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James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

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Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#141

Post by ethbr0 »

gameswithgo wrote: post #117
spaetzleesser wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.

This is the case with almost all large scale human endeavors. To get things done with lots of people takes compromises. Apollo program was the same way. I assume the pyramids and roman roads and so on as well. Though to be fair at some point once the shuttle program got going someone could have aborted on it and said that really this doesn't make sense.

And the Mercury program, which launched on adapted Redstone ICBMs [0], themselves improvements on V-2s.

An unfunded project that never gets built is objectively worse than a military-funded project.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-11_Redstone#Redstone_der...

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#142

Post by p1mrx »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #15
ainiriand wrote: post #14

'Science' writing at its worst -> the tennis-court sized telescope made its way into a parking spot that's about a million miles away from Earth. It would be better to try to explain concepts in a succinct way and, if it is not possible, to provide links to get the full information about a more detailed description. Also it is a good idea to use metric units for science articles.

> Also it is a good idea to use metric units for science articles. It's not if you're writing for an American audience that's more familar with imperial units.

We should just define that outer space uses metric units. The average american won't know the difference between "a million miles" and "a million kilometers", because they're both way beyond the realm of practical experience.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#143

Post by justin66 »

s5300 wrote: post #58
EMM_386 wrote: post #9

This was an absurdly teeth-clenching deployment. And no back-up, even if the Ariane launch failed. No back-up. Congrats to everyone across the board for getting this amazing telescope right where it needs to be. Now all we need is the mirror alignment and we're in for some seriously incredible science.

It’s really sad to think about how well NASA works when you consider how little funding they get and how hard they have to fight for it. It’s honestly quite ridiculous. I know a lot of military industrial complex boils down to being nationwide jobs programs, e.g. everything to do with the F-35. But NASA? I don’t think they’re anywhere near as close to being a “jobs program” Off the top of my head, I really can’t thin…

NASA certainly has their share of "jobs programs." The SLS is a prime example. Not NASA's fault: when congress gives you money and tells you to work on something, you work on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

> I still think NASA deserves much, much better treatment.

This is certainly true.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#144

Post by messe »

tobylane wrote: post #93
gameswithgo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!

What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.

The one that had the biggest influence on the design of the shuttle was probably the plan to launch into a polar orbit, rendezvous with a satellite, capture it, and land as it swung around for the next orbit. This require massive cross-range capability, in order to be able to glide back to a suitable landing site in the US, putting lower limits on the size of the wings.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#145

Post by echelon »

gameswithgo wrote: post #32
inamberclad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The space shuttle blows my mind every time I see one. It's huge - the size of an airliner - and would glide back at Mach 25. It's a humbling level of accomplishment.

original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!

> And of course the imagined mission never happened.

There were 11 classified (ten successful) DoD space shuttle missions:

https://www.space.com/34522-secret-shuttle-missions.html

That's roughly 8% of shuttle missions.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#146

Post by throwaway946513 »

samstave wrote: post #56
PinkMilkshake wrote: post #3

I'm a little embarrassed to say this and I don't know exactly what I pictured in my head, but I had no idea these telescopes were so big[1]. I guess I never saw one pictured next to a human. I've only seen pictures of satellites being worked on so I expected something more human sized? It seems so stupid now, especially since earth telescopes are huge. [1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a013500/a013522/JWST_v.…

May I please subscribe to the raw images of ANY space telescope... I mean * WE* /paid/ for them... I would like to access the data provided in real-time. Where can one get the raw images?

I tinkered around with the idea of building an app that would get daily images from the space telescopes and the Mars rovers, as it turns out - NASA has an API dedicated to them (search for it, really easy to find via your favorite search engine).

I never ended up building anything from it quite yet (maybe soon), but the possibility is there, and the data is free to obtain. You have to register for an API key, but again, it's still free. The photos are updated quite frequently if I remember correctly.

Same thing can be said about the National Weather Service. You can get your weather forecasts in nice JSON formats from NOAA, all whilst not having to sell your data to The Weather Channel, or whatever alternatives exist for weather apps on Android.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#147

Post by 2457013579 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #91
s5300 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really sad to think about how well NASA works when you consider how little funding they get and how hard they have to fight for it. It’s honestly quite ridiculous. I know a lot of military industrial complex boils down to being nationwide jobs programs, e.g. everything to do with the F-35. But NASA? I don’t think they’re anywhere near as close to being a “jobs program” Off the top of my head, I really can’t thin…

I agree with your overall sentiment, but I have to disagree with this: >Challenger & Columbia. Challenger wasn’t a NASA problem, it was a Politicians & Bureaucracy problem. NASA managers overrode the recommendations of the engineers. That was absolutely a NASA problem. Sure they were under some political pressure, but they made the wrong call in the face of strong data. Columbia too was a management priorities proble…

Parent comment: > It’s really sad to think about how well NASA works when you consider how little funding they get and how hard they have to fight for it. It’s honestly quite ridiculous.

Sibling comment (dmd): > I saw a study a few years ago where people were asked how much funding various agencies get, and the majority of people thought NASA was more than 10% of the federal budget; some even went as high as 25%. (It's less than half of 1%.)

Your comment: > [NASA’s] $23 billion dollar budget is only 3% of the size of the DOD budget.

NASA’s budget is about half a percent of total DoD budget, but that doesn’t tell an accurate story. Most people assume NASA is synonymous with the total or almost total US space budget, but its less than half. You can do the math in 2022 if you would like [0], but in 2013 NASA’s budget was $16.8B [1], and the total space budget was $39.3B [2]. According to that article, in 2013 every other nation was supposedly under a $10B space budget [2], but can’t really speak to the validity of that. I think it’s reasonable to say we spend a decent amount on space compared to others. All that said, not opposed to an increased space budget, more space is good in my book.

[0] https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/which-countries-spend...

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#148

Post by Steltek »

onceiwasthere wrote: post #71
Tenemo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Destin's channel is one of the older, best-known channels in the YT's educational sphere. Recently, the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted). He himself worked in the military. I don't think that it's fair calling him a random youtuber, to me he seems like the perfect youtuber to interview such people (as Destin himself has a background in ro…

If I remember right, his dad was/is very involved in the JWST.

It's really amusing contrasting the brains going around in that family with them both goofing off with a lawn mower carburetor in the garage.

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#149

Post by echelon »

messe wrote: post #144
tobylane wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.

The one that had the biggest influence on the design of the shuttle was probably the plan to launch into a polar orbit, rendezvous with a satellite, capture it, and land as it swung around for the next orbit. This require massive cross-range capability, in order to be able to glide back to a suitable landing site in the US, putting lower limits on the size of the wings.

The classified autonomous X-37 [1] has a cargo bay [2] and there are (were?) plans to scale it up to double the size to accommodate larger payloads and crewed missions [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37

[2] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36440/this-is-our-firs...

[3] http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/aerospace-engineering/spa...

Re: James Webb telescope reaches its final destination in space, million miles away

#150

Post by dboshardy »

Tenemo wrote: post #67
sillyquiet wrote: post #64

I think Destin of the Smarter Every Day YT channel had an interview a couple years ago with Dr. John Mather, the senior project scientist of the JWST, where he asked something like "will you be nervous during the launch and deployments", and Dr. Mather replied " I don't get anxious about stuff I can't deal with", and that they've tested everything they thought of to test. I was super impressed with Dr. Mather, not on…

Destin's channel is one of the older, best-known channels in the YT's educational sphere. Recently, the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted). He himself worked in the military. I don't think that it's fair calling him a random youtuber, to me he seems like the perfect youtuber to interview such people (as Destin himself has a background in ro…

> the US Navy even let him on a multi-day tour of a nuclear submarine and tape classified information (later redacted)

They _paid_ him to tour it. It was a marketing event for the US Navy to drive recruitment.

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