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Comment by eagerpace | Hacker News Reader

I hesitated posting this because my very moderate east coast American perspective seems to be appreciated less and less here. I posted this on a lazy Sunday morning and it got a lot of positive initial comments and discussion. Then a few hours later it turned negative.

Science is great but launch vehicle innovation is where the problem is so that’s why I focused on SLS. We could easily have 100 JWSTs today if something like starship were operational. NASA dragging its feet for decades, building silly things likes SLS, trying to find token uses to justify it, doesn’t inspire me anymore.

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NASA didn't want SLS and was very vocal about that. Congress earmarks funding for pet projects which is the only reason we have SLS. I'm not sure how you can say NASA is "dragging their feet" while also claiming to care about space. NASA's list of accomplishments is long and there isn't a gap.

I’m afraid I don’t understand how Starship could help proliferate JWST. It was launched with Ariana 5 which is a mature launch system.

The bottleneck is actual manufacturing of JWST - the folding mirror was especially fraught; I think the sunshield as well.

So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.

JWST cost $10B. The launch was expensive at $1.5B; but getting that down to $750M won’t really change the availability.

I'm a firm believer that if the mass and volume constraints were relaxed the design of such an instrument could be greatly simplified.

Hmm, I didn’t consider that, very good point. With 10x the volume, maybe the mirror and sunshine origami could have been avoided or much simpler. I wonder how to figure out how much the cost was because of that complicated mechanics…

The Europa Clipper mission saved $3B+ just by switching from SLS to Falcon Heavy.

>Then a few hours later it turned negative.

Happens all the time.

Europe vs us east vs us west.

Can you expand on what you mean by token uses? Wasn't Saturn V used for golf on the moon?

Putting the first people on the moon, the first people on any foreign celestial body, as a show of power during the cold war isn't what I'd consider "token".

Putting people on the moon today is a lot less substantive, and doing it with decades old technology makes it even less so.

I see the correlation you're trying to draw: "neither is of any practical use", but I think even that ignores the very deliberate effects the first space race had on the USSR.

I’m speaking of SLS. It’s a solution in search of a problem.

SLS is a solution for the problem of the US needing a large launch vehicle. That's not the issue. The issue is that it's taken way more time and money than anticipated and hasn't shown good results.

Budget and schedule overruns are expected with any large project - it's just the nature of contracting. But there are limits, and SLS blew past them quite a while ago. I'm not sure how much of it is NASA's fault given how much congressional meddling has gone on, though.

That’s fair, it’s gone on so long that the problem it was solving for has evolved. Someone has to be strong enough to know when to cut the sunk cost and shift gears and that’s how I’m choosing to look at the current situation.

It's worse than that - SLS siply can't do what it was supposed to on paper even after 10's of billions, resulting in the secondary boondoggle of the Lunar Gateway which will waste billions more and still fail to achieve lunar-relevant

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