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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

#221

Post by voidmain0001 »

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…

...NASA is compromised [comprised/composed entirely] of humans...

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

#222

Post by uj8efdkjfdshf »

billforsternz wrote: post #198
munificent wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting rationalisation for gendered inanimate nouns in romance languages, thanks. Also used in many/most other Germanic (and other language families?) right? Is your explanation a personal inspiration or established theory? For it to make sense they would need to (for example) refer to (say) a table as 'he' later in a sentence. Do they do that?

IMO grammatical gender in Indo European languages (of which the Germanic and Romance language families are a part of) reflect how nouns and their references (pronouns, adjectives etc) are semantically linked by modifying the word endings of the latter to better reflect those of the original noun - I like to think of it as the equivalent of type suffixes in assembly language.

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

#223

Post by mulmen »

dboshardy wrote: post #150
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…

> 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.

In the first video in the series Destin himself says the Navy did not pay him.

https://youtu.be/5d6SEQQbwtU&t=2m47s

I do recall him mentioning his own biases and conflicts of interest at some point but I don’t recall what series that was a part of.

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

#224

Post by dev_tty01 »

2457013579 wrote: post #147
dev_tty01 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the comment. Your reference [1] shows that NASA's budget is typically 0.5% of the total Federal budget in recent years, not the DOD budget. In 2020, NASA was about 23 billion and the DOD was about 766 billion, or about 3%. As to your other point, yes, some of the DOD budget is spent on space. That number will continue to increase.

Interesting tidbit: In constant 2020 dollars, peak NASA spending during Apollo was only twice today's budget.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://www.statista.com/statistics/264494/nasas-budget/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272473/us-military-spend...

*The third link says 2012, but it covers through 2020.

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

#225

Post by dev_tty01 »

voidmain0001 wrote: post #221
dev_tty01 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

...NASA is compromised [comprised/composed entirely] of humans...

Oops. Thanks. Yes, I meant comprised, although I suppose humans also lead to compromise...

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

#226

Post by jacquesm »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #108
pfdietz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its nice to be able to design things around Sci-Fi. However, still in 2022, there is no spacecraft that allows EVAs anywhere.

The occupants of the ISS beg to differ.

http://spaceref.com/iss/eva.html

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

#227

Post by nerfhammer »

LeonM wrote: post #25
pfdietz wrote: post #12

I'd be happier in a world where individual universities, or at least consortiums, could have their own space telescopes.

The JWT is famous for costing over 10b USD to develop. AFAIK it's the most expensive object ever to be launched into space. I don't think universities should (or could) spend that kind of money on research equipment.

It's one of the most expensive objects period

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

#228

Post by Sharlin »

jpindar wrote: post #161
ravi-delia wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mental image until I looked it up was around the size of a dog. No, I don't know why

The older ones were smaller. https://earthlymission.com/size-comparison-generations-mars-...

But even Spirit and Oppy were… well, I guess they're roughly the size of a very large dog. At 185 kg, much heavier than even the largest dogs though.

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

#229

Post by bewaretheirs »

macintux wrote: post #186
echelon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My understanding was that the specific requirement was for a launch into polar orbit (southbound from Vandenberg AFB, just north of Los Angeles) and then a landing ~90 minutes later at Vandenberg, clearly to snatch something out of orbit.

Since the earth is rotating under the orbital plane of the shuttle, this requires a large amount of cross-range maneuverability on reentry so it could land back in California rather than ~22.5 degrees west of Vandenberg in the pacific ocean, and this required large wings.

I don't believe it's known for certain outside of classified circles what was to be brought back. One theory was that it was to snatch a Soviet spy satellite out of orbit, but it's entirely possible given the timelines that the classified requirement was to pull a film cartridge from a US spy satellite in polar orbit and return it quickly to earth for processing.

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

#230

Post by ativzzz »

spookthesunset wrote: post #183
chernevik wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have there been any interesting breakthroughs or findings from the science done aboard the ISS?
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