[HN Gopher] To my surprise and elation, the Webb Space Telescope...
___________________________________________________________________
To my surprise and elation, the Webb Space Telescope is going to
work
Author : wglb
Score : 244 points
Date : 2022-01-26 19:54 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| divbzero wrote:
| It's probably hard to estimate for singular projects like this,
| but do we have a rough idea what the probability of failure was?
| jonahbenton wrote:
| Learning about the intricacies of the design and especially the
| deployment process, and then following the team's incredible
| badass successes has been one of the most heartwarming and
| inspiring experiences of this otherwise awful epoch. Bravo, and
| thank you, and can't wait to see the pictures.
| dnautics wrote:
| I definitely get this feeling though: "congratulations you
| skilled superhero bastards, now never do it like this again".
| ianai wrote:
| Is it that? Or is it maybe a sign that the current era is a
| little hyper-critical and in that hyper-criticality lost
| touch with what's actually possible and acceptable risks?
| This was no small engineering feat. It's also a good
| demonstration of the world of the possible.
| dnautics wrote:
| Well the delays were a real thing, I don't think it is
| uncoupled from the engineering methodology
| lstodd wrote:
| Seconded.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I think everyone felt that about the skycranes on Mars too
| (like... both times).
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I was actually surprised (happily) that they succeeded. It
| just seemed to be too many precise complicated manoeuvres
| that weren't allowed to fail.
| dnautics wrote:
| Were there delays caused by it, though?
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I have no idea what the causes were specifically, but
| Curiosity _was_ over two years late in launching (planned
| Sept 2009, actual Nov 2011), per:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Mars_Science_La
| bor...
| Sharlin wrote:
| When it comes to Mars, though, even if you're only a
| month late it will normally result in a 26-month delay
| due to how often (or rarely) launch windows open for
| Earth-Mars Hohmann transfers, and this is exactly what
| happened with Curiosity.
| mturmon wrote:
| Here's more on why:
| https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1319/1
|
| TLDR: It was not the EDL [edited to add: entry descent
| and landing] system, it was the fabrication and
| integration (putting together) of certain actuators that
| are used in low temperatures at Mars. People at a
| contractor, and at JPL, were putting in double shifts and
| they came within a very close margin of getting it
| together.
|
| Additionally, there were flight software/avionics issues.
|
| But if you're set to miss the launch window by even a
| week, you have to wait for the next one 26 months later.
| [deleted]
| salamanderman wrote:
| There were DARPA-funded projects back in 2004 to try to avoid
| doing it like this, while it was being built. They were
| funding investigations into assembling the satellite on
| orbit, e.g. send up the segments one at a time and dock them
| together on orbit. Those projects were cancelled in W. Bush's
| second term after he pushed for manned missions again. To
| this day, I still think in space assembly would have been
| cheaper and possibly lower risk.
| [deleted]
| tectonic wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about how much easier this could have
| been using orbital assembly (crewed or robotic). So, so many
| human years must have been spent designing and testing deployment
| mechanisms that simply had to function the first time.
|
| In 2019, NASA's Astrophysics Division finished up two years
| assessing the feasibility of assembling a large-aperture
| observatory in-space. The In-Space Astronomical Telescope (iSAT)
| Assembly Design Study [1] concluded that In-Space Assembly (ISA)
| is the only option for building observatories with aperture
| diameters over 15 m and would still likely be strongly beneficial
| for smaller ones like the JWST (6.5 m aperture diameter). Efforts
| like Northrop Grumman's successful Mission Extension Vehicles,
| the upcoming DARPA RSGS and NASA OSAM-1 missions, and the usage
| of Canadarm2 to install instruments with standardized interfaces
| on the outside of the ISS all demonstrate the increasing maturity
| of robotic servicing and assembly. The iSAT study describes a
| telescope composed of modules with standardized interfaces,
| launched with a spacecraft bus that has attached Canadarm2-like
| robotic arms that can assemble and deploy modules delivered by
| space tug from multiple launches. The benefits over launching
| monolithic spacecraft with hundreds of single points of failure
| (cough JWST cough) are clear: the mission won't be limited by a
| single launch vehicle's lift ability or fairing size; the same
| inchworming robotic arm that does initial ISA can later perform
| repairs and upgrades, either with freshly delivered replacement
| modules or by debugging malfunctioning parts (see Mars Insight);
| the final deployed structure doesn't need to be designed to
| handle harsh launch conditions; and, design and development will
| be faster without needing to design and test super reliable
| deployment mechanisms--if a part fails during orbital checkout,
| launch a replacement. The primary challenge is designing hardware
| that today's limited-dexterity robotics can manipulate, and
| figuring out supervised autonomy with fallback telerobotics for
| bringing humans into the loop when needed. There are definitely
| challenges, but this feels like the right approach. If you could
| do it near a crewed station for infrequent debugging EVAs, even
| better. After it's assembled, raise the orbit to L2 with solar
| electric propulsion.
|
| [1] https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/exep/technology/in-space-
| assembl...
|
| I'll be writing about this more in Orbital Index
| (https://orbitalindex.com) sometime soon.
| vkou wrote:
| The difference between automated deployment mechanisms and
| robotic[1] orbital assembly is that we have ~60 years of
| experience doing the former, whereas the latter is a completely
| brand-new, zero-experience field.
|
| It would be good to develop that capability, but maybe do some
| trial runs on assembling something a little smaller, and less
| critical?
|
| [1] Human orbital assembly of the JWST is not possible, because
| we do not have any crewed vehicles that can make the trip.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Assembly in Earth orbit is fine though (eg ISS), so just
| build it there and then boost the finished assembly to its
| destination.
| SamBam wrote:
| > Human orbital assembly of the JWST is not possible, because
| we do not have any crewed vehicles that can make the trip.
|
| I was assuming that GP meant "assembly in Earth orbit" and
| then the JWST could then rocket off on its own, fully-
| assembled. (Or, if they didn't mean it that way, I mean it
| that way.)
| tectonic wrote:
| Exactly.
| tectonic wrote:
| NASA also explored using EVAs for deployment in the 90s:
|
| "Neutral Buoyancy Evaluation of Extravehicular Activity
| Assembly of a Large Precision Reflector"
| (https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/3.26480)
|
| > The procedure and associated hardware are verified in
| simulated 0-g (neutral buoyancy) assembly tests of a 14-m-diam
| precision reflector mockup. The test article represents a
| precision reflector having a reflective surface that is
| segmented into 37 individual panels. The panels are supported
| on a doubly curved tetrahedral truss consisting of 315 struts.
| The entire truss and seven reflector panels were assembled in 3
| h and 7 min by two pressure-suited test subjects.
| autokad wrote:
| hopefully increased payload capacity provided by rockets like
| starship will make this requirement moot.
| tectonic wrote:
| I don't think so. We're going to keep wanting to build larger
| and larger observatories. The iSAT study considered BFR when
| doing their analysis.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| The terrestrial planet finder or any other optical telescope
| would have been much more revolutionary for fascinating humans
| with unbelievably pretty pictures
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| JWST isn't build to fascinate humans with unbelievably pretty
| pictures, it's build to better understand the early years of
| the universe.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| outworlder wrote:
| > or any other optical telescope would have been much more
| revolutionary
|
| Why? JWST is pretty damn revolutionary. There's only so much
| you can see with visible light. You really want old and far
| away stuff, go infrared.
| mikewarot wrote:
| They should have at least built 2 of them. It wouldn't have made
| it that much more expensive, and there'd be a backup.
| merlincorey wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they will have built a duplicate or two to keep
| on earth as essentially a staging / testing environment.
|
| My understanding is this is absolutely the case with the Mars
| Rovers which have engineering versions here on Earth such as
| this one: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8749/nasa-readies-
| perseverance-ma...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Ah yes, Cosmos-style.
|
| I'm not sure it "wouldn't have been that much more expensive"
| though. Building and testing these things takes _a lot_ of
| effort, time, and thus, money. Even at just 5% of the costs we
| 're talking about almost $500 million (and it would likely be
| much more than just 5%).
| zokier wrote:
| I celebrate when I see first images come out. Feels premature to
| now say that it is going to work. How long did it take until we
| noticed and understood the flaws of Hubble?
| aklemm wrote:
| What are the best write-ups about the whole mission?
| peletiah wrote:
| @marinakoren's articles on The Atlantic give a good insight,
| imo.
| prideout wrote:
| I wonder why they chose to focus on HD84406 for calibration. As
| far as celestial objects go, it doesn't seem very interesting.
| muds wrote:
| There's a great explanation of this on the astronomy stack
| exchange (https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/a/48317).
| capableweb wrote:
| Summary:
|
| - Available for observation for a prolonged time
|
| - A star that has just entered its field of view
|
| - Don't want a star in a field that is too crowded
|
| - The star should be bright, but probably not too bright
| dnautics wrote:
| You don't want to calibrate against something interesting,
| because of you see something crazy, you'll never really be all
| that sure it isn't because your instrument is goofy.
| antognini wrote:
| Astronomy has long had an issue with this. Back in the late
| 19th century when the magnitude system was being formalized,
| an astronomer named Norman Pogson chose Vega to calibrate the
| system because it is easy to observe in the northern
| hemisphere. In this system, which came to be the most
| dominant magnitude system, Vega by definition has a magnitude
| of 0 in any filter.
|
| There turned out to be two issues with this choice. The first
| is that Vega has a very unusual spectrum for a star. This
| means that more normal stars appear to have weird differences
| in their magnitudes between different colors. But it's not
| the stars themselves that are weird, it's just a weird choice
| of zero points!
|
| A more serious issue became apparent when CCDs became more
| common in the 1970s and 80s. It turns out that Vega is
| somewhat variable. You can define the zero point of the
| magnitude system to be the average brightness over a long
| period of time, but that doesn't really help you on any given
| night since the equipment needs to be calibrated daily (or
| more frequently --- temperature and atmospheric changes
| require re-calibration).
|
| Another source of annoyance here is that Vega is also very
| bright. This was a benefit in the days of photographic
| plates. But modern telescopes with CCDs cannot observe such a
| bright star. It almost immediately. So this makes calibrating
| the equipment trickier. (You essentially need a two step
| process where you use a small, specialized device to
| calibrate against Vega and then measure the flux from a
| dimmer reference star, and then measure the reference star
| with your telescope.)
| barkingcat wrote:
| Imagine if we decided to calibrate against a currently-
| assumed nondescript stable, in field of view star (HD
| 84406) but later it turned out was part of a strange
| stellar phenomena that we couldn't forsee (and didn't have
| the science for) until later on.
|
| I guess we can't win :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Or the beings in that star system build up a Dyson Sphere
| around it causing it to change drastically from our
| vantage point.
| not2b wrote:
| It may be that they don't want to use too bright a star
| because it would saturate their detectors, so perhaps they
| picked dim, but not too dim, in the right direction.
|
| Edit: the link posted by muds while I was writing this gives
| the explanation.
| kingo55 wrote:
| On the plus side, we'll get the best view of HD84406 that we've
| ever seen.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Heh, I guess all those delays make sense with this kind of
| feeling of risk - you can bet that they re-checked everything 101
| times and any piece that was even _suspected_ of not working 100%
| as expected was replaced !
| dnautics wrote:
| Kind of not really, IIRC the motors for the last mirror flaps
| are not working as they should but it was deemed to be within
| risk tolerances given a workaround. Also, if I'm not mistaken
| it is possible for the telescope to operate down some mirrors.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| AFAICT, the reasoning was that opening up the glued-together
| satellite to replace the broken position sensors would have
| added more risk of breaking stuff than it would have
| mitigated in the replacement.
| geertj wrote:
| Now that we've shown that we can do this (we = humankind), I
| wonder what's needed to scale up the JWST design by 10x or 100x
| or 1000x...
| dylan604 wrote:
| "Hubble Hugger" is such an amazing nickname!
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| I'm really waiting for @foone's reaction.
|
| foone is a retro hardware hacker who goes on these amazing
| threads on twitter, and is famous for running Doom on various
| things, including a pregnancy tester (though admittedly by
| replacing most of the internals), and his "Carthago delenda est"
| was on how the JWST was a boondoggle.
| lalaithion wrote:
| *their
| enkid wrote:
| I mean, of course it's a boondoggle? Isn't everything NASA
| does, outside of maybe climate science, a boondoggle? There was
| no real reason to put someone on the moon or build a space
| station. The Hubble has taken some pretty pictures, but doesn't
| really make people's live better in a measurable way. There's
| really no reason to want to see if you can fly a helicopter on
| Mars. The point is to do something challenging and cool and get
| some funding for science that isn't directly related to the
| military.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| There are various thresholds of boondoggle. The doubt was
| whether the money invested in JWST could have been better
| invested in other discovery science projects of the same
| category as JWST.
| mturmon wrote:
| Increasingly, there are applications for NASA science data
| taken about the Earth: https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov
|
| Some of that webpage is a bit fluffy for the HN audience, but
| trust me, look underneath and there's a lot of real stuff
| there.
|
| For example, GRACE measures groundwater
| (https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/applications/groundwater/) and
| has been the main source of information about fast-depleting
| aquifers in India and California.
|
| Probably the best measurements we have of whole-atmosphere
| CO2 (as opposed to in-situ point measurements) come from
| Earth remote sensing (https://ocov2.jpl.nasa.gov) -- you're
| right though, that is climate-related.
|
| Another one to take note of is MAIA
| (https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/multi-angle-imager-for-
| aer...), which will measure PM2.5/PM10 over various cities.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| The successful launch (and subsequent deployment steps) that went
| of without a hitch restored my faith in humanity.
|
| I'm so pumped to see what science and images the Webb produces.
|
| Could 2022 be the year we find an exoplanet with conclusive
| biomarkers?
| skybrian wrote:
| "Humanity" seems a bit broad? At most, it's increased my faith
| in the scientists and engineers who work on space missions.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Using the same filter, I'd say non-Boeing engineers. After
| the 737Max revelations, the fact that they can't figure out
| why their space capsule doesn't work, etc, I'd be very very
| concerned for any of their space craft not screwing up after
| the launch. All of those $numberOfMinutesOfTerror would be
| excruciating from a Boeing engineered anything at this point.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Boeing management, not engineers.
|
| And they're probably fine if they're supervised by NASA
| employees working for the government.
| alcover wrote:
| But somehow humanity works as a whole for these achievements.
| The higher education, the infrastructure, the people merely
| cleaning the launch site facilities, all get a sense out of
| this.
| pohl wrote:
| Yeah, that's a bit broad, but citizens who still work towards
| doing useful things through public policy deserve some
| recognition, here.
| stavros wrote:
| Ah, you know, this is as much humanity's success as global
| warming is its failure. We built a world that can make both
| these things.
| munificent wrote:
| Here's a funny asymmetry I've started noticing online:
|
| * Whenever a person or group do something bad, the response
| is always, "Look how much humanity sucks."
|
| * Whenever a person or group does something good, the
| response is always, "Look how good _those particular people_
| are. "
|
| Now, there is a positive explanation for this: It's good to
| give credit. When someone does something particularly good,
| it diminishes their act to say that it's just another example
| of humanity.
|
| But at the same time, the aggregate effect of this bias is
| that always appears that humanity sucks with the rare
| exception of a few blessed individuals. But the opposite is
| much more likely to be true.
| 300bps wrote:
| It's called being a pessimist.
|
| Martin Seligman teaches in the book Learned Optimism that:
|
| Optimists think any good thing that happens is permanent,
| pervasive and personal.
|
| Optimists think any bad thing that happens is impermanent,
| specific and impersonal.
|
| Pessimists flip flop these explanatory styles. The people
| you're commenting on seem to be pessimistic about humanity.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Or it could could be more that solving bounded problems
| that involve moving atoms around - like building a space
| telescope - is relatively easy.
|
| But solving unbounded problems that involve moving emotions
| and attitudes around - like building a planetary culture
| that isn't violent, irrational, and collectively suicidal -
| is hard.
| 6510 wrote:
| There is also those who paid for something getting all or
| non of the credit depending on the settings.
| mam4 wrote:
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Since the JWST design started, there's been a revolution in the
| "easiness" of launches.
|
| I wonder if a future evolution of space telescopes will be some
| kind of interferometric (obviously extremely hard for IR or
| visible light, but easier for radio and microwaves) swarm of
| cheap semi-disposible telescopes than one enormous one.
|
| Then you can add to the swarm, upgrade elements, and retire
| failed elements without having to eat a multi-billion helping of
| humble pie.
|
| And rather than have a fearsomely complex integrated sunshield,
| you could have a similar swarm of simpler satellites that provide
| a large cool area at L2, and then the observers just need to
| handle their own heat.
|
| I suppose this could be described as microservices...in
| spaaaaace. Draw what parallels you will from that!
| semaphoreP wrote:
| Astronomer here, we are thinking about doing interferometers in
| space[1,2], but it won't be a catch-all for everything. One
| reason is that the instrumentation is equally as important as
| the telescope optics itself, and it's non-trivial to have your
| swarm of satellites both collect light, but also do science
| experiments with the light. One thing we are thinking of is to
| fly more proto-typing missions to get the technology readiness
| of various components to mature stages before assembling it all
| together for the real thing (I would say we did not do this as
| well for JWST).
|
| [1]: https://www.life-space-mission.com/ [2]:
| https://lisa.nasa.gov/
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| > Since the JWST design started, there's been a revolution in
| the "easiness" of launches.
|
| Producing novel observation platforms is going to be expensive
| regardless of which platform, because of launch costs.
|
| > I wonder if a future evolution of space telescopes will be
| some kind of interferometric (obviously extremely hard for IR
| or visible light, but easier for radio and microwaves) swarm of
| cheap semi-disposible telescopes than one enormous one.
|
| With space recovery and repair mission capabilities like
| https://nexis.gsfc.nasa.gov/osam-1.html growing, a single large
| asset could be easier to repair than constant refresh.
|
| Anyways, small satellites = small sensors.
|
| There is a big difference between a projected life of 1-3
| years, and a prestige mission with a long lifespan. Hubble has
| been operating for ~30 years now.
|
| > Then you can add to the swarm, upgrade elements, and retire
| failed elements without having to eat a multi-billion helping
| of humble pie.
|
| Keeping a swarm of space assets ideally situated over time,
| with proper attitudes and control is a non-trivial problem.
| Look at Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, that is considered a
| hard problem.
|
| Software solutions don't always translate to hardware.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Well of course its not going to be simple, and I doubt it
| would even be possible for the JWST successor, which I assume
| are already being sketched out, but its an interesting idea
| to think about. Satellite swarms are a very active area of
| research, along with cheap launches enabling cheap hardware
| based on substantially COTS electronics, which means 10
| "unreliable" things, of which 9 may fail may be cheaper than
| 1 gold-plated one that will definitely not fail.
|
| And yes, they have small elements, that's the whole point. A
| small element is disproportionately easier to produce than a
| bigger one. The point of The Swarm would be to offset the
| small area individually small elements with a large number of
| them. ALMA does this, and they even pick the dishes up with
| giant forklifts and move them around to reconfigure the
| array.
|
| Optical interferometric arrays are very hard and only
| recently even possible, so it's unlikely you could do it in
| space "soon" (even LISA is still a long way out, and that's
| been planned since I was at school). I obviously don't have a
| handle on if the added noise from positioning errors
| outweighs the literally astronomical baseline advantage.
|
| And yes, Hubble might have lasted 30 years, but JWST has
| about 10 years life, and then it's dead and will fall away
| from L2 unless they can get a refuel/regas mission launched
| (it does have the ports for it) to it in time.
|
| Of course any number of practical issues can torpedo such a
| thing from the phase space of feasible implementations, but
| they're still fun to think about.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| "Hubble has been operating for ~30 years now."
|
| Right, and the GPS constellation has been active for almost
| thirty years too. I think the GP is probably right that it
| would be great if the risk associated with a single mega
| launch/deployment could be spread over a fleet, but
| ultimately it does no good if you can't use that
| configuration to get the observations you want, hence the
| question. It has less to do with it being a "software
| solution" and more just whether it would actually practically
| work.
|
| To their point, though, lots of ground-based radio telescopes
| are now also arrays of many dishes [1], so it's not at all
| hard to imagine that a similar configuration could be of
| value in space.
|
| [1]: https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| The fearsome requirements imposed by optical interferometry
| are a real killer here: the JWST mirror segments can be
| controlled with 10nm precision for a reason.
|
| Radio is a billion times easier (at least in naive terms):
| wavelengths in the kilometers rather than hundreds of
| nanometers
| snewman wrote:
| > Producing novel observation platforms is going to be
| expensive regardless of which platform, because of launch
| costs.
|
| This is exactly the point: launch costs are coming down, and
| there is widespread anticipation that they will start to
| plummet as the next generation of launchers comes online.
| If/when Starship (a) becomes available + (b) has any
| significant competition, launch costs could plummet by an
| incredible factor.
| samwillis wrote:
| The other thing to bear in mind is the size of up coming launch
| vehicles. SpaceX Starship will be 9m and Blue Origin's New Glen
| is expected to be 7m in diameter. Both of those could take a
| telescope the size of James Webb with much lest or no
| "unfolding" required.
|
| Annother option with some of these cheaper launch vehicles is
| to build the telescope into the upper stage, using it as a
| bus/platform. So for example you could convert a Starship upper
| stage into a telescope, using its full 9m diameter for a
| mirror. Fully assembled on the ground before launch.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Yes, small satellites are simpler and cheaper. Larger systems
| are complicated and expensive.
|
| But the entropy of a large system is low, because it's
| physically attached with the Strong Force of physics. There is
| a low risk to other neighbouring satellites (space junk
| collisions). A swarm of small satellites has high entropy, and
| is loosely-coupled with the Gravity force of physics.
|
| At what point do we want to accept the financial tradeoffs
| involved? Humans and the economy also benefit from the large
| projects, and the management structures also teach efficiency
| to more people who can go on to create other exciting new
| sensors.
|
| We could start with a small satellite like Sputnik, and make
| them grow. Eventually it will reach a point of stability with
| the neighbouring environment. That could be much larger than we
| expect. "That's no moon, it's a spaceship!"
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| > But the entropy of a large system is low, because it's
| physically attached with the Strong Force of physics. There
| is a low risk to other neighbouring satellites (space junk
| collisions). A swarm of small satellites has high entropy,
| and is loosely-coupled with the Gravity force of physics.
|
| I'm going to go and assume that you used the strong force and
| gravity as metaphors here.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| One advantage of L2 is that it's a point of gravitational
| metastability when entropy inevitably hits, your satellite
| will slowly fall away from the point, and either depart for a
| long, initially slow, fall back to something rocky, or spiral
| out from the Earth-Moon system into interplanetary space.
|
| An L2 swarm isn't bound together by gravity, it actually has
| to maintain active control to stay there, so it's a "self
| cleaning" area.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| "Satellites are livestock, not pets"!
| dylan604 wrote:
| >in spaaaaace
|
| in recognition of getting old(er), i wonder how many youngins
| even know there's a reference to be caught here.
| xcambar wrote:
| TIL, I am youngling.
| sho_hn wrote:
| How could you feel old about something that jus... 10 years?!
| dylan604 wrote:
| wrong reference if you think it is only 10 years old
| zargon wrote:
| Got a young one here. Try 40 years.
| csdvrx wrote:
| Would you care enlightening about the reference?
|
| On duckduckgo I only found some references to The Muppets, a
| Springer article and a streaming playlist on archive.org
| johnny22 wrote:
| i've never played the game, but i think it's from portal 2
| throwamon wrote:
| I've never played it either, but I actually know the
| reference thanks to this video[1] (which in turn comes
| from the once-viral Keyboard Cat[2]).
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7C_1QfhpMQ
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J---aiyznGQ
| dylan604 wrote:
| Ahhh, sorry. Thanks for playing. We've got some lovely
| parting gifts for you...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmI77ZBeJrQ
| scrollaway wrote:
| I believe GGP was referencing the far older Muppet Show
| bit of Pigs in Spaaaaace :)
| dylan604 wrote:
| Ding ding ding. Now, let's take a look at the prizes...
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Due to budget cuts the only prize I can offer is back
| pain and a vague sense of nostalgia for a time when
| modems made a weird noise and your wierd aunt wasn't on
| the Internet.
| dylan604 wrote:
| https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Pigs_in_Space
| [deleted]
| belter wrote:
| https://youtu.be/EmI77ZBeJrQ
| secondaryacct wrote:
| His compliment of Ariane 5 tingles my French pride. So annoyed
| when watching the launch live to see all the ameritards in
| youtube chat saying "what why is it not spacex" grrr. And we did
| it for free to boot.
|
| Elon "Electric Jesus" Musk only does it as a business model.
| He'll never do important national stuff that go beyond budget
| efficiency.
| misotaur wrote:
| So now that Webb is on its way what is the next Nasa telescope?
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