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Webb telescope delayed again to 2020

NASA has announced that it is once again delaying the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, from 2019 to 2020.

The observatory was supposed to fly this year. But last fall, NASA bumped the launch to 2019. NASA announced the latest delay on Tuesday. “We have one shot to get this right before going into space,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of science. He said some mistakes were made while preparing the telescope, and NASA underestimated the scale of the job. [emphasis mine]

None of this is a surprise. Webb is more pork than science. It was originally budgeted at $1 billion, with a planned launch in 2011. It will now cost more than $9 billion, and be delayed almost a decade. Since the project began in the early 2000s, by the time it launches it will have been in development for almost two decades, which is almost a lifetime career for some people.

And note, the article includes the lie that Webb is “a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope.” It is not. Hubble is an optical telescope. Webb will only look in the infrared. These are very different things.

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On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
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"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

8 comments

  • “a lifetime career for some people.”

    And that explains that.

  • Michael

    We can manifest Webb on SLS and then they could hide behind each other.

  • pzatchok

    As soon as a new private company comes forward and offers to make major satellites like this NASA will be sorely pressed to try to not try them out at least once.

    That company will have to have good financial backing and experienced people working for it.

    Space X as an example.

  • Localfluff

    The Galileo Jupiter probe failed to deploy its main antenna. The reason found was that the lubrication of moving parts had deteriorated during the 4½ years launch delay after the Challenger accident. Maybe snags and tears and leaks now discovered when test-deploying the JWST have similar reasons. Delays increase risks.

  • Localfluff

    Someone pointed out that any further substantial delay might see the Ariane 5 canceled (Ariane 6 first test launch summer 2020). With new costs to either pay for keeping a last Ariane 5 ready, or adapting JWST to the replacement launcher. Now, the both Ariane probably have much in common for their customer interfaces, but delay means decay for missions like this.

  • Lemuel Vargas

    A delay would be a good idea because once the Webb Telescope launches, there is no possibility of it being repaired once in space and thus it will just become one of the very costly failures of NASA and could perhaps affect and postpone and even cancel some of the deep space probes of NASA.

  • Edward

    Localfluff pondered: “Maybe snags and tears and leaks now discovered when test-deploying the JWST have similar reasons.

    This is entirely possible or probable. When the first large solar arrays were deployed on the ISS, they were balky and sticky, and they did not deploy smoothly. During deployment, there was some damage to the photo cells, because they had remained packed for longer than intended, due to delays. Several pieces of space equipment have a “shelf life,” for various reasons.

    Lemuel Vargas wrote: “A delay would be a good idea because once the Webb Telescope launches, there is no possibility of it being repaired once in space

    This is true for almost everything that we have ever launched. The ability for repair or maintenance is rare, and rarer still for unmanned spacecraft. At some point, Webb has to launch in order to be useful, so as with every other piece of equipment ever launched, they have to do their best effort before launch, then take the chance that they did it right. If we, as a nation, aren’t willing to take that chance, after all this expense, then the project was not worth spending the resources on, and we could have done a whole lot of other science instead.

    Webb’s delay is because they “underestimated the scale of the job.” This shows that the management of the project is poor. It may have been poor from the beginning.

    Making mistakes while preparing the telescope also shows either poor understanding of the telescope’s requirements (the plan was followed but was incorrect for the task) or poor workmanship (someone didn’t follow the plan).

    One of NASA’s problems is that they tend to make unique satellites and probes, so everything they do is development and test. Developing something new just takes time, and unexpected things can go wrong. Webb, however, is taking much longer and is farther over budget than we should expect.

    I have worked on commercial communication satellites, which we could build, test, and fly fairly quickly (about 30 months from contract signature), because very little was unique and everything had already been developed. Very little went so wrong that it took longer.

    I also have worked on spacecraft science instruments for NASA, and these tended to be entirely unique, taking several years to develop, build, and test before launch. Back then, however, NASA was better managed, was not set adrift nor had strategic confusion (as have been the case, this past decade), and was fairly able to keep close to the schedule.

  • Localfluff

    Maybe it’s the theoreticians who deliberately delay it until they retire. Because they would hate seeing their life long worked on models being obliterated by new observations. Will JWST really see the first star in the universe, at the same time as it lights up? If instead just more galaxies are found without end, there will be much headache.

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