its life limited by liquid He as a result).
Re: Moon-- Why put a telescope down a gravity well?
Most of the discussion of telescopes on the moon I've heard has been about radio telescopes, where a huge hunk of rock between you and Earth can be a feature.
Roman is slated for launch in 2027 (and survived the JWST overruns!), LISA in the 2030s, and there are a few competing proposals that haven't totally firmed up for the next decade too: LUVOIR, HabEx, and a few others
Further optical and gravitational observatories are amongst further options.
Trust that plans are in process.
JWTs location in L2 (a mathematically unstable location that requires energy to not roll back into a gravity well in any direction) is like putting it on the satellite equivalent of K2 and not coming down from the peak for 20 years and you compare it to the thousands of commuters that made it up the hill down the road from your house.
> legally mandated reentry in 25 years.
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Mitigating_...
FCC subsequently fined them $900k.
[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363486A1.pdf
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-satellite-fine-idUSKC...
https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/06/24/a-behind-the-scenes-look-...
Perhaps there's some altrusitic archive.org style site that needs to exist for science, that features datasets of multiple PB in magnitude and allows anyone to pull the full archive.
Maybe in the future, but still, people still have access to source imagery and they regularly make spectacular images and material from public domain data from space agencies and interest groups. You don't need 4PB unless doing something like, well, imaging a black hole.
It's fun, not sure how much there is run a business from it, unless you plan on taking the data and creating spectrographs for some future mining mission way in the future? :D
JWST pivots the entire spacecraft to point the 6 meter mirror. I'm sure they've optimized the consumables on the schedule, but it simply 'costs resources' to do this sort of work. I assure you there are gruellingly dense and optimized observations plans afoot.
Compare to e.g. the very successful Herschel Space Observatory -- it too went out to L2(-ish), did everything it was meant to do in its three year mission, and managed to extend to four before (drum roll) running out of fuel, this time for cooling. JSWT solves this cooling issue by some incredibly funky mechanical resonance cooling. Herschel "only" cost about $1 billion, and it will be interesting to compare the science results.
L2 is an unstable orbit and needs constant corrections to not drift away, so JWST has much more significant fuel needs than if it were in say Hubble's orbit. How much fuel it would have left for these maneuvers depended on how precise the launch was (i.e. how much fuel it needed to spend on corrective burns just to get to L2). This was obviously uncertain until after the launch, but ten years was a lower bound above which the launch would not be considered a major issue--if it only had say 5 years of fuel left after the launch that would be an indication that the launch was flubbed some how.
TLDR: JWST was not "supposed" to last only 10 years. It was designed and built to last much longer, that was just a lower bound assuming nothing went very wrong.
cf. Mars rovers operating long past the "planned" mission length, e.g. Opportunity's "planned" 90-day mission turning into over 5,000 days. It is vastly unfair to the people who designed and built Opportunity to say it was "supposed" to last only 90 days. It was built to last much longer; 90 days was a lower bound for the mission to be considered a success.
This one is hundreds to thousands of times further out than any of those satellites, for instance. It also has a far longer lifetime compared to the average, even before this news. Four times the distance of the moon from Earth. There's no luxury of being able to repair, service and refuel such a thing without approaching or exceeding the costs of just making a new, better one with the learnings and savings from before.
(edit - the "earth moon" distance isn't to scale with respect to planetary diameters... the distance from the earth to the moon is about the same as the sum of all the diameters of all the planets - that's a long way itself)
Or do we get to go all the way back to Shuttleworth, Tito, and Branson?
Surely Branson is the first space bro.
Maybe a new kind of blockchain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26117587
"After some years of running, any particle physics experiment typically begins to suffer from diminishing returns: as the key results reachable by the device begin to be completed, later years of operation discover proportionately less than earlier years"
Perhaps the same applies to space telescopes too?
> Perhaps the same applies to space telescopes too?
That's not to say we'll run out of interesting things to look at. Only that there is in fact a case of diminishing returns and interest.
But yes, space is big. And there's much in it.
Only stable - self correcting - are L4 and L5 points .
Even if it was stationary at L2, Earth wouldn’t completely shield it from the Sun - the point is too far from Earth/the Sun so large for it to.
There is a nice animation on https://webb.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html
https://space.stackexchange.com/a/38415
https://time.com/6127003/webb-space-telescope-discoveries/
> Webb faces other operational challenges, however. Hubble has been kept alive in part through maintenance and servicing runs done by astronauts. Webb’s great distance from Earth makes that kind of house call impossible. What’s more, in order to remain stable at its gravity-balanced Lagrange point, Webb needs a thruster system, and a thruster system requires fuel. The telescope will launch with a full tank, but that will be only enough to keep it operating for a minimum of five years and a maximum of 10. In theory, a refill ought to be possible, and the telescope is actually equipped with a docking target to accommodate an incoming spacecraft that could conduct a refueling and extend the JWST’s life. It’s an appealing idea, especially considering the telescope’s dizzying price tag. That spacecraft, however, does not yet exist, though it could within the next decade.
To be honest, sounds like a cool project to start working on, with the idea that it becomes an off the shelf capability for future space observatories. SpaceX's Dragon can carry a 6000 kg payload, and already supports autonomous docking with the ISS, for example.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2021/12/29/nasa-says-webbs-exces...
Maybe technology will develop enough to allow us to send drones to work on JWST, but today this is still just a dream.
PS: I'm just a random code monkey on the internet, so take these comments with a grain of salt.
Let’s say we wanted a constellation of telescopes to do full sky surveys of small objects in our system for asteroid detection. Do those need to be kept at near absolute zero to be effective at that task?
Webb has a specific mission of imaging deeply redshifted space. I would hope in 20 years we’ll be able to launch bigger, simpler, and cheaper designs for more “pedestrian” missions.
Rather than lament its lifespan, I am hopeful that a couple decades from now we will build and launch something that is exponentially better.
I am very excited about space and the future, I just think that in the years since Apollo the story has been emblematic of wastefulness, contractor level benign corruption (cost plus contracting) more than it has been inspiring with the stories you mentioned. just my opinion.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
2 https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/nasas-sls-moon-rocket-is-2...
> NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending....In 1973, NASA submitted congressional testimony reporting the total cost of Project Apollo as $25.4 billion (about $156 billion in 2019 dollars).
I wonder if there also wasn't that level of waste at that point but not too many people cared because the country was mostly terrified by the USSR and wanted to win.
Ironically, I think the more we think there's corruption and waste, the more that may lead to corruption and waste, as we distrust and defund and discourage. Again, I imagine some of the waste comes from the fickle attitude that some of the public and lawmakers have towards funding these orgs.
The stagnation in aerospace is mostly due to us running into fundamental limits of physics pretty quickly, not due to some kind of work ethic or creative failures. to keep pushing forward in space would have required another order of magnitude in funding, and funding during Apollo was already huge. That said, I wouldn't mind if all the worlds military $$$ had been dumped into mars colonization either.
We've sent hundreds of robots all over the place. To Mars, Jupiter, asteroids, comets, the outer planets, out of the Solar System entirely, as close to the Sun as can be managed, and everywhere else in between. For basically all of these missions, sending humans along would be 1000x more expensive, and the humans would be bored to tears for 99.9% of the time. For most of the rest of the time, they'd be relying on the same instruments as the robotic missions, as the environment is too harsh for anything else. So what's the point?
And who would we be sending? We could send super-smart scientific experts to maybe follow up on things a little faster, but it'd be a waste to have them sit around for years on the voyage back and forth. Or we could send more ordinary folks, who might not be all that much more capable than the robots we're sending now.
Sorry, it might burst some peoples bubbles of romance and sexy space adventures, but it mostly just doesn't make sense to send humans into space for the type of exploration missions we're doing. Maybe if we can send enough resources to actually have a colony on Mars or something, but we're not there yet.
What about Voyager, ISS, Hubble, Mars rovers, Mars helicopter(!), and Cassini/Huygens missions? There's more to do in space than just going to the moon. I'd love to see us back there as well, but I think there's still a whole lot to be excited about.
As to what we can do in space: the value of reusable boosters is very understated. Why don't we have a manned mission to Mars? Because it takes a huge payload with lots of delta-V. Sending ten rockets up for orbital refueling was always a pipe dream in terms of cost. Suddenly it's attainable and the solar system is our oyster. It's still expensive, but we now have the tools.
Your comment is really frustrating. few people in this life can do something that was never done before, much much fewer on this scale, much much much fewer with such impact on science and humanity.
So you would have to do that again basically or come up with another mirror design.
I am sure they have learned alot from building JWT, as they certainly learned a lot from building Hubble or the space shuttle. I don't think that knowledge necessarily transfers forwards to make the next project easier.
The evidence is that the time and cost it took to produce JWST are what they are. That planners lowballed these estimates, or that administrators and legislators wouldn't have approved greenlighting based on accurate estimates, speak to failures in planning and administration, rather than engineering.
Much of the planning / large-project literature, which I've studied for some three decades, seems itself to be largely blind to this distinction.
As to many comments found on the Internet mirroring such viewpoints.
20 year project? Dies in committee.
Welcome to politics.
All I'm saying is there's room to improve. JWST would be a monumental success for humanity even if it launched 20 years late.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...
"The video game Duke Nukem Forever spent fifteen years in development, from 1996 to 2011."
This was, and continues to be, a momentous accomplishment.
The fact that it happened at all is a herculean task in constraints management, not only on the engineering side, but also on the political and zeitgeist-management side (e.g., managing different adminstrations with often antithetical perspectives on the value of science, etc).
A lot of folks on HN only see this from their own perspective, of "how-can-I-disrupt-X", or "I would have done it so much better", without a real appreciation of the overwhelming complexities in pulling off a task with so many moving parts (literally and figuratively).
Sure, you could have done it better. Then do it. But don't diminish the value of a truly monumental accomplishment when it happens; they don't come often enough, and more often than not, projects with this level of ambition fail far before they ever get to the point they can be critiqued by arm-chair geniuses.
1. For an astronomer, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an large mirror, mounting it in space with a really big catapult, and then using origami to unfold everything. From earth, this telescope could be accessed through everyday ham radios.
2. It doesn't actually replace the Hubble. Most people I know still want to see things in the visible spectrum, and IR fake images just don't cut it. This does not solve the visible spectrum issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
This is all sarcasm, modified from this infamous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Say it wildly over performs reliability.. it lasts not 20 years but 1,000 years - is that more of success? I'd argue against that - it's more of a failure because we don't need it to last that long.
What if - hypothetically - we had JWST 10 years ago for half the cost but it were just winking out right now? Would that be a failure? I think that's at least an arguable point.
We have that guideline because putting down your peers like this is reliably the marker of a bad comment, and leads to significantly poorer threads. We all love to feel superior to others, or (probably the same thing) to ward off feeling inferior, but this is a low-grade mechanism and never a source of interesting conversation. It also pretty much dominates the internet and we're trying for something different from those defaults here.
HN comments have been overwhelmingly positive about the JWT and it is currently one of the most popular topics that appears here.