Spitzer SpaceTelescope shutdown in a week
After sixteen years in orbit, NASA will shut down the Spitzer Space Telescope on January 22, 2020,
The telescope is still functional in a somewhat limited manner but NASA wishes to save the annual budget of $14 million to operate it. Moreover, it will become redundant and significantly superseded once the infrared James Webb Space Telescope launches and becomes operational next year.
NASA had hoped a private organization would take over Spitzer’s operation, but apparently got no takers.
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After sixteen years in orbit, NASA will shut down the Spitzer Space Telescope on January 22, 2020,
The telescope is still functional in a somewhat limited manner but NASA wishes to save the annual budget of $14 million to operate it. Moreover, it will become redundant and significantly superseded once the infrared James Webb Space Telescope launches and becomes operational next year.
NASA had hoped a private organization would take over Spitzer’s operation, but apparently got no takers.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Call me naive, but why does it cost $14M/year to pay a few people to man a desk in Flight Control, monitor the thing and occasionally send up a snippet of code? Where is the money going?
V-Man: I tend to agree with you, but if the cost could have been cut a lot, then some private organization would have taken NASA up on its offer to take over operations, and gotten their money back by charging for telescope use.
That no one did suggests the cost is real.
The end of the article helps to explain the annual cost:
Lockheed Martin performs the space operations, and there is overhead associated with this (e.g. managers, payroll people, etc.). JPL manages the mission with its own overhead (e.g. managers, planners, payroll, etc.). Caltech seems to be the main science manager, again with overhead. The remaining costs will be associated with archiving the data and distributing it to future science studies, and those costs will move to a different budget line item, as will the cost of the future scientists. Add to this the cost of antenna time.
We spent $720 million building her, with an intention of getting data for five years or so. The helium lasted for five and a half years of operations, so we spent, just for construction, more than $120 million per year of data collected on her primary mission. The past decade has been bonus operations for one tenth the cost of the original mission.
Considering the science that we have been getting from Spitzer, $14 million per year is a reasonable cost to the taxpayer.
Hopefully, future commercial science exploration will be designed, and managed in a way so that they can be done more efficiently and similar data will cost even less.
$14 million? We spend over $11 billion a year now on climate.
I have always been fascinated by the costs of keeping a mission going once it is launched and in the right place…. Not rovers and such, but orbiters and probes…. Once launched, and requiring not much in the way of mission management, even given the cost of the DSN, I fail to see how the real cost, if it was broken down, could be multiple millions per year to “just” keep contact with the thing and down load recieved data, for someone else to analyze.
Does anyone know how much it costs the keep the voyager missions running… I can’t imagine it needs more than a handful of technicians?
( I’m too lazy to Google, and I have pancakes to cook… My kids have requested “American pancakes”…. I have no idea what the difference is…. But they are getting English ones, and I will lie to them… ;-) )