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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Two weeks of service, made possible by 26 years of development. Not unlike the 10-years-to-overnight-success pattern.

This is another good example of how consistency, determination, and effort can really make big things happen. (It's also an example of why we should force ourselves to put some of our energy into long term efforts, the results of which we may never personally experience.)

Classical "one person, overnight entrepreneurship success" that took 10 years of making and a team of skilled employees.

Kinda like how common people think Elon Musk "invented" Tesla, while he's not even one of the founding engineers. Yet he's invulnerable in the company despite impregnating senior leadership with impunity. Perception is reality

And you can be sure he s not impregnating them only with impunity ;)

According to this article it was Joe Bidens doing lol.

No it wasn't. According to the article Biden unveiled the first image. That's it and that's true.

No credit is being falsely attributed to him here.

> Two weeks of service, made possible by 26 years of development.

With already unanticipated levels of micrometeorite collision and mirror damage [1], I'm worried we may not see a full service life out of JWST.

All of the "look what the JWST has accomplished in two weeks" press seems like drumming up accolades in advance of an early retirement.

I hope I'm wrong.

[1] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-micrometeor...

Current amount of damage has JWST operating perfectly fine, it was created to sustain some damage and still function for its mission. If the JWST gets hit by a second unexpectedly large micrometeorite it’ll become an issue though. Getting hit once this quickly is bad luck, getting hit twice would probably mean we were wrong about how common debris of that size was at JWST’s position.

I think you are more sanguine than the JWST team themselves. They say (from that article):

“It is not yet clear whether the May 2022 hit to segment C3 was a rare event.”

First, you're being conspiratorial. I know that seems to be the fad nowadays, but honestly, that way lies madness.

I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through the Perseid cloud. I just did a search online and nothing obvious came up about it.

I don't know if the debris is (are?) spread out enough to affect the area around the moon, and I'm sure NASA has planned for it, but the news of that meteor which lit up over the Midwest made me wonder how the telescope is faring.

https://youtu.be/WDwUmVVpJ4s

> I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through the Perseid cloud. I just did a search online and nothing obvious came up about it.

Reasonable question but JWST is a lot smaller than Earth.

> First, you're being conspiratorial

What a dramatic accusation to shut down conversation. That's frankly uncalled for.

I'm expressing fears about a very expensive and time consuming investment.

A positive media spin for NASA means their budget remains unscrutinized and unfettered.

I never said NASA is telling the media to say these things. It may be a general sense of "talk highly about our expensive things so we can keep doing expensive things". How any department, public or private, keeps getting itself funded.

We're seeing a lot of these pieces. It feels as though scientists are telling journalists this byline, because it's everywhere. Nothing wrong with that.

> I'm wondering how well it's going to do as we pass through the Perseid cloud.

I don't think we know yet. We're about to find out.

It was just meant as an aside. Friendly generic advice to help save your sanity.

More advice: You're probably just hungry or in a bad mood. Whenever I overreact on HN or taken something the wrong way (which sadly has happened more than once) that's usually the issue. Go have something sweet to increase your blood sugar, maybe take a walk. It'll help. :-)

> A positive media spin for NASA means their budget remains unscrutinized and unfettered.

Wow. No, it doesn't.

(Relative to a failure or catastrophe.)

It isn’t uncalled for, what is uncalled for is how in the modern era you can’t talk about fucking anything without a conspiratorial interjection like yours, always without evidence, derailing fucking every conversation and every attempt to do something good. stop.

> seems like

It's a simile.

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