91–100 of 165 posts
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2014/ 2026? Probably not. 2021? I doubt it. My money is on 2023-24.
They already built the damn thing, how hard could it be to land it in stable orbit 1.5 gigameters from the planet? This ain't rocket science, people. Wait a second.
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To be fair, the reason for this is that if you try to be creative and don't follow strict processes, things fail a million miles from Earth or blow up entirely.
You mean the strict processes that strictly demanded mixing imperial and SI units ?
Man, I really want this telescope to succeed its mission, but I just can't get over how complex its deployment procedure is. I am extremely pessimistic about it actually managing to deploy as planned.
For a project this magnitude, I think they should build a spare telescope or two to account for launch failures. Or is it not how the space industry operates?
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That's what I thought about Curiosity's skycrane, and that ended up working out pretty well. Yes, it's complicated, but I'm willing to accept that my intuitions about whether something is too complicated are wrong when we're talking about something that actual rocket scientist have spent millions of hours planning.
I can't let go of my intuition that complex deployment procedures carry an inherent additional risk to the mission. Now, maybe that additional risk is less than the risk of doing it a different way, but that just means the mission is particularly risky. That appears to be the case with the JWST in any case. Space is hard. We've failed many times. It seems rational to be concerned in this case.
The public must be enlightened enough to understand that occasional failure ia a much faster and better and even cheaper path to success.
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I can't let go of my intuition that complex deployment procedures carry an inherent additional risk to the mission. Now, maybe that additional risk is less than the risk of doing it a different way, but that just means the mission is particularly risky. That appears to be the case with the JWST in any case. Space is hard. We've failed many times. It seems rational to be concerned in this case.
You can retire risk and accelerate progress by launching more smaller missions and accepting that some of them fail. The public must be enlightened enough to understand that occasional failure ia a much faster and better and even cheaper path to success.
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You can retire risk and accelerate progress by launching more smaller missions and accepting that some of them fail. The public must be enlightened enough to understand that occasional failure ia a much faster and better and even cheaper path to success.
The science done by a bunch of smaller IR telescope is different from what you can do with JWST. (Basically you are reducing resolution but get better time coverage of transients.)
These missions don't even need to be physically small.
Then launch the more expensive one.
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I mean, the giddy idiot in me just gets excited about the urgent need for a human L2 mission to fix it.
Likewise. My train of thought goes like "So what if it fails? There's a lot of money sunk into that! Well, maybe someone would actually decide it's worth going to the L2 to fix it, wouldn't that be cool!!" So yeah, not the only idiot...
Anyone know if there are any well paying jobs in space programs of any kind? I've been seeing a growing number of reputable universities offering a wider range of space / aerospace / engineering offerings* and I've been getting curious what's out there. Only issue is, a lot of places I looked pay well below market rates :/ (at least for software engineers). I'll admit my expectations might be off considering I've bee…
Just a bit of warning: Software Engineering in Aerospace is NOT fun. You're basically in a supporting role to the hardware and system engineers designing the spacecraft. It's pure drudgery... process to the point of absurdity, specs and tasks being spoon fed to you with little room for creativity and/or problem solving, etc. The pay, benefits, and level of respect on the job reflect all of that. If you really want to…
Man, I really want this telescope to succeed its mission, but I just can't get over how complex its deployment procedure is. I am extremely pessimistic about it actually managing to deploy as planned.
And this isn't like hubble, where we could (and did) send up a space shuttle to fix an issue after launch. Really scary.
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I'm betting that in 5-10 years, there will be an explosion of aero startups. But fast and loose don't work as well in space, where everything ends up going 11,000 meters per second at least. The culture will necessarily be a bit more conservative, and as others have mentioned, software is usually a supporting element at best, a necessary evil at worst.
With launch costs falling and hardware getting smaller/lighter it's getting less conservative. It used to be everything was C99, VxWorks and SPARC or worse but a lot of companies are starting to look at newer technologies. Good luck finding one of those projects right now but it is happening.