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Comment by mygoodaccount | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else have an inexplicable subconscious desire for the JWST to fail catastrophically? I've been a huge fan of the project for years, but after launch my mind was constantly plagued with these urges. I can't seem to explain or get rid of it. "Call of the void", maybe?

Anyone else with this problem? I'd really like to stop thinking these horrible thoughts.

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Intrusive thoughts. They're far more common than society lets on. Just try not to act on it. But if you do try to destroy the JWST, please document the process as NASA might be interested.

I legitimately thought it for several years as I wanted it to act as a restorative force in the US space industry against mismanagement. It 'deserved' to fail to 'punish' those responsible for it's mismanagement. That was my thinking for quite a few years. However now I think SpaceX is doing a better job of leading that charge by simply pushing the industry forward towards being a little less risk adverse and avoiding analysis paralysis. Carrot is always better than the stick, when it works.

Not totally fail, but somehow I would’ve liked to see a bit of drama, so that some clever engineering would have needed to salvage the mission. And this is probably what most of the engineers were expecting and had contingency plans already drafted for many of the mechanisms.

I've had my occasional "wouldn't it be funny..." moments, but oddly enough, for the telescope I can confidently say "no".

Even from purely an entertainment standpoint, the prospect of getting new images from deep space in unprecedented quality and resolution seems a lot more interesting to me than some drama and blame-shifting about billions of NASA dollars going up in smoke.

If you want the experience of a 20 year project dissolving into nothing, you can just rewatch the news coverage about Afghanistan from last summer.

But yeah, it would certainly fit into the string of bizarrely bad news of the last years. Maybe it feels so weird that some project actually appears to succeed for a change?

Hopefully the upcoming Moonfall movie can scratch that itch, allowing us to keep the real world JWST un-exploded.

Gravity safely scratches that itch. As much as I love Hubble and the ISS, I love to see them disintegrate.

I think it's because our boring safe lifes makes us want a little bit of thrill.

It's the same feeling when you want society to colapse because 'how cool would be to be a survivor in an apocaliptical wasteland'. Or when you vote for a bad candite saying "f..k it, let's see what happens"

I experienced this with the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11. I was horrified by the human cost, but so, so interested in what I was seeing. I had often wondered what the collapse of a super-tall would be like, and there it was, on TV.

Is that you, Hubble main computer? You still have the visible spectrum!

looks like you need to start following hurricanes during the season.

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