James Webb, Hubble space telescopes face reduction in operations
astronomy.com
astronomy.com
Hopefully it will lead to a situation where the freed time will be rented out. I mean, xuntian won't be capable of replacing James Webb since it's meant to complement rather than rival.
Is it part of the anti-science? Do they hope they can contract stuff out to the private sector? Or what?
Loyalty to US science research (like any other US government work) is at odds with loyalty to MAGA: it's a zero-sum question, you're with us or against us. Isaacman failed this test—was too enthusiastic about space science.
Except for ICE, which is getting many billions of dollars.
> My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub - Grover Norquist
Replace 'worked in a shoe factory' with 'were a reality TV star', 'was a fox news agitprop host', or similar for any of the current US leadership in the scene from Chernobyl and it fits like a glove.
NASA is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of NASA's science is related to climate and weather, and a large part of the US right is still doggedly pretending that global warming isn't happening.
It's plainly true that spending several billion preventing climate change now, will prevent having to spend several trillion dollars later. There is no debate about that. But the people with the billions now do not want to give it up, so they have spent decades destroying trust in experts, so people will be tricked into voting for their children to spend trillions later, so that the current billionaires don't have to spend anything now.
It's the same thing pushing anti-vaccine views, even though people getting needlessly sick is obviously bad for the economy. Don't trust your doctor, "do your own research" because you know better than the experts, etc etc. It's all part of getting people to vote against their own interests. A stupid population is easier for the powerful to maintain control over than an educated one.
I actually think it's dangerous to view these people as intelligent, because I really think they believe the things they say. Perhaps, yes, it started out as a way to increase the oligarchy, but I think these people are so far gone that they can't understand any difference now.
Actually, it's a lot more dangerous to view these people as stupid, because the decisions they make are singularly focused and very, very effective. coldpie is absolutely right, if the policies are intelligent, the policy-makers should be considered intelligent too, so we can focus on the goals and methods pursued by that intelligence.
> but I think these people are so far gone that they can't understand any difference now.
There's no way to be sure, it might be theatrics all the way down... They do gain handsomely from their actions so why call them stupid? It's very unconvincing because it doesn't make sense.
As for the rest of us there's nothing to gain and a lot to lose in viewing the present policies as a string of random stupidity.
Given the US fiscal situation, the benefit is perceived to be the reduction in cost.
There has been a presumption that science is locally important, but this presumption is being questioned, and needs to be better defended.
Other such globalist endeavors, like being world policeman, are also being questioned.
They've never heard of the problems with utopias or throwing out babies with the bathwater.
The momentum from that kept things going for a while after the Soviet Union fell, but the inertia has been running out and anti-science sentiment has been raising to the surface in its full form again. The sad truth is that it will most likely be at least another decade to swing things around again, if it's possible at all.
Trump proved to the Republican party that a politician only needs one thing to win: engagement. What's the most engaging policy? Bullshit.
Bullshit gives you free advertising. Bullshit makes all of your political rivals fight you, which makes them look bad. Better yet, your political rivals get busy fighting the bullshit itself, leaving you free to shovel more. There is no such thing as winning a fight in politics: you only win the vote.
Most voters in the US are convinced that there is nothing more to politics than bullshit anyway. This division is rooted in our two-party system. Because of first-past-the-post voting, this is a mathematical inevitability: every vote is a vote against whoever you dislike more strongly. Remember: dislike is not generated by valid criticism as well as it is generated by bullshit engagement. Politics in the US is a team sport, and nothing more.
The second factor is politics. The progressive party in the US is trying so hard to be the "good guy" vs Big Bad Trump. Much of this is manufactured outrage, expertly crafted to win elections. ( However, some of it is true. There's some quote out there that the best lies have some grain of truth in them).
So when any conservative actor makes an effort to reign in egregious waste, the opposing party uses their best tactic: claiming victimhood. It's never the waste that is reigned in, no. The cuts always go directly to the most disparaged, "under-served" weakest segment of whatever population they can apply it to. In fact, this party doesn't even acknowledge that there is gov waste at all, or that any of it is borne by the taxpayers, thanks to MMT.
tl;dr there are incredibly wealthy political factions that want Trump out. Any move he makes will be amplified and mischaracterized to maximize outrage and retaliation. You cannot trust the media anymore, sadly.
There is no risk structure within government research, and NASA's results of the past few decades shows this. No one paid the price for the SLS being so overpriced, delayed, etc.
What SpaceX has done is very valuable - let's make no mistake about that. But without decades of NASA experience and subsequent hand-holding with SpaceX engineers, SpaceX wouldn't exist.
NASA is a vehicle for pure scientific research, which is something private industry is absolutely terrible at. Let's be real: as much bluster as Elon has about going to Mars, it's going to take an organization like NASA to do it first before a private company like SpaceX ever attempts to do so.
I'd agree that's generally true when a profit motive is identifiable.
Absent that, if left to the private sector, the research simply doesn't get done at all.
> The evidence for this in regards to space is very clear IMO
You have an incredibly narrow view of what space "research" involves. It's not just about putting payloads in LEO. Were it up to the private sector, the HST wouldn't exist at all.
Whether that's good or bad is a philosophical discussion, but personally, I believe science should be about more than just what is profitable.
(and that's ignoring that, as others have pointed out, SpaceX stands on the shoulders of government-funded giants)
The reality is there's room for both government-funded and private research, and to imply otherwise... well, let's just say we're living in a time of extremely narrow, black-and-white, polarized thinking, and this is an excellent example.
This ignores political goals (Moon landing, DARPA, state funding of education) - what does space exploration look like in the 50s, 60s ?
(LISA is a particularly ridiculous case. It was pitched in _1997_ as a joint ESA/NASA mission, was finally picked up in the noughties, NASA pulled out in 2011 due to budget cuts, LISA was cut down and then cancelled in favour of JUICE (which itself was a redesign of _another_ joint mission that NASA pulled out of), then LISA was brought back a few years later, with NASA as a junior partner, and an MoA was finally signed last year. Now the NASA side has apparently been cut, though the ESA side is continuing, and who knows, maybe eventually it'll be launched...)
Honestly, ESA should probably consider just stopping doing joint missions with NASA; NASA is just too vulnerable to political interference.
This particular US administration seems especially keen though to simply delete anything that might be worth tax dollars.
Depends on who is determining the worth. Those making the decisions very much find the causes their pork is going to worthy.
Cutting taxes on a broken tax system that disproportionately taxes poor and middle class citizens does absolutely nothing positive for the vast majority of the electorate in the long term. Neither does the reciprocal raising of taxes once the other side jumps in the drivers seat.
Also, please refrain from suggesting posters are "parroting" arguments. It's an argument that doesn't really contribute anything to the discussion, and isn't in the spirit of HN guidelines.
Rather than condemning the whole community like this, which is against the guidelines, it would be more helpful to highlight the important parts of the article that you think others are missing.
Compare Arecibo: https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/historic-space-ima...
To JWST/Hubble: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=h_&q=Hubble+and+JWST+images&ia=ima...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42051368 ("Failure analysis of the Arecibo 305 meter telescope collapse (nationalacademies.org)", 114 comments)
As a taxpayer, that's what I want to know.
> Reid said STScI does not yet have a specific plan to deal with JWST’s budget shortfalls, but it will almost certainly involve reducing staff.
> “It’s fewer people, really,” Neill Reid, multi-mission project scientist at STScI, told Astronomy. “[JWST has] got 17 different modes. Each of those modes needs people to support it, to calibrate it, to keep it going. So, if you cut the funding, you have fewer people. And you can’t ask people to do twice as much work. So what will happen is that there will be potentially fewer modes available. There will be less user support.”
If you compare Biden’s FY2022 budget estimates to this budget, it matches almost exactly (Webb 175M, Hubble 85M)
yep. see
> Caleb will later recall, in an interview with D Magazine, asking his dad why he works so hard.
> “It’s a game,” Randy explains to his son.
> “How do you know who wins?” the boy asks.
> “Whoever dies with the most money.” [1]
not even exaggerating
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/alden-g...
You can’t pour from an empty cup. The more you have, the more you have to work with, and the more you can help others.
This is what the parable of the talents is meant to demonstrate, for example.
They do! You can look up why the Simonyi Telescope, or the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, bear those names. (Two examples from memory; there's many others). (edit: Or the Allen Array, for Microsoft fans)
The world's largest telescope of the mid (20th) century was a Rockefeller donation. Several of its peers were Carnegie's.
Observational astronomy was, for much of history, a useless hobby for kings and idle rich. It's a very recent thing that democratic societies decide to fund this kind of no-applications research through public institutions—and to do so on the megaproject scale. There are no precedents in human history for JWST.
The space based telescopes are useful and valuable projects that I think should be supported, but they also offer sharply diminishing returns paired with sharply rising costs. JWST is advancing humanity's knowledge far less than Hubble did at twice the cost (comparing at-launch to at-launch), and the successor to JWST will advance our knowledge far less than the JWST is at probably again some multiple of cost of JWST.
By contrast Musk seeks to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and Bezos wants to create an industrial ecosystem in space, not to just exploit resources in space but to move e.g. highly polluting industries into space. These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
In our economic and political system, I also think this is the more logical way forward. Government is no longer particularly good at long term projects and these sort of visions may come to fruition in a decade, or it may take a century. Left to government, the programs would 100% end up getting scrapped sooner or later. Either by fiscal rhetoric claiming they're wasting money, or by emotional appeal rhetoric claiming that it's unreasonable to indulge in space fantasies when a kid is starving in Africa.
Strong claim. How are you quantifying this?
> These are visions that will, sooner or later, come to fruition - and will completely reshape humanity.
Another strong claim.
We could start with the article [1]:
>"Hubble... produced a record 1,073 peer-reviewed publications last year... JWST is performing better than NASA expected, has produced around 1,200 papers since beginning operations in 2022...
Last I checked, 1000 paper a year is more than 1200 papers in 3 years. It will take JWST many years to catch up to Hubble, and Hubble still has atleast another 8 years left in it. If you divide the cost of each telescope by the number of papers tied to it, the cost of the knowledge Hubble advanced humanity by will be many times cheaper than JWST, and that doesn't look like it will change given JWST may operate for 10-20 years.
[1] https://www.astronomy.com/science/james-webb-hubble-space-te...
JWST has already generated lots of counter-evidence for theories we were sure about based on Hubble. If your comparison doesn't even pay attention to this simple fact, how is it worth anything?
It's a metric. A good metric? Maybe not. Feels like using lines of code to measure programmer productivity.
Plus, have you controlled for factors like time allocation? If fewer research teams are getting access for longer then this would explain it
And that's not a fault of JWST - it's just the nature of diminishing returns when what you're doing is just expanding the capabilities of something that was already highly capable.
On the other issue I don't understand how you can think humanity would never become multiplanetary, outside of expecting an imminent self annihilation. And that is certainly a possibility, but certainly not something one could argue as a high probability event anytime in the foreseeable future.
But of course it's true. The announcement was largely met with skepticism. But after it held up, it led directly to the contemporary hypothesis of dark energy and created a general frantic hand-waving not about the earliest moments of the universe, for which we will never have any certainty whatsoever, but about what's happening at this very moment!
For JWST to match this it'd need to do something like make some completely unexpected discovery effectively resolving dark energy/matter, which would sort of be the equal but opposite of what Hubble achieved. Of course the odds of it doing anything like this are near 0. On the other hand the odds of the universe's expansion accelerating were also near 0.
That, if it was not clear, is why I simultaneously support development of such telescopes and similar technology, but also am extremely skeptical that they'll provide anything of major value. Because in 99.9% of cases, they won't. But that 0.1% is worth looking for nonetheless, because you never know how large a leap it may enable.
Yeah, I dunno, you've a pretty subjective valuation of these discoveries that I don't think is shared by many in the scientific community. Feel free to post links if I'm wrong.
And what I said regarding Hubble was not subjective in the least. The observation that the universe's expansion is accelerating was huge. JWST cannot realistically be expected to match this, simply because such discoveries are unexpected by their very nature, and phenomenally rare on top of that.
Better if you compare annual salaries to annual budgets.
To communicate with them we have a worldwide array of massive satellite dishes (Deep Space Network) which needs to be operated part of the cost is operating that. Then there is the scientist using the data. These are some of the greatest scientists in the world they are getting paid well enough. Then there is the engineers which make sure the spacecraft operates correctly which are expensive good engineers are expensive.and obviously all the other costs associated with it like facility, technology electricity etc.
It's explained in the user documentation[1]. You did read the documentation right?
For example[2]:
JWST Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) has 5 observing modes: imaging, coronagraphy, grism wide field slitless spectroscopy, time-series imaging, and grism time series.
With further details for each in subsections.
[1]: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/
[2]: https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-near-infrared-camera/nircam...
The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”.
The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable.
While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”.
It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.