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Comment by PinkMilkshake | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little embarrassed to say this and I don't know exactly what I pictured in my head, but I had no idea these telescopes were so big[1].

I guess I never saw one pictured next to a human. I've only seen pictures of satellites being worked on so I expected something more human sized? It seems so stupid now, especially since earth telescopes are huge.

[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013500/a013522/JWST_v...

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It’s really easy to get a wrong intuitive sense of the size of these things! I don’t understand why space agencies don’t always have human figures for reference in their visualizations. Or even a simple scale bar! We just get these silly “the size of a tennis court” type textual comparisons. Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are, as another example.

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are

To be fair, Perseverance looks as big as I imagined it would be, about the size of an SUV but wider (because even in 2020s, they still don't have streets in mars, what a bummer): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/science/mars-2020-rover-n...

Or did my googling fail me? :)

edit: direct image link around paywall: https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/02/18/science/18mars202...

My mental image until I looked it up was around the size of a dog. No, I don't know why

The older ones were smaller.

https://earthlymission.com/size-comparison-generations-mars-...

But even Spirit and Oppy were… well, I guess they're roughly the size of a very large dog. At 185 kg, much heavier than even the largest dogs though.

Because it's called rover? :)

Stupid me thought its go kart sized like the one Howard Wolowitz in The Big Bang Theory brought to a baseball stadium.

https://archive.is/tpcRK for the article

I believe the banana is the Internet standard for visual scale.

Also radioactivity, which also suits a Mars rover comparison.

> Few people realize how big the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are

… and how much larger they are than Sojourner from the Pathfinder mission. Perseverance was sent with a metal plate depicting profiles of all five Mars rovers to date: Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance. [1].

[1]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/mars-rovers/en/mars-rovers_metal...

The JWST at 6.5m is larger than the largest terrestrial telescope in my childhood.

Keck was the first one bigger - 1989.

The next one Keck 2 was 1997.

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

The space shuttle blows my mind every time I see one. It's huge - the size of an airliner - and would glide back at Mach 25. It's a humbling level of accomplishment.

To show the comparison (737 for example here)

https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/shuttle-948x1500.jpg?v...

Those size comparisons are super misleading. I've seen the shuttle and it's not that big. A 737 is pretty small. The shuttle can ride piggy-back on a 747--in fact it was designed to:

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/news/FactSheets/FS-01...

Also, the comparison with the Statue of Liberty is also misleading. The Statue of Liberty is on a huge pedestal that makes it stand much, much higher; the orbiter and boosters wouldn't reach the top of the SoL.

The sum of your comment seems to be the subjective belief that the statue of liberty and 737s are "not that big"...

Not sure what size you'd expect the shuttles to be, but being in the same ballpark as the statue of liberty (without pedestal) seems a great deal larger than my expectations.

These are subjective things, sure. My personal feeling upon seeing the shuttle was that it was not that big, because I've seen big airliners all my life. I was expecting the shuttle to be bigger. So when I looked at the parent's infographic and saw a 737 and the Statue of Liberty there, they didn't seem right (I've also seen the SoL in-person). So the size comparisons I think are quite misleading in that graphic, and yeah, I was surprised how much smaller the shuttle is than what I expected.

Having never actually seen the statue of liberty my sense when seeing these comparisons is that it's much smaller in real life than the version in my imagination - no matter how many times I see the comparisons, the statue remains much bigger in my head

Well, the 737 is probably the worst aircraft to compare against, given it has been enlarged by 50% from the original 737-100 to the newer 737-900! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/B737Fami...

original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!

The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.

This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.

And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s.

An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...

If the military-funded project creates $1M worth of value using $1B of funds, the unfunded project is objectively better.

That's what army mapping service essentially did with early radar distance measuring projects. Huge expensive fleet of 18-wheeler trucks failure. And classical surveying methods beat it in every way at the time.

But it was the direct predecessor to microwave communications. It was just portable military distance measuring equipment (like the model-99 dme w/ ~1cm @50km) that used a signal they found easy to piggyback voice and data on. And included that in the field units.

AND 2nd, after a dozen or so more hugely expensive projects (ranging from failure to moderate success to "achieves objectives"), it led to the Airforce NAVSTAR program, which you know as... GPS.

So the question becomes: What was the actual "objective" value provided by those expensive initial radar experiments, despite failing to achieve their direct objective?

It's difficult to say without access to the counterfactual world where GPS was invented based on civilian microwave communication which itself would have evolved from civilian radio communication. We live in a world where the DoD redistributes money away from private industry and towards another sector of private industry, and it is hard to say what would happen if R&D tax laws were changed to move that money back from private military industry R&D to industry-industry R&D.

Maybe microwave transmission, but the economics of GPS or GNSS in general would preclude civilian investment in such an expensive constellation without obvious revenue channels.

And it's moot for both these cases because the technology was needed for direct military applications anyway.

What's the practical or ideological benefit of industry-industry R&D when the military is going to be the only customer, or at least the only paying customer for the first years/decades of use?

I agree with you in general, with it being better for governments not picking the winners of markets or deciding who gets research money.

But military is such a unique (yet universally needed) type of market, that practicality here means treating them as a large customer with unique product needs ( products unlikely to be revenue generating on the public market), even if you don't treat it as direct government allocation or a fixed/manipulated market.

The only way I can think of to avoid that entirely would be some libertarian version of an all private, defense-by-contract type military.

And then you'd have concerns about whether that could hold up to peer adversaries, and dozens of other wildcard concerns.

And sweeping von Braun's Nazi complicity under the rug while others were hanging from the gallows at Nuremberg.

As A German this really bugs me. Von Braun and friends knew exactly what was going on in their production facilities, didn't care and never had to confront their role in this.

"Once the rockets are up who cares where they come down, that's not my department" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

don't say that he's hyp-o-critical, say rather that he's a-po-litical

(For those who aren't familiar with 1967 humor: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s )

Right, this is basically a "human politics" thing.

A pretty typical big government project to me. Lot's of power centers pulling in different directions, little focus on actual needs.

Space X does better work in part because it can make its own decisions and focus on long term goals.

That's the stereotype of government promoted by private business like SpaceX, so they can get the funding shifted from NASA to them. But no private business has accomplished in space anything approaching what government has. NASA has been spectacularly successful, orders of magnitude beyond any explorers in human history.

We're talking about just one of many successses on this page.

OTOH, they also influenced it in many good ways that you don't hear about.

E.g., my astronomy professor mentioned to me in a conversation that the original design for the Hubble was smaller due to expected budget, but that it got up-sized because it turned out that they could piggy-back off of other relevant military development, and iirc, that went beyond just the larger available size of the shuttle bay.

I thought the military money was promised but never ended being provided, making it doubly tragic.

>>the imagined mission never happened

The X37s would like a word. Also, "Rods from God" has something to say

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

https://endwar.fandom.com/wiki/Kinetic_Strike

---

Rods from god may be the source of "jewish space lasers" <-- the comment by a senator on how the wild-fires have been started in US and AU, meaning that a tungsten rod from space rained down molten tungsten to start fires...

Fun stuff to speculate on.

The mission being referred to was capturing a Russian satellite in a polar orbit in the cargo bay and returning it to earth. The shuttle also needed big wings to provide the cross-range capability it would need to complete one polar orbit and land at the original launch point (Vandenberg) despite the earth having rotated, moving the airbase by many hundreds of miles since takeoff.

The original NASA spec had a smaller cargo bay and wings because it would have mainly been a crew ferry. As a result it would also have been launchable on top of a rocket instead of strapped to the side, giving better safety. Significant cargoes would have been launched independently.

Russians had the Buran, with more or less the same dimensions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

I've heard the (probably unfounded) story that the Soviets saw the Space Shuttle, couldn't figure out why the Americans would build it but figured there surely must be a good reason; so they copied it to also have whatever capability the Americans were after.

Buran was also superior in capabilities; greater lift capacity, ability to transport more people, and attain higher orbits. It could also perform a mission entirely autonomously.

The US Space Shuttle was the (heavy) inspiration, but the Soviets put their own spin on it.

That's the second mover advantage right?

That's part of it (with regards to rocket motor tech). The other is that the Soviet's designed the vehicle through a different process, versus the American's where it was design by committee (between NASA and the DoD [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_design_process

It had one test flight. Hardly comparable to a system which had (six?) models fully deployed and operational.

Five Shuttles flew to space - Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour. And Buran - the one which flew (other Soviet spaceplanes would have different names, so Buran is like Columbia, not like Space Shuttle) - didn't have e.g. the life support system; it was rather a development flight, than a demonstration of a complete system. Still Buran (as a combined name, like Energiya-Buran program) had some better capabilities e.g. no toxic propellants onboard (Shuttle has to be chemically "pacified" after each landing) and longer orbital life (with cryogenics onboard).

> Buran (as a combined name, like Energiya-Buran program) had some better capabilities e.g. no toxic propellants onboard (Shuttle has to be chemically "pacified" after each landing) and longer orbital life (with cryogenics onboard).

My point is that they aren't capabilities, just specifications and promises for a cutting edge, developmental technology.

It didn't fail for any technical reason though, the whole government behind it was stumbling at the time on it's way to full collapse from a heady medley of internal and external forces.

According to a book cited on the Wikipedia page on the Buran program, the Soviets looked at the shuttle's payload capacity and concluded it could be used to deploy military weapons into orbit.

Any orbital rocket can deploy weapons into orbit. The Shuttle was unique in that it could theoretically capture a satellite and return to Earth with it.

It's not unfounded, and they knew about it before it ever flew once. A family member was in the CIA at the time (later at NSA and RAND) and played a role after they were sent to the USSR after graduating college to study Russian (paid for by CIA, they know 8 languages). They translated the technical Russian Buran plans/documents and decoded them for our scientists to compare to their own, as well as help slip design flaws into plans they knew would get stolen (because they knew who was stealing them from Nasa). They met with the president over the issue multiple times. True story. They were also involved in every stealth program until they retired in the early 2k's. They were in the pentagon when the plane struck on 9/11. I really wish I could get them to talk more or write a book lol. [Using "they" to avoid gendering family member]

The Soviets (at the time) didn't "copy" it. They stole the plans and made it from them, adding in a few alterations, although the plans they stole were purposefully flawed.

If you're up for it, you can visit the Buran's in their final resting place in Baikonur. They're just sitting there rotting away. Here's a video of some kids who broke in and had some fun exploring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q7ZVXOU3kM

Article about the Soviet's espionage to get the plans: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/12/buran-how-russia-stole-t...

In re the youtube vid, that's a flippin' huge hanger. Crazy that this stuff is sitting dormant.

There’s a fantastic book about the stealth program by the former director of the Skunk Works, Ben Rich

They told you about these highly classified operations?

It's not classified anymore (I linked to a story that gives more info than I did), and you can be sure they won't tell me most details of things I ask about. If you think they sit there and tell me state secrets, think again lol. They're quite frustrating to talk to about this kind of stuff with because they won't answer most questions, or answer vaguely, and give absolutely no visual or audio indication of what they're thinking or what the answer might be. No wink-wink nod-nod. Completely dead-pan. You don't get to the level they were at by not understanding what you can and can't talk about. They don't slip up when drinking. They're still active in the community in the public sector side post retiring.

What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.

Likely snatching enemy satellites in a single orbit (i.e. launch, snatch sattelite, land, all in the same orbit) before enemy can even detect that the shuttle is up there.

> What was the intended mission?

There were several. A couple of examples: the shuttle could delay release of a payload, maneuver while in orbit, release the payload, then maneuver again. So conceptually, you just put a satellite into an orbit and your enemy doesn't know exactly what orbit its in. I'm sure eventually they would find it, but the military still wants stuff like that.

Another example is the ability to grab a satellite and bring it back to Earth. To my knowledge, this was only ever used with the "long-duration exposure facility" because it'd probably be considered an act of war to steal another country's satellites but here again, it's the kind of thing the military would ask for.

Isn't the shuttle so big that it would be easy to track and see it?

yes, but no country can track a given object in LEO for its entire orbit (unless it's transmitting its position to another satellite).

So the idea is that the shuttle launches with a secret payload, and every 90 minutes you see it pass overhead. This goes on for days or weeks. Eventually it lands.

What happened? Well what you don't know is that on day 2, while it was over the Pacific and you weren't tracking it, it fired the OMS, deployed a payload, then fired the OMS again to return to it's previous orbit.

There's a whole other satellite out there and you don't know about it until you find it by some other means. And eventually you will find it. But the military is happy to pay for that short window of subterfuge.

No idea, but yes I assume other missions managed to use the full capabilities once it was big!

The one that had the biggest influence on the design of the shuttle was probably the plan to launch into a polar orbit, rendezvous with a satellite, capture it, and land as it swung around for the next orbit. This require massive cross-range capability, in order to be able to glide back to a suitable landing site in the US, putting lower limits on the size of the wings.

The classified autonomous X-37 [1] has a cargo bay [2] and there are (were?) plans to scale it up to double the size to accommodate larger payloads and crewed missions [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36440/this-is-our-firs...

[3] http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/spa...

That X-37 photo in the wiki article had me go down the "payload fairing" rabbit hole. Still don't quite know what the "bubble wrap" is on the inside. I assume it is part insulation to protect from extreme heat and part, well, bubble wrap.

According to wikipedia those things cost around $6 million to manufacture and spacex was the first to ever bother retrieving them.

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

Gosh, the section on "Mission failures caused by payload fairings" is understandable but not something I've ever heard of before. The launch crew error of failing to remove two lanyards.. ugh. To be "that guy" must've sucked.

Scott Manley has a wonderful explainer on it "The Most Important Space Shuttle Mission Never Happened":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q2i0eu35aY

they spent a huge amount of money building a launch facility for it at Vandenberg that was never used. Got cancelled after the Challenger exploded.

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1960/1

HEXAGON KH-9

> And of course the imagined mission never happened.

There were 11 classified (ten successful) DoD space shuttle missions:

https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html

That's roughly 8% of shuttle missions.

The mission I believe the parent comment was referring to was a foreign (Soviet) satellite recovery. It required a larger payload bay and as I recall a very aggressive launch profile that I believe also imposed some undesirable design constraints, but my memory is fuzzy.

My understanding was that the specific requirement was for a launch into polar orbit (southbound from Vandenberg AFB, just north of Los Angeles) and then a landing ~90 minutes later at Vandenberg, clearly to snatch something out of orbit.

Since the earth is rotating under the orbital plane of the shuttle, this requires a large amount of cross-range maneuverability on reentry so it could land back in California rather than ~22.5 degrees west of Vandenberg in the pacific ocean, and this required large wings.

I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. One theory was that it was to snatch a Soviet spy satellite out of orbit, but it's entirely possible given the timelines that the classified requirement was to pull a film cartridge from a US spy satellite in polar orbit and return it quickly to earth for processing.

> I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back.

Given that many details of the keyhole program were recently declassified [1], is there any chance we'll get to know the true nature of the shuttle program? (And if so, when might it happen?)

[1] (a decade ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-9_Hexagon

Unfortunately there would be no way for the USSR to know that they weren't going there to nuke Moscow from the south where there weren't any radars looking. I'm not sure if that was ever seriously considered on the US side but my sense is that the eventual realization that there was no way for the USSR to know and trust that is part of what stopped the shuttle from ever launching from there.

re military mission never using the size, there could always have been classified payload launches that ended up using it.

There were plenty, the military missions existence and classified nature weren't classified themselves. (Or at least plenty enough weren't. We wouldn't necessarily know of ones that were.)

So the "classified DOD project xyz" tasks are listed right there on the published official mission lists and schedules, and quite easy to look up on both Wikipedia and straight from NASA.

But the thing not achieved was Vandenberg launches, which would allow more N-S polar orbits that are often more useful to the military.

The less official but still obvious thing not achieved was the Airforce building a manned military space station (as far as we know...).

The shuttle had plenty of military missions, and most are still classified.

No, we never got the Vandenberg polar launches we were promised.

And I don't think anyone anticipated just how quickly miniaturization and automation were going to advance when it was designed in the 70's or even as missions began in the 80's.

Even autopilot was a controversial cutting edge technology that was excluded because of the focus on human centered missions.

But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay.

(Hubble being a spare keyhole spy satellite body, with borrowed mirror fab tech.)

But it would be interesting to know just what else the military had in mind, besides their not-so-secret ambitions for militarized manned space stations.

> But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay.

I assume Hubble was built that size because it would fit? No coincidence indeed. And what does that have to do with the military?

> what does that have to do with the military?

Hubble is a military spy satelite design.

Development of which presumably predated or coincided with setting the design parameters for the shuttle.

Not exactly, I think they just use a specific mirror design (2.4m dia.) because they are already manufacturing them to be used in spy satellites.

Actually one of the reason SS was not cost effective anymore because of the added complexities required by the DoD.

In perspective, you should keep in mind that the Space Shuttle was a failure as a launch vehicle, both in terms of safety and economics.

And yet it allowed capabilities that we have lost in 2022.

Reminds me of a video I came across last year about about landing the space shuttle and the complexities of it all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb4prVsXkZU

You can actually go see Endeavor in real life at the L.A. Science Center. Admission is like $2. Regardless of the size, the spectacle is breathtaking.

I traveled to LA once just for the sole reason to see the space shuttle there. It was worth it!

I remember when it was decommissioned and flown to LA on the 747 transporter...definitely an event. They publicized the flight path and times, and did like 2 or 3 loops over LA and the west side. Everyone in the city was watching on the rooftops of all the office buildings and parking garages.

I'm sure it was! And more for your trouble you got to get really up close to a real SR-71 Blackbird out in the parking lot. The L.A. Science Center is one of the best hidden gems of Los Angeles and I used to love going there pre-COVID.

Standing next to a shuttle is a humbling experience. On TV it looks like, well, a plane, but in person, it's just massive. The exit hatch (I assume), the one you would expect an astronaut to exit while fully equipped and layered, looks like the size of a bottle opening.

https://californiasciencecenter.org/exhibits/endeavour-exper...

You can get really close to it, in the current temporary building. Wonderful. You can almost touch it, and you can smell it, and see the scuff and scorch marks. Go before they raise the money for a bigger building and stand it up.

Both Endeavor and Vasa[0] are super, super cool.

[0] https://i.redd.it/7zzqeyu5zyo71.jpg

Space shuttle was not that big. It was literally transported on an airliner and a fraction of the size.

I'm trying to find an article with the exact story, but during the building of some of the early large satellites (something like the MilStar satellites [0][1]) they realized it would be really handy to be to rotate the satellite to work on it from different angles. So the satellite manufacturers repurposed rotary train car dumpers [2] in order to rotate the giant satellites.

[0] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fc...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milstar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_car_dumper

I'm surprised that JWST isn't actually all that much bulkier than Hubble, despite the mirror(s) being so much larger. In retrospect I guess that makes sense, since much of Hubble's bulk is the long tube enclosing the mirror, which JWST lacks. Also, the size of things that can be reasonably launched into space is limited by the launch vehicles themselves. (Maybe NASA would have built it bigger if they knew exactly the launch vehicle specs that would be available at the end of 2021, or they might have waited for Starship, but obviously that couldn't have been predicted when work on JWST began.)

They're mostly limited by the size of the nose that goes on the rocket, which sadly hasn't advanced much in the past few decades. They were able to get a much larger mirror on there using a ton of clever engineering and folding, but the overall structure size is mostly limited by the payload size limit.

Starship would supposedly fit the unfolded mirror as a single piece. There has been discussion in actually using starship itself as the structure for a future telescope.

The largest geostationary telecom satellites are also quite huge, if you were to stand next to one. In the range of 6500 kg weight and about the size of a school bus.

The nasa image[1] of employees with the scale model provides a better sense.

[1] https://www.astronomie.nl/upload/750x498/images/Telescopen/J...

I marvel at how small they are. Why not add 20, 100, or 1000 more mirrors to JWT? Or launch 10 more of these and go full interferometry? Maybe I've just been playing to much Dyson Sphere Program, but it feels to me that NASA et al are committing the cardinal sin of making the production loop too small.

Probably because this project has been in development for decades and overran it’s timelines and budgets multiple times (to my knowledge). Congress already hates funding NASA, can’t imagine they were lining up to give them more money when I’m sure they had been asking when’s this thing even gonna come out?

Also, FWIW, this thing has 100+ points of failure along its route to being fully deployed and getting to the L2 spot. A lot of people thought for sure at least one area would malfunction, would have easily doomed the whole launch. After this successful launch, it’s possible we’ll see discussion on building another in this design, but there is already a telescope in the planning stages for a 2027 launch, as well as four other concepts being developed for the future.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Tele...

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/57407/are-they-alr...

> Congress already hates funding NASA

? They seem to fund it quite a bit, for generations.

That animation seems right. Hubble space telescope is about the size and shape of a bus.

https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-k...

https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/hubble-space-telescope-ho...

May I please subscribe to the raw images of ANY space telescope...

I mean *WE* /paid/ for them... I would like to access the data provided in real-time.

Where can one get the raw images?

These images would not be your typical jpg taken in the visible part of the spectrum. I’m not sure it is cost effective to host these image data for random people to download without any post processing. If you are dedicated enough to understand and post process the data yourself you can probably get access to the data for free

Once they're taking images, you'll have access to them.

Hubble's all went up (in raw as well as processed form) at https://hla.stsci.edu/, http://hst.esac.esa.int/ehst/, and several other places. Expect the same for JWST.

(Same for any other NASA mission. Here's the Curiosity rover: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw-images/)

> Once they're taking images, you'll have access to them.

What you say is true but with an asterisk. They grant time limited exclusive access to the data to whatever science team is using the telescope. It's basically an embargo agreement. That way the science team gets the first chance to do their research and publish it. Not all missions fall under this and in some cases you'll see what is going on right away. Eventually all data will become public.

I'll just quote their policy[1]:

    Access to science data from most active missions is often limited to the Program Investigator Team during a period of exclusive access immediately following the observations. The duration of the exclusive access period ranges from a few months to as much as a year, depending upon the mission, the program category, and other factors. Some other data, such as those obtained during facility commissioning, or those that are found to duplicate concurrent observations by a Guaranteed Time Observer (GTO), may also be embargoed for a period of time. Data falling under exclusive access can be discovered via MAST public interfaces, but may not be retrieved except by authorized and authenticated persons. Following the expiration of the applicable exclusive access period, science data become available for public use without restriction.

There is a ton more [2] about how to apply to get time on the telescope. Dudes even have a standalone desktop application to help put together the proposal.

    [1] https://archive.stsci.edu/publishing/data-use
    [2] https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-opportunities-and-policies

> I would like to access the data provided in real-time.

Telemetry is unencrypted. You have access to the data in real time. Have fun getting useful data out of it.

> Where can one get the raw images?

Online ,its all public. You might need a pHD to figure out how to make it useful to the mark 1 eyeball

I loved "Mark I Eyeball"

As noted elsewhere: um, yeah, all the data is available, for free.

But in regards to the James Webb: I don’t think you’re going to find the raw images to be particularly compelling. It is imaging in the infrared spectrum. So it’s going to require a fair bit of processing to get a reasonable monochrome image out of that data.

Give https://api.nasa.gov/ a look.

I tinkered around with the idea of building an app that would get daily images from the space telescopes and the Mars rovers, as it turns out - NASA has an API dedicated to them (search for it, really easy to find via your favorite search engine).

I never ended up building anything from it quite yet (maybe soon), but the possibility is there, and the data is free to obtain. You have to register for an API key, but again, it's still free. The photos are updated quite frequently if I remember correctly.

Same thing can be said about the National Weather Service. You can get your weather forecasts in nice JSON formats from NOAA, all whilst not having to sell your data to The Weather Channel, or whatever alternatives exist for weather apps on Android.

just enjoy, if you have a disney+ account, the documentary "among the stars" where you can view the astronauts repairing the hubble telescope

I think most satellites just unfurl solar panels. This one had to wrap up the big sun shield as well, and the lens pieces were kinda crammed together and then spaced out after deployment too. So the rocket couldn't fit something nearly as large as this as a payload going up.

Did you ever see images like these?

https://www1.udel.edu/udaily/2009/may/cool051509.html

Then it should not be surprising that a telescope is about that size.

Maybe that video can also help:

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/10776

basically spaceships to capture photons!

The human is not to scale if that's the Webb telescope.

I measured the mirror - top to bottom - as 304 pixels and the human as 86 pixels. This makes the human 1.83 meters given a mirror diameter of 6.5 meters. So it is to scale.

I think the height is there, but the human seems otherwise out of proportion. He seems to wide, which gives the illusion that he is shorter. And his head is too big, which again makes him look younger/smaller, more cartoonish. I think this is from a stock cartoon character rather than a real person.

A human standing next to a full-size replica: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...

It looks the same to me.

Where is this replica located? Is it open to the public?

I don't know where it is currently, but according to this 2008 article it was on a world tour at that time.

https://phys.org/news/2008-07-james-webb-space-telescope-ful...

I recall seeing a full-sized mockup of the James Webb at the South by Southwest about ten years ago. It was accompanied by a small traveling exhibit about the mission and some folks from a NASA (or Northrup?) education team to answer questions. They had been taking it to cities and museums across the country.

Not sure where it is now or if there are multiple full-sized mockups, but I wouldn't be surprised if one ends up in the public collection at Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian Annex where many big NASA toys end up.

6.5 m across 5 hexes. The human is maybe 1.25 hexes tall.

About 1.6m or 5'3". That's a dry short adult human.

It definitely is. 6.5m diameter of the mirror only on JSWT and 2.4 of Hubble.

Really sad that 30 years later we're only slightly larger. This is a major problem for telescopes since there are hard physical limits on resolution vs size.

Obviously it’s sad that we don’t have a larger Hubble-equivalent by now, but the Webb’s operating temperature makes it a completely different beast. It is massively expanding our capabilities in a way a larger Hubble wouldn’t. And I’m hopeful for the mid-term future, as the massive improvements in launch capability we’re seeing start to pay off.

It's 2.5 times the mirror diameter, which is 6.25 times the light collecting area.

They both look like they might be similar sizes in an illustration like that, but the Hubble mirror is 2.4 meters, whereas the JWST mirror is 6.5 meters, which has 7 times the light-gathering capability of Hubble.

SpaceX Starship may help with that, assuming it works as intended.

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