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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

#181

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.

To show the comparison (737 for example here) https://icdn2.digitaltrends.com/image/shuttle-948x1500.jpg?v...

Well, the 737 is probably the worst aircraft to compare against, given it has been enlarged by 50% from the original 737-100 to the newer 737-900! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/B737Fami...

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Hubble was put into space by a (mostly) reusable system the space shuttle STS-31. That was about 30 years ago.

Calling the Space Shuttle "mostly reusable" is laughable. It cost 1.5 billion dollars per launch [1] whereas a reused Falcon 9 costs 50 million to launch. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9

The shuttle could cary 29,000kg to orbit, the Falcon 9 can only carry 22,000kg (30% more capacity) plus 8 astronauts (Falcon can only carry 3), and was designed and built in the 70s.

So yeah the Falcon is an improvement and I'm sure will be better one day, but the Space Shuttle was a huge achievement for its time, and as of today there is no lift system that can match it for both capacity and reusability.

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

#183
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…

It seems to me that there are two NASAs: The unmanned exploration programs, which do amazing things, and the manned exploration programs, which look very much like jobs programs. I'm not an expert, but I haven't yet seen a good science rationale for returning to the moon. I'm not aware of what we've learned from the International Space Station. And the Space Shuttle was an expensive and needless boondoggle that kille…

> I'm not aware of what we've learned from the International Space Station

If you watch videos of the people on the space station you begin to be reminded of "remote hands" in a data center. The space station is like a colo-facility that houses science experiments instead of racks of computers. The people on board seem to exist as "remote hands" that maintain those science experiments for whatever science team is on the ground running them.

This is all conjecture, of course... but I've watched enough of "Hi I'm somebody on the space station, let's walk around" videos to draw this opinion. The ISS is a science lab that orbits the earth. The people on board are there to be remote hands.

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

#184

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…

I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Mather 10 years ago, when he spent a new years with my family, he booked a vacation with my parents company, and he is without a doubt the smartest person I have met in my life also very humble and interested.

One of the best experiences of my life.

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

#185
post #51

I really can't wait until the have proper first light. They say June will be the earliest after phasing has completed, but it can't come soon enough. That being said, I've waited 25 years so far, a few more months won't hurt

I'm sure there will be "test photos" that get published in the interim. I'd be seriously disappointed if there wasn't.

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

#186

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!

> 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.

The mission I believe the parent comment was referring to was a foreign (Soviet) satellite recovery. It required a larger payload bay and as I recall a very aggressive launch profile that I believe also imposed some undesirable design constraints, but my memory is fuzzy.

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

#187
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And sweeping von Braun's Nazi complicity under the rug while others were hanging from the gallows at Nuremberg.

As A German this really bugs me. Von Braun and friends knew exactly what was going on in their production facilities, didn't care and never had to confront their role in this.

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

#188
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Webb telescope didn't go several times over budget from growing several times heavier. Novel telescope are expensive because they must address unique engineering challenges with unforeseen costs. You can't just grab a sunshade off the shelf – everything's built bespoke. Of course, the flip side here is that it would be cheaper to build a second Webb telescope. Maybe we could mass produce a hundred more for a tent…

That's not what I was implying. I'm implying the mass (and volume, and especially servicability) constraints required expensive engineering. Those constraints are relaxed with much cheaper launch, especially if in-space assembly and maintenance (by astronauts!) becomes affordable.

I hear what you are saying--if launches were easy they could have dropped a bunch of expensive constraints. But consider that if launch costs were truly the bottleneck for JWST, they'd have just thrown more money at the launch budget and got a bigger / fancier rocket. I'm no rocket science person but I'd assume you can scale launch capacity by throwing more money at it--it's generally a solved problem whose risks are much better understood than whatever JWST is doing. It makes sense to throw money at things to reduce risk like larger launch vehicles, regardless of their cost.

JWST is expensive because it does stuff that has never been done before. Lots of "unknown unknowns" that you need to make "known unknowns" Anything like this will be expensive--same is true for software even. You are working in uncharted water--risks are everywhere.

If they could have dropped a bunch of their constraints and reduced program risk by throwing money at a fancier launcher, they'd have done it. The fact they didn't suggests that the cost & risk wasn't constrained by the launch.

Now maybe you could argue that "if there was only a way to make it serviceable using cheap rockets"--then yeah maybe they could drop some of the more expensive and risky constraints. But however many years ago when this project started, such a thing was not even on the horizon. Only in the last few years has such a thing even begun to seem feasible. Perhaps future missions can relax their constraints because suddenly technology makes repair "easy". But JWST didn't emerge in that environment.

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

#189
post #82

I am quite relieved that all the deployment worked out and so looking forward to the first images. I hope, planning for a true Hubble successor (a telescope in the visual range) starts soon. Maybe a one-off Starship could be the telescope housing, it would enable an 8m mirror without any folding, just the tip of the Starship would open up once in orbit.

Why not go for a much larger folding mirror?

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

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just out of curiosity, is it considered best practice these days to use the gender-neutral "their" even with a specific subject (Obama) who is known to use masculine pronouns for himself?

I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns.

You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed across the previously mentioned nouns.

So, in English, you can say:

"Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. gave Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk Koyaanisquatsiuth Williams a sweater for Christmas. She liked his gift."

The second sentence can use two pronouns because they happen to be unambiguous. With only a single pronoun, that sentence ends up like:

"Rhoshandiatellyneshiaunneveshenk liked Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff's gift."

(This is obviously an extreme example for comedic effect.)

This is also why Romance languages have noun gender for inanimate objects where actual biological gender isn't meaningful. It's not about genitals, it's about scattering a few pronouns uniformly across the noun space.

Of course, one might rightly argue that gender is not a good mechanism to use for your pronoun distribution. We could do something like shells do where we assign pronouns based on recency of the mentioned noun. Or some other system.

But my point is that gendered pronouns aren't completely bananas. They serve a pragmatic function.

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