The DOD had two "better-than-Hubble" space telescopes just sitting around.
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The spy sats bought a bunch of ball bearings (these might be a foot in diameter and are speced to be extremely low noise at low turn rates). They tested them all (using a phono needle resting on the outside of the bearing while it was slowly turned). The ones that made the least noise went in the sat while the others were sealed in a plastic bag and put on a shelf in the clean room.
I was told that when Hubble came along, the US no longer had the capability to make those (I'm not sure if that was true). In any event the ones that went in Hubble were the least noisy of the ones that had sat on the shelf. My summer job was (largely) testing to see which was the best. A cool job.
It turned out that a normal distribution centered at 5 ohms was not quite right. It was a normal distribution, but with a deep notch taken out right at 5 ohms. All the resistors that tested to very close tolerance had been bagged separately, and sold at a higher price.
(The context was why you might want to put, say, four 5-ohn resistors in series, rather than just use one nominal 20-ohm resistor.)
In the old days, it might have been cheaper than the more accurate resistors. These days, high precision resistors are relatively inexpensive.
But of course it's better when the tolerance doesn't matter (or only of a few components)
Let's take a moment to walk down the aisle with the label "Current Hubble Science Instruments". First, we come upon WFC 3, a 4k x 4k high quantum efficiency CCD imager with a wide field of view, spectral coverage from the near-UV through visible spectrum and with 63 different narrow and wide-band filters. Oh, and with a set of grisms and prisms for taking spectra, and with a separate 1k x 1k IR sensor with 17 of its own filters. Next up is NICMOS, an IR imager and spectrometer with a spectral range of 0.8 to 2.4 microns, this instrument alone places Hubble into the rankings as one of the top 3 or 4 most productive and capable Infrared telescopes in history all on its lonesome. Then there is STIS, a 3 CCD sensor with coverage from far-UV through near-IR wavelengths which is capable of taking high resolution spectra for 500 separate points simultaneously while also taking a full frame image, this instrument alone is responsible for much of all of the astronomical observations in the UV-range throughout all of history. And there are several other equally impressive instruments I have not mentioned.
The point is, none of these instruments or capabilities are going to be on a spysat. And they make up the vast majority of the value of a space based observatory. If a space telescope was nothing more than a big mirror, some guidance, and an imager then we could save billions of dollars, but they are so much more than that.
It would seem to me that the CCD's should be cheaper - we have a LOT more experience producing CCD's than we have producing 3 meter mirrors capable of being launched into orbit. Surely the huge amount of research being put into producing low noise CCD's for cameras and phones would have the effect of making it easier and cheaper to produce the science instruments for a space telescope?
It's just the telescope (the mirror) - it doesn't include the cameras.
Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects. For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.
Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have higher powered telescopes in space.
My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html.
Edit: Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps 15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4.
The "better than hubble" telescopes are old keyhole era spy sats, this is the design Hubble was originaly based on. It's also partly the reason for the original Hubble screw-up.
The contracts for Hubble went to companies that had experience building 2.4m mirror space telescopes (nod+wink). But security walls in the suppliers meant that the people who had build these spy sats didn't work on Hubble or pass on their knowledge - then oversight of the Hubble build process was hampered by security concerns that meant NASA QC engineers never got to see the mirror being built.
A few other points.
The cost of the Hubble 'airframe' was a small part of the space telescope cost, compared to the launch and service missions, the building of the STSci and the 1000 of professors, postdocs, researchers and students that it funded. Just the cost of storing it in a clean room for 3years after Challenger was estimated at more than raw commercial build cost.
The JWST isn't just a better Hubble it's a completely different concept - actually designed as a scientific instrument rather than compromised by being a spy sat design built to justify the Shuttle launch - as HST was.
In fact, some of the folks down the hall from me had a telescope they were working on fail to deploy properly after launch due to the canister containing the telescope not opening. There was no spare telescope--they had to start over from scratch.
The two telescopes that I worked on that had no such problems were XTE (aka RXTE) and AXAF (aka Chandra). I only did a little bit of work for AXAF, but I worked on XTE for years. In addition to some other miscellaneous software, I wrote the code that let the scientists configure the parameters of the on-board data processing computers.
There were some serious issues with AXAF, though. The CCDs were damaged by some sort of unexpected particle radiation. Prior to this damage, the CCDs on AXAF were the most carefully calibrated CCDs ever manufactured. Or so I was led to believe. And the damage, although not fatal to the mission, did ruin the calibration. This was pretty discouraging to a colleague down the hall, since he had spent years making it so perfect.
Wouldn't a device to open. The canister be cheaper than starting from scratch?
The telescope in question wasn't worth terribly much, at least compared to a Shuttle launch, which at the time cost at least $500 million, not including the cost of any payload, so even if the telescope hadn't been ruined, trying to rescue it wouldn't have made any sense.
There were some other satellites in the canister, however, and IIRC, the total value of all the satellites was nothing to sneeze at.
A manned Shuttle service mission cost something like $500M / $1Bn (depending on how you do the accounting) so it was never really practical to retrieve a damaged satelite from a purely economic perspective.
Does this explain the Buran as well?
The idea is that if you track the launch vehicle's path you can get a good estimate of where to look for the payload and so you know it's orbit and when to not doing anything suspicious out of doors. KH satelites are so big that you can see them in orbit anyway and are difficult to move to an other orbit very often. If you had the ability to maneuver in flight while over friendly territory the opposition couldn't get a good estimate of where you had been.
Since the Vandenburg facility was never used and shuttle flights from the Cape were pretty public and a payload this big was pretty obvious then it's unlikely that it was used.
Buran was probably a pure case of "what do they know that we don't" plus politics overriding the engineers saying that it didn't make sense.
Then we actually flew the thing. Whoops, the heat shield falls apart after reentry. Whoops, the turbopumps can only last one flight. Therefore, six months of downtime between flights. Whoops, Columbia and Challenger! Therefore, the fleet might be grounded at any time, for years at a time, since the Shuttle can't be flown without humans, (Landing gear deployment requires pulling a manual lever, on the insistence of the astronaut corps. Otherwise it was entirely automatic) and the public doesn't like it when astronauts are killed.
Thus the military returned to conventional rockets. They even built an unmanned spacecraft for the "go up and steal a satellite" mission the Shuttle never ended up performing: the X-37.
I can imagine if the military had orbit-capable telescopes like those sitting around, there must be many ground-based ones used to track other satellites.
Snatching an enemy's property is even more risky - as soon as the opposition has the capability you would fit your special toys with an anti-handling device. I don't work on the 'dark side' but I'm betting that anything special has a self destruct anyway just in case a launch goes wrong and it is retrieved.
You could even launch a whole constellation consisting of just a proximity fuse, a few kg of C4 and some ball bearings and wait for the other side to go fishing in their $billion space plane.
http://www.space.com/13004-declassified-spy-satellite-kh-9-h...
Years ago I went to one of my first programming conferences , sat in the same room as GvR and Stroustrop and had one of those what am I doing here moments. But it was an amazing revelation - hundreds of people way smarter than me all of whom chatting where the side conversations and corridor chats are always more interesting and informed than the set talks
HN is just like the corridor outside the worlds biggest tech conference. The door bangs open and someone is talking about space and suddenly you realise there are actual rocket scie fists standing in ear shot.
I used to want to write scintillating blog posts and bump my karma score. But that happens in the main hall. Not in the corridors and I think I am happier here, like a young guy open mouthed that brilliant people actually like explaining stuff and it's beginning to make some sense...
> "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?" - Hadden
For once, art has under-imitated the hyperbole that is our life.
Not that this nit-pick changes the nature of the discussion.
2) Econ isn't my forte anyway
C) You have my permission to stop being pedantic and laugh
D) I switched from numbers to letters, lest anyone develop the impression I am at all serious
:) When you make bullet lists like this, you can throw in a smiley emoticon and it will confuse at least a handful of people
6) Hope this made your Monday a little brighter :)
In the real world you can build two bits of identical high tech equipment for little more than the cost of one - in military procurement the normal rational rules of supply and demand don't apply
Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne,
the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered,
“We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”
NASA's problems lie elsewhere, mostly in the form of having a boss (Congress) who demands that they spend their money in mind-bogglingly inefficient ways, and then adds further inefficiencies by continuously jerking them around. Giving them more money won't solve this problem.
But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity of their whims.
Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night, resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite). That's $100 million, wasted on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?
My personal hope is that partnership with private space companies will allow NASA to be more NASA than they can be today. If they are able to refocus into a stronger research role and not be singly responsible for a complete space infrastructure I think it should free up a bunch of funds, and while nothing can change the fact that it is by its very nature a creature of Congress, a lot of the more obvious pork opportunities will be eliminated. And should NASA be forced to abandon a project, having at least the choice of having it picked up by industry is a good thing.
This is far more likely to solve the core problems than more money, and once the problems are solved, if the whole system starts clicking along better and making better progress, then I'd be relatively happy as a tax payer to give them more money.
I do recall they eventually found some instruments to put on the thing, but it was bass-ackwards. You don't launch a satellite into a very specific orbit that allows for a pretty picture, and then go looking for science to justify it. You come up with the science, and try to sell your way into the proper orbit.
The bottom line is that a presidential hopeful said "I want this stupid thing", and NASA said, "How high, sir?" Then, after much handwaving and scrounging of scientific merit, the victorious politicians (Bush, et al) said, "never mind - scrap it."
Insanely wasteful.
Also, NASA isn't mind-bogglingly inefficient. Citation needed, I guess. Besides, their budget is a puny 0.5% of the federal budget, compared to 1% back in 1990. The return on science spending is, as far as I know, typically pretty good in the US.
The NASA budget outline can be found here: http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html. And the complete 2012 budget report: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516675main_NASAFY12_Budget_Estimates...
It all looks pretty reasonable to me.
I neither trust nor agree with Krugman's definition of austerity, nor do I see how to square his definition with budgets like [1] that show growth almost across the board.
As for NASA's inefficiency, an efficient department would not be able to purchase private space services from SpaceX for a fraction of what they can do themselves. (As for the argument that SpaceX can and did just build on NASA's work... so can NASA. They ought to be able to do even better than a third party building on their stuff, no?)
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budg...
2. Krugman doesn't count some expenditures, such as social security, unemployment benefits and a number of other items. He argues on his blog why this paints a more accurate picture. (Search for "Austerity")
3. SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too. It's better to compare NASA's inefficiency with other big research labs.
The fact that the federal government's budget grows like a cancer does not mean that NASA's budget is austere, nor does it mean that NASA should get more.
It's simply absurd to claim that your budget has been "cut" when it has actually been increased, even in real terms. Your argument sounds like the Bugs Bunny cartoon "Racketeer Rabbit", where they're counting the loot: "One for you; one for me. Two for you; one, two for me". Somebody else getting money does not mean that you're entitled to additional money.
SpaceX is an exceptional startup and NASA has been in business since the 60s. A typical web startup can outpace IBM and Microsoft too.
The online conclusion I can see to draw from this is that NASA should be wholly disbanded. We'll create a new one, since even a typical startup should be able to outpace the old-time behemoths.
On the latter point, I don't see NASA as really less efficient when they're given freedom over designs. They have some pretty impressive low-cost-satellite programs that teams of scientists have put together out of small bits of discretionary funds. And while StartX is impressive for a private company, I think it'll be some time before they're doing NASA-level work. For example, none of the private sector companies seem to be even attempting scientifically useful things like space telescopes, Mars rovers, or interplanetary probes, even though there is no technological barrier to doing those (they're doable with literally decades-old technology).
While the US economy only increased by 1/3, and population only increased by roughly 15%.
Why would you need twice the government spending for 15% more people? We had 270 million people in 1998, and now have 312x million.
Total government expenditures (local + state + federal) in the US came to over $7 trillion in 2011 (counting the deficit spending). Out of an economy that is close to $16 trillion. Under absolutely no scenario is that austerity, it's the greatest spending binge in world history.
To put it another way, our government system spends more than the combined economies of Germany + France + Britain are worth.
If that's austerity, then the 1990s were hyper austerity by comparison. Somehow we managed to have a government that was more functional then than the one we have now.
Austerity is not about the absolute expenditures of government, it's about the change in (real) expenditures of the government over time.
There is no reasonable definition of austerity that can be satisfied in these conditions. The US (and various European govt's that Krugman has been blathering about) were already spending a lot of money. For the most part (a few very limited examples exist), their spending has kept pace with, and generally even exceeded, inflation.
When the government is taking at least as much of the country's pie as it always had, and generally even a growing share, it is simply absurd to call that austerity.
Apologies for popping the austerity genie out of the bottle.
NASA budget:
1987: $7.5b | 1990: $12.4b | 1993: $14.3b | 2001: $14.1b | 2006: $15.1b | 2007: $15.8b | 2008: $17.3b | 2009: $17.7b | 2010: $18.7b | 2011: $18.4b
They're doing just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Also, consider the fact that congress allocates the money going to individual project, not just the agency as a whole. NASA is not doing just fine.
My point was: NASA is doing just fine. They're fortunate to still be getting that much money year in year out. It's a lot of money.
7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.
So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?
(Incidentally, something is definitely wrong with Wikipedia's figures, which show the nominal budget going up $7.6M -> $9.1M but the inflation-adjusted budget going down $17.7M -> $14.5M between 1987 and 1988.)
The goods provided by NASA are things like technological innovation, scientific discovery, and sheer coolness, all of which (it seems to me) provide net benefit proportional to the population. And the tax revenues available to fund it are kinda-sorta proportional to population too, even ignoring economic growth. So an increase of, at most, 22% over a 25-year period during which the population has grown by about 28% and the inflation-adjusted GDP by about 2x ... yes, I think that is too bad.
Just having two satellites sitting about isn't really that shocking, nor is the fact that the DOD has technology that is more advanced than Hubble, Hubble was originally funded in the 70s, slated for a launch in 1983, and finally launched in 1990.
From real experience, the commercial and public space programmes are positively infantile compared to the black project space programmes.
There's no reason to think that these would be NASA's dream telescopes, even if by some definitions they are more advanced instruments.
Looking up has more stringent pointing and tracking requirements just because we want to sit on the same object for hours at a time, but we also have lots of bright stars in the field to track. Although our downward looking colleagues also use small star tracking telescopes on their toys.
The big difference was generally in the cameras. Astronomers use a 2D CCD (like your digital camera) to take a long (hours) exposure which is read out at the end. Spy satelites (used to) use a 1D sensor like a scanner or fax machine which was constantly read out as the earth passed underneath - producing a long continuous strip image across a target.
Did you just violate your security clearance?
Some things don't fit into normal technology progression.
edit OK I might have found an answer actually. Using multiple exposures from different angles, you can resolve an object as if you had a lens that spans the entire angle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis I'm sure the movable secondary lens helps with this :) I'd heard of this technique used by ground-based radio telescopes before, and according to Wikipedia, the ability to do this within the visible spectrum has become possible only recently.
We have windows that span about fifty feet in the office, and a hotel across the street; if someone left the complimentary bible in the window open to a random page, could I combine multiple exposures into an image detailed enough to read the text?
100+ meter diameter radio telescopes pointed at the earth. That's the same size as the largest steerable ground-based radio telescopes. Makes you wonder what they can hear.
They where forced to open the briefcase, which was less than 1 meter (3 feet) wide. They agreed only if the briefcase was opened under a roof, alluding it was standard procedure because of spy satellites looking at its content.
That was when I realised that spy satellites currently have ridiculous amounts of optical resolution I had never though equipment could achieve in orbit.
However the photo-recon interpreter guys are amazing. They can look at a 1m resolution image of a vehicle made up of half-a-dozen blurred pixels and say "that's the new mkII whatever - you can see the extended wheelbase from the length of the shadow"
I'm not sure how atmosphere is optically taken into the equation, but maybe having a mathematical model of it can be used to increase the 10cm practical limit... sort of like with heat shimmer binoculars.
Really there is a limited return from higher and higher resolution imaging. Once you have vehicles, roads, missile batteries etc spotted there isn't much point being able to see which of the operators are bald.
With modern wars photo-recon is even more limited, you could have mm accurate imaging from a drone of an Afghan tribesman but it wouldn't tell you what he thinks of your politics.
Amazing in identifying what is actually on the picture or amazing in giving politicians what they want?
They explained how you could detect barbed wire in photos with >feet resolution by the patterns of wear animals left on the ground near it, or find underwater tank traps on Normandy beaches by the change in the wave patterns
300km is about the lowest practical orbit with any reasonable lifetime, it depends on the size of the satelite and the solar weather
This sounds like a reasonable speculation to me. Drones would be orders of magnitude cheaper, more manuverable, expendable, not as subject to being obscured by cloudcover, able to survey many places at once or swarm over a wide area, etc.
This is made by Festo, a German industrial automation company. They did this for a trade show.
It was "for fun".
Imagine what we're capable of building for spying on China. I doubt we're having problems with it.
1960s - we have photographed Soviet SAM sites around Moscow. We know where to avoid to send bombers in.
2010 - we have photographed a semiconductor fab in china. We don't know what they are making but we can tell where the fab is to an inch.
http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/us/powell.iraq_1_official...
http://articles.cnn.com/2005-03-31/politics/intel.report_1_m...
Hmmm.
http://www.nps.edu/About/News/NPS-New-Home-for-Giant-Segment...
("National Reconnaissance Office Deputy Director Air Force Maj. Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski [...] officiated at the unveiling of the Naval Postgraduate School’s latest high-tech research and teaching acquisition, the agency’s Segmented Mirror Space Telescope. The Naval Postgraduate School is the proud new home for the Segmented Mirror Space Telescope (SMT), designed and developed for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) as a technical demonstrator and experimental testbed for cutting-edge space imaging technologies.")
These instruments are making single-mirror telescopes (like the ones described in TFA) obsolete.
The Global Hawk [1] drone is optimized for high altitude loitering. Operating multiple drones in the area is one way to overcome the problem of running out of fuel.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Ha...
Google did pay for a half share in GeoEye-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye-1) and have exclusive commercial access.
There's probably a very limited number of groups that would be able to use this technology in a way that was agreeable to the military.
Optically I'd think looking down at a relatively bright earth would be a much different task than looking up at a very dark universe. Also field of view is much less important.
If these telescopes have to be equipped with instruments, what is left? The optical system? Thats nothing compared to the instruments.
Better in terms of optical system would mean an order of magnitude at least. This is obsolete, more or less, because ground based instruments come closer to a proper correction of atmospheric turbulences. They are cheaper to build and cheaper to run. The next generation optical space telescope may be a very long baseline interferometer. This cannot be build on earth.
Infrared is also a space domain. Thats why Herschel, ISO, Spitzer and James W. Webb are space telescopes.
This line worries me the most, hubbles pictures of things thousands of light years away are spectacular. Imagine what a better scope could so pointed at earth 300 miles below!
Also take into consideration mirror size. On Earth, we have built (and are building) giant mirrors many meters across. In relation, the mirrors on Hubble and other space telescopes are rather small in comparison. Its really the lack of atmosphere that provides most of the advantage to space-based installations.