Mitt Romney pointed out that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary. Ultra high income individuals may pay more In dollars, but since much of their income is passive, they pay at a lower rate.
3,741 karma · joined March 19, 2008
I really want the Webb to work and would like this bet to somehow hedge my happiness. I would be happy to pay $1000 if it somehow contributed to future missions like this one being successful. Is there somewhere that money would do some good? Likewise $100 is not going to move the needle off the peg of how disappointed I will be.
What do you think about the money going to: https://www.planetary.org/ In the winners name?
Here is a good place to start: https://www.spiedigitallibrary.org/journals/Journal-of-Astro...
Yes, insulating an RTG from the IR sensors would have been a challenge, but one that could be completely and accurately tested on earth. The lack of sufficient power directly drove the passive cooling requirement. Which in turn drove the fraught 5 layer shield requirement - which has never been and can't be "Test as you fly" tested on earth.
The lack of power also drove the decision to use the experimental 26 Ghz Ka band downlink radio instead of a higher power and more robust X band radio.
Remember that Hubble was essentially useless until heroically repaired the first time by Story Musgrave. Many subsequent repairs were required to get the best pictures from it - like the deep field, long duration picture.
The sunshield is a crazy idea and no one challenged it. Even worse, it is impossible to test it on earth. Just about every (partial) test of the shield has revealed problems that have been patched instead of starting over. If they had made the Webb telescope nuclear powered, many problems would go away - including deploying a 5 layer, experimental sun shield.
The power limit also requires that science data be downloaded with an experimental 26Ghz radio that only the three 100' diameter Deep Space Network dishes can receive. The projected science data download will require using the DSN for 8 hours a day, everyday for 5-10 years.
They should have started over using nuclear power and then they would have had a chance.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/webb_ir...
To name a couple other problem spots: They have trouble getting the shield to deploy on earth: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/analysis-finds-james...
The IR detectors were replaced in 2015 because they were deteriorating in storge. Now the new detectors are 6 years old: https://optics.org/news/6/2/35
Even the 26Ghz downlink radio that can only be received the the 3 huge Deep Space Network dishes on earth is an experiment.
I really REALLY want the Webb to work, but I would take 10:1 action against.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/nasa-science-chief-s...
This should have been cancelled 3 or 4 years ago when the sunk costs were only $8B. Instead we dumped another $2B into this almost sure failure
So many design compromises were forced by not putting nuclear power on the telescope. I really hope it works, but I think the odds of getting much useful science from it slim.
https://imgur.com/gallery/ZSMg1pZ
They cleaned up the chunks of concrete that had fallen from the beam.
The parent is referring to trying something that has been used for centuries before trying something that has been used for years.
The ship weighs 220,000 so it will be riding about 4.5% higher in the water. The main channel is very narrow. Its bow is buried about 20m deep and 100m into the shallow bottom outside of the channel. They are not going to lift it out.
ERCOT does not pay producers for standby capacity. Just this week the New England grid completed its annual auction for capacity to be available 3 years from now. The prices they will pay are between $3-$5/MWhr. Maybe a little more than electricity in TX in 2024 (but who knows). No power plant operator is going to hit the $9,000/hr “gusher”, but it will be available and they will get paid.
I am sure running a power grid with thousands of producers and millions of consumers is incredibly complex. Did you know every wind turbine and generator is spinning exactly in sync across the whole grid. I am amazed that it works.
What obviously does not work is the libertarian fantasy of live market pricing for turning generators on and off. What are the chances of rolling blackouts on Monday as oil cracking plants come online to take advantage of free power?
Maybe markets are not the best solution for every situation.
https://www.apollo-magazine.com/thomas-mckeller-john-singer-...
I am amazed the grid goes all the way to Iraq
> I developed test sketches for NTP, DNS, multicast, web server, web client, httpd with SD or SdFat-beta lib, tfttp server (SD, SdFat-beta, or SPIFFS), ftpd (get/put) with SD lib, and TCP/UDP client/server