It's funny how the excellent job of the French Ariane launcher is nowhere to be seen in this (and others) article.
I'm not sure who it was anymore (possibly Scott Manley on youtube), but apparently ESA had been setting aside the components for the Ariane 5 that tested best to be used for the launch of JWST to lower the risk of failure and that might explain in part why it was able to launch it so precisely - it was not your average Joe's Ariane 5.
If it doesn't behave as within parameters defined would the core/chip is binned.
Complex systems can break in unexpected ways if any one parameter is outside range even if it actually better (say more clock speed) , you want to stick to spec.
Source: podcast in French
If SpaceX was simply doing the same thing as everyone else has for 60 yrs, no one would care, I don't understand why people think they're the same thing
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
Starship looks a lot like Shuttle 2.0 to me. Except the landing is somehow even more terrifying.
As far as I can tell the idea with Starship is to design a vehicle that can survive losing a few tiles because that’s inevitable.
It's easy to attribute political reasons to whatever Congress does, because Congress is filled with politicians. But members have other motives too, and private businesses, despite the hype, have plenty of corrupt and political motives - throwing contracts to allies and friends, undermining enemies, etc. - though they are far less transparent and are unchecked by the public or other institutions.
which references
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1156294287245660160
Quote:
> Digging through some old notes. Found this quote from a few years ago from a senior academic engineering source at the time.
> "Senator Shelby called NASA and said if he hears one more word about propellant depots he’s going to cancel the space technology program."
Aren't we supposed to start by considering the accuracy of the information?
So yeah the Falcon is an improvement and I'm sure will be better one day, but the Space Shuttle was a huge achievement for its time, and as of today there is no lift system that can match it for both capacity and reusability.
Sigh. Where did you get that number? Wikipedia lists 27,500 kg to LEO, but according to Guinness
"With a mass of 22,753 kg (50,161 lb), Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope launched on 23 July 1999 is the heaviest satellite the shuttle has ever launched."
And I suspect that if the flight required abort and won't reach orbit, the shuttle would have out-of-specification loads at landing, as the payload mass which is safe for landing is less than that.
From NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584722main_Wings-ch...
Agree.
> as of today there is no lift system that can match it for both capacity and reusability
Disagree. Falcon Heavy lifts higher payloads - you don't count the orbiter mass itself, do you, just like you don't count the mass of the last stage which actually gets to LEO, right?
Reusability was also lacking. SSME was made by Rocketdyne, not Pratt and Whitney, who had somewhat better hydrogen technology, so after each flight SSME had to be disassembled, tested and parts nearing faults (e.g. turbines) had to be replaced. The first stage modules, which dropped to the ocean, had to be cleaned from the sea water, which also isn't an easy rinsing. And of course thermal protection tiles had to be inspected and the broken ones replaced. X-37 is way better here.
For example your standard AA/AAA batteries are much cheaper if they are one time use than reusable [1]
Reuse may be desirable in a product for environmental impact, turn around time, security or many other concerns.
Shuttle was mostly reusable even the booster components , not cheaply but reusable nonetheless.
[1] it is a crude example, overall cost being more expensive, TCO per cycle will be cheaper for rechargable batteries
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/all-hail-the-ariane-...
If someone builds a big new ocean liner you know journalists are going to compare it to the Titanic. Same thing.
Oh, bullshit. NASA spends an awful lot of money and effort on promoting its projects to the English-language press. Does the ESA make a comparable amount of effort?
OTOH, I think Webb is amazing, and fairly, perhaps without the marketing it wouldn't even exist because of all the American deficit hawks.
The #1 what? I wouldn't blame you for using some unkind phrases here, and I suspect you want to! But it's certainly not false that the U.S. does much more space exploration than any other nation, spends a lot more on it, achieves more in space, etc. None of that invalidates the work of other nations, and spaceflight and the production of scientific data seems like a very healthy form of competition (and cooperation!) between nations. If the U.S. isn't #1, I am curious how you are keeping score.
Herschel didn't just get less English-language press than American made space telescopes. It was less prominent in the public consciousness than short, much less expensive Japanese missions like Hayabusa and Hayabusa2. I doubt any of this is about American exceptionalism.
It's just like everything else in life. You can build the best product in the world but it won't make a damn bit of impact on people's lives unless you let them know it exists. Marketing your product is just as important to its success as the product itself.
US ego is already badly bruised that they've had to launch this highly visible project on a foreign rocket, and now you'd want them to sing the frenchies praises?
That's a huge ask.
Yeah, no. JWST has a limited lifetime because of the finite fuel, that's completely different from building a machine for a purpose and the machine not falling apart at the end of the initial mission.
When people say Ariane doubled the lifetime of JWST, they mean Ariane performed much better than the allowed margins, thus pushing the fuel efficiency to its limits.
Think this, a Toyota has a lifetime of 100K miles but many get 200K out of it. That's completely different from achieving 80mpg on a car rated 40mpg.
When someone tells you that they are driving so precisely that they are getting twice the milage, is it appropriate to say "So what, my car was supposed to last 100K miles but lasted 200K"?
I think, no.
Using your driving analogy, this is like you getting 80mpg on a car that needs to hit 40mpg or heads will roll. Maybe everyone driving it would get 80mpg. Maybe someone driving extremely precisely would get 120mpg.
There's not enough information here to say how well Ariane did other than public comments from the engineers which were vague but positive.