Why are the budgets for operating these so expensive? The numbers in the article are staggering
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.