leave it to hn to be disappointed about such a monumental achievement
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
So you would have to do that again basically or come up with another mirror design.
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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.