[HN Gopher] Greg Robinson fixed NASA's James Webb Space Telescop...
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Greg Robinson fixed NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, reluctantly
Author : wallflower
Score : 110 points
Date : 2022-07-15 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| crikeyjoe wrote:
| kepler1 wrote:
| Not to take away credit from Greg Robinson (or other many people
| involved in the project management), but to say that he fixed it
| as if a miracle happened is exaggerating.
|
| The project had to be delayed, cost-overrun, de-scoped in some
| small areas, to get it onto _some_ schedule that could then be
| followed and predictable. If you cut enough things you can
| "rescue" a project back onto schedule.
|
| It's not like he (or anyone else) turned back time and gave us a
| miracle. It's an interesting "people story" though.
| gsk22 wrote:
| Ctrl-F "miracle" 0 results. Kinda feels like you're the one
| exaggerating...
|
| Of course he shouldn't get 100% of the credit, or perhaps even
| a majority of the credit, but it's clear from the article that
| the project was languishing when he took the job, and he
| quickly made several improvements to get it back on track.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/pb3vq
|
| See also:
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope...
|
| https://archive.ph/AEzFQ
| anewpersonality wrote:
| The most surprising thing about JWST is that Mark Adler didn't
| work on it.
| Rafuino wrote:
| I remember working on an audit of JWST back in 2012-ish and
| thought that it would never be launched or, if it did, something
| critical would fail. I'm happy my doubts were proven wrong
| nonethewiser wrote:
| What was this "audit"? And why did you think it would never
| launch, or fail?
| jffry wrote:
| NASA performs a variety of audits as part of its annual
| financial reporting, for example here's the 2012 report: http
| s://www.nasa.gov/pdf/707292main_FY12%20AFR%20111512%20FI...
|
| Perhaps it was one of these audits?
| netsharc wrote:
| Seems like at least 2 people on this reply thread didn't
| read the article. It could be 3, since OP wrote "an audit",
| if OP did the audit mentioned in the article they would've
| written "the audit".
| jffry wrote:
| The audit discussed in the article was "several years"
| after 2011. The document I linked discusses, on page 17,
| a 2012 GAO report on 21 large NASA projects and discusses
| how its cost overruns are affecting other programs, which
| could be motivation to can the project or otherwise give
| the impression it will "never get off the ground"
|
| I brought it up because it more closely fit GP's "2012"
| timeline and shows that even before the audit in the
| article, there was good reason to doubt the future of the
| mission.
|
| Please also remember the HN commenting guidelines
| ("Please don't comment on whether someone read an
| article."):
| motoboi wrote:
| You are assuming people only comment if they read the
| article.
| derekp7 wrote:
| Question -- Is the cost of projects such as Webb so high because
| of high launch costs, which in turn has a cascade effect on
| limiting the the projects that get launched to space, and
| therefore requiring that they be built to higher specifications
| because you only get one shot at it? If so, then will the lower
| cost of space access from future vehicle development (such as
| Star Ship, and others that may follow) make projects such as
| future James Webb scopes and deep space probes much cheaper, if
| they know they can easily launch replacements and iterate the
| designs? Or is this just fantasy at this moment? I haven't really
| found much other than speculation comments (such as mine), but
| would like to see a professional's opinion.
| jmyeet wrote:
| The cost of launch is relatively low, meaning several hundred
| million out of a a $15-20B budget.
|
| But a given launch system is deeply intertwined with designing
| the mission. The size, the weight and the mass distribution.
|
| Moving parts are a nightmare for reliability. Every moving part
| is something that can cease up and go wrong. It's a motor that
| can fail and gears that can get jammed.
|
| JWST has two key components that involve a lot of moving parts:
|
| 1. The mirror. Hubble was smaller enough to be deployed fully
| constructed in the Space Shuttle so didn't have to deploy in
| space. JWST's mirror is 3-4x larger an there's no current
| launch vehicle that could launch it fully assembled. That's why
| you have all the beryllium hex mirrors that had to deploy the
| mirror once in orbit. These motors, actuators, assemblies, etc
| need to be _incredibly_ precise and reliable; and
|
| 2. The heat shield. JWST has to be incredibly cold to operate
| (5K IIRC). The only way to get rid of heat in space is to
| radiate it away. The heat shield separates JWST from the Sun,
| the Earth and Moon (each of which reflect enough light to
| interfere with operations). The shield is several layers and
| it's large, like tennis-court sized. Obviously this too had to
| be deployed in space.
|
| There were like 10 technologies for JWST that had to be
| invented to make the mission possible. That's less than ideal.
| It adds to the cost, the complexity and the timelines.
|
| In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a stepping
| stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of these
| technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably with a
| smaller mirror. But here we are.
| capableweb wrote:
| > In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a
| stepping stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of
| these technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably
| with a smaller mirror. But here we are.
|
| That doesn't really seem to be in NASAs DNA, to do smaller
| incremental improvements. Instead, they really upgrade big,
| in chunks with long time in-between. I don't know why they do
| it, but in their webcasts it been mentioned a couple of times
| related to James Webb.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| My (minimally educated) guess is the funding model: they
| need to give lots of congresspeople stuff for their
| districts. Big projects provide much more stuff and are
| easier to sell if everyone can get a piece at once rather
| than Alabama getting this one piece one year and Colorado
| getting this other piece the next year.
| swores wrote:
| Seems a reasonable guess, but I'd hope that if that were
| the main stumbling block then it wouldn't be too hard to
| still sell it as a multi-state project that's also multi-
| stage, either sharing the work at each stage or signing
| off up front which stage goes where.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Remember that for congresscritters, it's infinitely
| easier to cull $20m from NASA's budget than $5 from the
| DOD.
|
| Also remember that a non-trivial amount of Americans
| believe the moon landing was faked, or that the earth is
| flat and NASA is part of some conspiracy. Or that a
| certain political party has spent literally three decades
| saying "the nerds at NASA are lying, there is no global
| warming" and you might start to understand the complete
| lack of political will to give NASA the funding to do
| even literally the basics.
| l1tany11 wrote:
| My understanding is that not only did the heat shield have to
| unfurl, but construct a particular geometry such that it
| created a waveguide to channel the light out the sides and
| avoid too much entrapment or too slow of transport. Being the
| material it is, there's also no way to model exactly how it
| will unfurl so it's difficult to develop. Just the metrology
| effort on the ground to validate the shape was quite great.
|
| The sun shield is held up as this big challenge but I don't
| think they do a good job explaining why it was so difficult.
|
| There's a popular YouTube whose father was a metrologist
| working on the sun shield. https://youtu.be/Pu97IiO_yDI
| WalterBright wrote:
| A while back I raised a bit of a furor here saying that a
| duplicate could be made and launched at a tenth of the cost.
| A lot of people said I don't know what I'm talking about,
| that little money would be saved.
|
| But it seems patently obvious. After all, 10 technologies
| don't have to be reinvented. No research would need to be
| redone. No test rigs would need to be redesigned and
| duplicated. And on and on.
|
| The most bizarre argument against building a duplicate was
| there wouldn't be anything extra worth looking at. Yet I
| watched the NOVA episode on the scope last night, and
| everywhere they look where we thought there was "nothing"
| turns out to be crammed with 10,000 galaxies and stars.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Olbers' Paradox[0] resurgent.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox
| zabzonk wrote:
| I take your point, but it does seem to have actually
| worked.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Obviously a great deal of the cost also came from making
| sure it would work, because there wouldn't be another.
|
| What if 10 were built, each with only a 10% chance of
| success? What would that have cost? After all, it doesn't
| need the expense of being man-rated.
| mmazing wrote:
| What is the measure of success though?
|
| Successful launch and arrival at the observation point?
| The 6 month setup period before observations can be made?
|
| I contend that success here is a full mission that yields
| science data over decades of observation. If we cut down
| the acceptable error rate so we can launch early, how
| does that impact longevity?
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I think the question is, imagine we built 10 -- and got
| an outcome like:
|
| 2x -- failed to deploy, mission lost
|
| 4x -- early operation error, 6mo lifetime
|
| 3x -- lower performance, 3 year lifetime
|
| 1x -- mission successful, 10 year lifetime
|
| ...do we get a better deal building them with larger
| faults, at a lower cost?
|
| A lot of expense is in developing technologies, assembly
| tooling, and test rigs -- all of which is easier if we
| don't need them to be as assured because only 1 in 10
| needs to succeed.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Right. And if they are launched serially, you've got a
| chance to correct mistakes in the previous launches. Odds
| of success increase with every launch.
| mmazing wrote:
| Yeah, makes more sense when I think about it like that.
| Thanks!
| zabzonk wrote:
| > What would that have cost?
|
| No idea. Do you? Genuinely interested, particularly
| regarding methodology. Not intending at all to be
| insulting.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Look at SpaceX's rockets. They cut costs by what, 10x?
| over NASA's? A part of that was not trying to build 100%
| the first time, but to accept failure and iterate.
|
| My dad told me that Pratt&Whitney made the most reliable
| aircraft engines by putting them on a test stand and
| running them at full power until they broke. The
| engineers would figure out why it failed, redesign the
| part, stick that on the engine, and continued running
| them at full power.
|
| It's straightforward, inexpensive, and it works.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Could it be, that iterating fast through additional
| failures may be harder to finance with public funds,
| because the general public hasn't caught up with the
| recognition of failing early and often being a good
| thing?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Government programs fail all the time, and they just get
| a budget increase. Hire the salesmen who accomplish that.
| noizejoy wrote:
| lol - you do have a point there!
| dekhn wrote:
| Surely you can see that the P&W approach is only going to
| discover a subset of problems that will affect the engine
| in the wild. For example, engines don't run at 100% power
| during the full flight, and they go through heating and
| cooling cycles. It also doesn't address failure modes due
| to manufacturing problems specific to a single engine-
| for example, turbine blades are manufactured with serial
| numbers and you can go back and get detailed process and
| QA for that specific item to understand what went wrong
| and why it failed and how to not do that during
| manufacture again.
|
| Then there's all sorts of complex failures that aren't
| addressed by single engines: " Prior to this crash, the
| probability of a simultaneous failure of all three
| hydraulic systems was considered as low as one in a
| billion. However, statistical models did not account for
| the position of the number-two engine, mounted at the
| tail close to hydraulic lines, nor the results of
| fragments released in many directions. Since then,
| aircraft engine designs have focused on keeping shrapnel
| from puncturing the cowling or ductwork, increasingly
| utilizing high-strength composite materials to achieve
| penetration resistance while keeping the weight low"
|
| (I'm not disrespecting P&W- I'm sure they have more tests
| than just "100% power until it breaks, fix and repeat")
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Surely you can see that the P&W approach is only going
| to discover a subset of problems that will affect the
| engine in the wild.
|
| Keep in mind that my former job was designing gearbox
| parts for the Boeing 757. This included doing the math,
| and devising a test plan. I've spent a _lot_ of time on
| "what could go wrong" scenarios in the real world.
|
| Also, when I prepare slides for a coding presentation,
| the implementation code for a concept gets trimmed way
| down to what will fit on a slide.
| prpl wrote:
| What is the timescale you are thinking of for 10% chance
| of success? 10% first light success is different than 10%
| 10-year survey success.
|
| There's physically not enough infrastructure (clean
| rooms, testing facilities, vacuum chambers, etc...) nor
| skilled manpower available to NASA to be able to build
| more than one in parallel, so that would add to the cost
| significantly.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What's being done with that infrastructure (clean room,
| testing facilities, vacuum chambers, etc..) right now?
|
| Nothing?
|
| Of course, the sensible thing to do is to build the test
| equipment, procedures, train the testers. Then test #1.
| Then test #2. Then test #3. That's what everybody does.
|
| The cost of the Saturn V rocket was amortized over many
| launch vehicles, despite a host of new technologies that
| had to be developed for it, despite much of it being
| hand-built.
| zabzonk wrote:
| But the cost of grinding the mirrors?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Consider the cost of designing the mirrors, designing a
| machine to grind the mirrors, testing the machine, and
| verifying the grind of the mirrors.
|
| All that adds to the cost of the first mirror, and adds
| $0 to the second.
| prpl wrote:
| Other telescopes are being built, at least at places like
| Goddard SFC. Probably WFIRST aka Nancy Roman Space
| Telescope) there. Other facilities (Northrop Grumman)
| would be competing with NatSec/OGA instruments.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>A lot of people said I don't know what I'm talking about,
| that little money would be saved.
|
| Those are the ignorant ones.
|
| It isn't quite a "Those who know don't speak and those who
| speak don't know" situation, but this is just blindingly
| obvious to anyone who has done any R&D to manufacturing and
| risk assessment. Heck, even just having a duplicate on the
| ground to debug could save the mission (since there isn't
| one, let's hope it doesn't come to that).
|
| On one-off projects of any size, the design, prototyping,
| testing, & refining the design just overwhelm the cost of
| fabricating the final parts -- and they do it by orders of
| magnitude. Just for the carbon fiber parts I work in daily,
| the initial R&D test program for a sizeable (scale of 1
| m^2) part might cost $25K, the first mold $12K, the first
| part sells for $3K, the second part $2K and the fifth part
| 1.7K. To get to volume production in the 100s, there's
| probably another dev program & set of molds, and the 300th
| part out the door might sell at $1200.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When I worked in engineering at Boeing, the cost of a
| forged part was the cost of the tool&die machinist making
| the die. The incremental cost of doing the actual forging
| was a rounding error. The dies do wear, and the parts get
| larger and larger until they're out of spec and a new die
| is sunk.
| googlryas wrote:
| First rule in government spending: why build one when you
| can have two at twice the price? Only, this one can be kept
| secret. Controlled by Americans, built by the Japanese
| subcontractors.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| There should be a movie with this plot.
| motoboi wrote:
| Never now if people are joking saying that but oh boy!
| [deleted]
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Wanna take a ride?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You got much more detailed explanations in that thread. It
| simply doesn't scale like that. These are extremely bespoke
| systems, and the entire process is gated on vendors and
| facilities that are both unique in the world and under high
| demand. There is simply no way you get a 2nd unit at the
| kind of discount you're assuming.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| We already had the discussion. Could you link to it? Is it
| worth having it again?
| WalterBright wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30730726
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm not sure you're correct.
|
| Consider fabbing chips. Fabs spend an awful lot of time
| verifying the produced chips. I've seen estimates that
| verification cost exceeds fabrication cost.
|
| How much of the development cost of JWST 2.0 would be spent
| on verification? I honestly don't know but I would guess
| it's high.
|
| Another factor: part of making a production process is
| predicated on how many you'd build. We had a process for
| making Saturn-V rockets based on the number of Apollo
| missions we planned for. If you then up and decide you need
| 500 Saturn-Vs you might have to go through a whole new
| process for something that will scale that high.
|
| Yet another factor: the launch vehicle. If you decide to do
| JWST 2.0 in 10 years, what launch vehicle will you use? The
| same one might not exist so the new mission will have to be
| designed for what is available.
|
| And another: materials science changes. We don't make the
| same materials that we did 50+ years ago for good reasons
| but those materials are a key part of the design of
| something like Saturn-V.
|
| So I imagine JWST 2.0 would be cheaper but 90% cheaper? I'm
| not convinced.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I can't wait for JWST 2.0, but we're only talking about
| JWST #2. We're not talking about upgrades, just another
| copy. I mean, it should be easy, right? It's in the cloud
| so to speak, so just spin up another instance and push to
| a different region. No problemo.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The obvious number to make is 5; currently we only have
| one at L2. What about L1, L3, L4 and L5?
| rdevsrex wrote:
| It will be so cool, if eventually we could deploy
| telescopes on other plants, like in Ad Astra.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It has to be L2, because Webb needs the shade.
|
| That still leaves the L2s of Venus, Mars, Jupiter etc.
|
| And you can probably fit a few more into Earth L2.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| It's actually not in the shade, its orbit around L2 is
| quite wide. That's why it has the massive sunshield and
| solar array, it needs a lot of power.
| MereInterest wrote:
| The advantage of L2 is that is stays in Earth's shadow at
| all times. None of the other Lagrange points have this
| benefit.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Why does it need the _sun_ shield, then?
| polishTar wrote:
| Earth is not big enough to fully eclipse the sun at the
| L2 point, but it doesn't matter anyways since JWST was
| deliberately put in an orbit around the L2 point that
| never enters the earth's eclipse for energy reasons since
| the solar panels are not large enough to provide
| sufficient power during an eclipse.
|
| https://space.stackexchange.com/a/57378
| dylan604 wrote:
| Ask the moon why during an eclipse it isn't completely
| shadowed out. It's much closer than L2
| WalterBright wrote:
| Good answer! Although the Earth is also much larger than
| the Moon.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And the JWST is much smaller than the moon
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| L2 means that the Earth and Sun are roughly in the same
| direction. JWST orbits at a distance around L2 such that
| it's actually never in the shade, so it doesn't need
| energy storage and thermal controls other than constant
| sun in a constant direction.
|
| It has an orbit around L2 of roughly 0.8 million km. L2
| is about 1.5 million km from Earth. The moon is only 0.36
| million km from Earth.
| amluto wrote:
| L3 may have some challenges with its Earth uplink, and we
| wouldn't be able to see a satellite there very easily.
| L3, L4, and L5 might need separate shielding from the
| Earth and the sun.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What are the odds of two objects at L2 colliding? The
| telescope does have maneuvering capability, as L2 isn't
| stable.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The odds are astronomically small. ESA has at least 5
| other missions aimed at L2. [1]
|
| [1]: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Scienc
| e/Hersch...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > astronomically small
|
| That's what I supposed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| They aren't exactly at L2 as they are orbiting a point
| that is L2. So just put each one in their own orbit.
| Hopefully it doesn't get congested that we have to fear a
| Kessler Syndrome incident at L2
| Teever wrote:
| I dont know if your chip fab comparisom is correct. It
| would be more comparable if you included the cost of
| building the chip fab itself as well as the R&D cost of
| several of the key technologies in the fab.
|
| Also, the entire Apollo infrastructure was actually
| designed for many more launches than occured, that's why
| some of that infrastructure is still in use to this day.
| It's been a few years since I read a biography of Von
| Braun but I remember him making design decisions for
| Apollo that anticipated many more launches and manned
| missions to Mars and Venus in the 1970s with a manner
| Mars base by the early 80s.
| somat wrote:
| I always thought they should have planed to build and
| launch two of them in case something happened to the
| first(unlike hubble we cant get people out to L2), if you
| are building one, then building the second is relatively
| cheap.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The universe at this distance seems very homogeneous. Won't
| looking at different parts of the sky just yield more of
| the same? It seems like you'll just see the same things
| over and over again in any patch of sky.
| ISL wrote:
| One of the hypotheses that can be tested better than ever
| by JWST is precisely this: Is the very-distant universe
| homogenous?
|
| Modern cosmology assumes-so, but it need not be true.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| "Why build one when you can have two at twice the price" ~
| S.R. Hadden. Contact
| baxtr wrote:
| We could probably deploy 100k of them and still see only a
| tiny fraction of the universe.
| skykooler wrote:
| Taking pictures the level of the first image released, it
| would take about 3700 years for JWST to image the entire
| sky.
| motoboi wrote:
| With really cheap space access you can do assembling in
| space. No motors, just plain old human hands in space.
|
| Tennis court sized shield? Take it up like a long and
| precious Persian mat and let the humans rig the thing in
| orbit.
|
| From there, attach fuels tanks and you are good to go for
| your insertion burns.
| ars wrote:
| > These motors, actuators, assemblies, etc need to be
| incredibly precise and reliable
|
| Is it impossible to build to a lower level of reliability
| then have humans available to fix/adjust things in orbit?
|
| Then once it's fully assembled in place, move it to its final
| location?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Don't we also have 60 years of experience with motors,
| actuators, and assemblies in space?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Some of the parts are so sensitive them weren't deployed
| until the telescope got into its final position at the
| moon's L2 Lagrange point. If you had humans assemble it in
| orbit it would still have to undergo the stresses of
| acceleration to get to the L2 Lagrange point.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| I don't think that's possible because, if I understand
| correctly, many of the parts need to be adjusted
| periodically to maintain accuracy. It's not a set-once-and-
| forget type situation. Those parts need to be able to make
| extraordinarily precise adjustments repeatedly for the life
| of the mission.
|
| _" Aligning the primary mirror segments as though they are
| a single large mirror means each mirror is aligned to
| 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair. This alignment
| has to be done at 50 degrees above absolute zero! _[0]
|
| [0]https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/webb-
| actuato...
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| The Webb is orbiting the Earth/Sun system at a Lagrange
| point. It's not in a normal Earth orbit. Astronauts have
| not gone that far from Earth
| jmyeet wrote:
| Yes and no. It raises a bunch of questions/problems, wuch
| as:
|
| 1. Where doe the telescope deploy? Ideally in LEO so you
| have a chance fo fix things but then that complicated the
| launch. You have to park in orbit and restart th eengine at
| a later point. AFAIK JWST didn't enter a parking orbit so
| would've required additional fuel. That might not have been
| possible;
|
| 2. What if the launcher itself fails? Do you want to have
| the capacity to launch another rocket, have it rock with
| JWST and then go on? If so, that's a whole new level of
| complexity and a set of problesm you have to solve as well
| as things that can go wrong;
|
| 3. If you look at the flight plan there are a bunch of
| turns. How would the G-forces affect, say, the deployed
| heat shield?
|
| 4. JWST actually had to rotate during launch to point the
| instruments away from the Sun so as not to destroy them.
| This already added complexity. Doing this with the deployed
| spacecraft would probably only further complicate this.
| desmosxxx wrote:
| Some of the design choices that went into JWST will be fixed
| with larger diameter payloads.
|
| When we get into the government allocating funds it gets
| tricky. Cheaper launch costs could just mean that the savings
| go into the telescope rather than risk management. It's hard to
| get funds for a backup telescope, even if it's cheaper overall.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Musk has nothing to do with it. The cost is not due to lack of
| Musk.
| causality0 wrote:
| The cost of projects like Webb is so high because there's zero
| incentive for the contractors not to make them high. When the
| Webb program was approved the estimated cost was 500 million
| dollars. The final cost was ten billion dollars. What's a
| reasonable punishment for a cost overrun equal to sinking a
| Nimitz-class supercarrier?
| efsavage wrote:
| One question I love to know the answer to is why we only built
| one, or how hard would it be for us to build more now? Would a
| second one have cost 5%, 10%, 20% more? Surely it wouldn't be
| near 100% as all of the research and testing scales.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| The components are immensely expensive. The mirrors alone
| required new manufacturing techniques to be _invented_ and
| these components are largely invented by doctorate level
| research scientists.
|
| Not to mention the spacecraft and all the deployable systems
| must withstand intense G forces to achieve escape velocity.
|
| The design also requires complete verification. Each component
| must be created and a test bench then has to be engineered to
| ensure viability after launch. It is an immense undertaking to
| develop experimental equipment (ultra-high vacuum, pulsed
| powered laser physics background), to then add the additional
| expectations of space launch and zero opportunity for
| corrective intervention means the standards are exacting.
| Laremere wrote:
| Yes and no, with factors pushing both ways:
|
| There was a tremendous amount of r&d expense for James Webb.
| However I think that sibling comments are underestimating how
| much can be reduced by just expecting that the first few
| attempts would fail. Take the sunshield, where Smarter Every
| Day did a video showing the extent to which everyone worked to
| ensure the exact shape was perfect:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu97IiO_yDI
|
| A lot of this difficulty was because you couldn't just put it
| up there and see if it works. If an extensive test costs $100
| million, but a launch costs $177 million, you choose the
| extensive test every time. I think overall a program which made
| dozens of James Webbs, launching a couple times a year would
| likely have been cheaper with better results.
|
| On the other hand, there's a big problem: Failure, even within
| the expected threshold of failure, looks really bad in the
| realm of public opinion. There's just the practical problem of
| a NASA director having to stand in front of congress and
| justify why the telescope program that has launched 6 failed
| satellites over the last 3 years should still get funding.
|
| but this is still just an interested observer's speculation.
| [deleted]
| supernova87a wrote:
| Here is my take on the confluence of factors at play:
|
| **
|
| 1. The telescope and instruments are designed for a one-time
| special use, shared by no one else (pretty much). That means
| many if not all the requirements are being discovered as they
| go, and it is not a very predictable process in terms of the
| risks and unknowns. Many delays happen/happened because people
| believed the requirements were set, and started building
| things, only to have them change later, leading to wasted time
| and resources. But that's how something in research phase goes.
|
| 2. The size, materials, instruments, etc were pretty much
| unprecedented, aside from some very low level legacy
| components. Everything had to be designed for the first time.
| This often leads to many unexpected cost overruns.
|
| 3. It was a huge project, which is always in tension with
| something that is R&D / being discovered as you go. It takes a
| long time for many different and scattered teams to be able to
| communicate their requirements and capabilities and schedules
| to each other when they are so distributed. There really is
| something to the idea that 6 people in one room can do things
| that 100 people in multiple rooms cannot, but by the sheer size
| required, and the fragmentation of expertise to do the job, it
| had accompanying schedule and risk problems.
|
| 4. Because the telescope is a one-off and so valuable as a
| project, it had to be risk-free or risk-minimal. When something
| costs so much, it has to cost even more to protect it against
| mistakes. That means that you can't cheap out and risk certain
| things, leading to it taking more time and resources to get it
| right. It is the opposite of the Mars program "fast and cheap
| and fail quickly". It has advantages and disadvantages.
|
| 5. Also a sort of less tangible factor is that these projects,
| even when delayed, have to keep a certain group of people
| employed to maintain continuity of knowledge and technical
| expertise. If you get delayed, you cannot just cut people from
| the program, you will lose them to other projects and further
| delay progress. So every year of delay incurs you a very high
| cost.
|
| **
|
| The costs were not the cost of launch. That was a relatively
| small part of the project. Ariane, etc. are known factors at
| this point. It was the fact that everything about the telescope
| was new, will never be reproduced again, and had to be gotten
| right the first time.
|
| I am probably oversimplifying some things that happened during
| the process, and other related factors, but that's my opinion.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "Many delays happen/happened because people believed the
| requirements were set, and started building things, only to
| have them change later."
|
| The second part, 'changing requirements' has been the reality
| of many NASA and DoD projects for decades.
|
| The "delays" happen because the vendors make gobs of money
| working this way.
| supernova87a wrote:
| That is also true to some extent.
|
| I would also say that it is a product of the federal
| government in recent decades gradually losing its ability
| to keep people on staff (or pay them enough) to build the
| knowledge about how to run/build such projects themselves.
| And cost-effectively.
|
| If you recall the earlier days of aerospace, aircraft,
| etc., technical experts in the military would basically
| tell Lockheed, whoever, exactly what they wanted to design,
| or would be equally qualified to set out the specs and be
| deep in the design.
|
| Over the last decades, that capability (I believe) has
| largely left the government/public institutions. We have
| essentially outsourced the design and building of aircraft,
| spacecraft to private contractors, and when that happens it
| naturally costs more to do, to pay them to do that job (and
| take on the risk of doing it). After all, they are profit-
| seeking enterprises, while if that expertise had been kept
| in government, it would not be.
|
| If you take it by examples, the era of WW2/shortly-post-WW2
| military aircraft was when Air Force/Navy/Army aircraft
| engineers helped design planes that contractors would get
| marching orders to go build (of course with their input).
| Nowadays, we're in the era when Pentagon procurement office
| tells LM / Boeing to go design us a plane to these
| outcomes, which are cobbled together from 4 different
| branches of the military and uncoordinated generals' wish
| lists.
|
| And we're surprised that a fighter program ends up costing
| $2T.
| uoaei wrote:
| Have you done any research into the budgeting process?
|
| Edit: I googled it. Here's the first paragraph of the first
| link from DDG:
|
| > The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to cost
| NASA $9.7 billion over 24 years. Of that amount, $8.8 billion
| was spent on spacecraft development between 2003 and 2021; $861
| million is planned to support five years of operations.
| Adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars, the lifetime cost to
| NASA will be approximately $10.8 billion.
|
| So "spacecraft development" comprised about 90% of the total
| budget. Of the remainder, 96% is allocated to "five years of
| operations". So we have about $39 million left over, which I
| assume covers the launch and everything around it. If you want
| to try optimizing that, go ahead, but it is nearly a rounding
| error (0.4% of budget) in the grand scheme of things.
|
| There is an argument to be made that a few million dollars
| saved is valuable. I would propose a counterargument, that the
| amount of friction induced by working with private contractors
| (especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who
| run SpaceX) would add to some of the development costs, so the
| savings may not be as big as you think from a naive comparison.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who
| run SpaceX
|
| I don't think you know anything about the space industry.
| SpaceX is famous for being wildly easier to work with than
| any other launch provider (including semi-national providers
| like Arianespace).
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Famous among who? Are you in the space launch industry?
| ghaff wrote:
| Basically, it's the cost of designing and building a complete
| one-off that's going to be launched off into space, deployed,
| no opportunity to repair, etc. There are a million things
| that can go wrong. And you have one shot.
|
| I know someone who was one of the test engineers on SDO
| (solar dynamics observatory) and there were all manner of
| concerns about this, that, and the other thing that were
| really hard to say were almost absolutely certainly "just
| fine."
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Basically, it 's the cost of designing and building a
| complete one-off_ [...]
|
| As a simple analogy: there's a difference between going to
| 3-for-1 Suite Warehouse and going to Saville Row and
| getting something bespoke.
|
| It's just there are no COTS satellites that do what JWST
| do, so if you want to do cutting edge science you're paying
| for Saville Row.
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably even worse than that. They're effectively often
| designing special fabrics, threads, and tools to do the
| sewing. Not that I have a need any longer, but custom
| suits in lower cost of labor areas aren't a big deal and
| even off-the-rack suits pretty much have to be tailored
| for many of us to look good.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Is it possible that cheaper and more frequent launches will
| keep and up dropping the development prices as maybe more
| regular launches will enable the development process to be
| less strict and leave more room for error?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That is essentially what's driving the popularity of
| smallsats and megaconstellations. Since launch costs are
| dropping and flights are becoming more regular (eg SpaceX's
| transporter flights, where the rocket flies regardless of
| payload readiness and anyone who wasn't ready just moves to
| another flight, eliminating the main issue from other
| rideshare arrangements), it's potentially cheaper to make
| more replaceable satellites. So far this mainly applies to
| Earth observation and internet constellations.
|
| This doesn't really carry-over to large projects like JWST
| yet though.
| raisin_churn wrote:
| Part of the huge cost to develop it was getting a mechanism
| that could deploy the mirror segments into a large enough
| array with sufficient accuracy, a task that would be
| dramatically simplified by a a launch platform with a wider
| fairing and greater mass to the L2 Lagrange point. So yes, if
| SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton of
| money on JWST, albeit mostly by relaxing the design
| parameters of the telescope rather than through cheaper
| launch costs.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > if SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton
| of money on JWST
|
| How much? How much did it cost for the actual JWST? Do you
| have any evidence of this great cost?
|
| The glorification of Musk's ego is endless. Can JWST see
| the farthest reaches of it? Is it expanding or contracting?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's pretty trivial to tell that a large portion of
| JWST's delays were related to the unfolding mechanism
| (first building it, then the 5 years of delays from a
| ripped sunshield, loose screws and more), much of which
| would be rendered unnecessary by Starship's wider payload
| bay. Thus of course it would've saved a ton of money on
| the telescope. The telescope wouldn't have needed so much
| testing if it didn't have 344 single points of failure,
| and it wouldn't have that many of those if it didn't need
| its unfolding mechanism.
|
| If that isn't convincing enough, the budget plan
| including all folding mechanisms etc before testing was
| $6.5B, so the $3.5B extra was spent entirely on testing
| and repairs. Thus, if a folding mechanism was not needed,
| they could have saved at least that much on testing and
| fixing said mechanism.
|
| Might be a good idea to take off your blinders before
| complaining about someone being more successful than you.
| Since your jealousy is blinding you so much, it would
| have been just as convenient for costs if any other
| rocket had a wider payload fairing than Ariane 5.
| JacobThreeThree wrote:
| I think OP is saying they would have had the space to
| simply built one large mirror instead of many different
| mirror segments that require complicated motors and
| moving parts to deploy into position.
|
| The mirror segment deployment technology is surely a
| significant percentage of the cost.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > surely
|
| Is there a more common or obvious trap of reasoning? If
| 'surely' worked, we wouldn't have needed the
| Enlightenment, science, or the JWST to learn about the
| universe.
|
| IIRC (much stronger evidence than 'surely', but still
| lacking), it's in fact not significant to the cost.
| raisin_churn wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Musk. A larger payload
| fairing diameter means fewer/no elements of the mirror
| have to be folded up for launch, means reducing or
| completely avoiding the multi-hundred step deployment
| procedure, the design of which was both an enormous
| engineering undertaking and most of the over 300 single-
| points-of-failure[0] in the final design. It doesn't have
| to be the SpaceX Starship, but there's no other launch
| vehicle currently in development with a comparable
| payload diameter. Since it's a purely hypothetical as the
| entire design process took place with launching on Ariane
| 5 in mind, I have no idea what the cost savings would be,
| but it is self-evident they would be considerable. The
| thing isn't made of $8B worth of metal, the cost was in
| engineering it.
|
| [0] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-
| deployment-...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > it is self-evident
|
| Nope! It doesn't cost 8 billion to unfold a mirror. Seems
| like a rather straightforward mechanical problem to me.
| And your baseless theories and mine are worth nothing
| without _evidence_. That 's the reason we built the JWST
| - we need evidence. Baseless nonsense is the stuff of
| cults of personality, not knowledge. We need much more of
| the latter and much less (i.e., none) of the former in
| our society.
| raisin_churn wrote:
| Okay, engineering time costs money. Absolutely staggering
| amounts of engineering time were spent ensuring that the
| extremely intricate, highly prone-to-failure deployment
| process would be successful. With a larger payload
| diameter, the mirror deployment process could have been
| dramatically simplified, thus saving some percentage of
| the staggering amounts of engineering time expended, thus
| saving some percentage of the billions of dollars spent
| to get the telescope to the launchpad. I do not care what
| company produces the launcher with the bigger payload
| diameter, OP specifically asked about Starship, and the
| answer is YES, a launcher with a significantly larger
| payload diameter than what is currently available, like
| Starship if it is ever successful, would make an
| undertaking like the JWST easier to design, and thus
| cheaper to design. I dislike Musk as much as any
| disinterested party (I'm sure people he's scammed with
| his "FSD next year" or people he's sexually harassed, and
| definitely his children dislike him more), but a better
| launch vehicle WILL make bleeding-edge space missions
| cheaper, and better. That is wholly unrelated to one
| obnoxious egomaniac.
| WalterBright wrote:
| An engineering way to deal with inaccuracy is to make
| things adjustable with feedback.
|
| It's like the silly analogy I hear now and then that
| sending a probe into the solar system is like throwing a
| baseball from LA to NYC and hitting a small target there.
| It isn't like that at all. The probes undergo course
| corrections as necessary.
| ccooffee wrote:
| What lessons are to be learned by the process of the JWST? I'm
| amazed that such an ambitious project, which required many
| advances in the "state of the art" has been successful so far,
| even with the 12 year delay.
|
| It gives me hope for reversing climate change, though the scale
| and scope of the projects are absurdly different. 1000 gigatons
| of CO2 is a lot, but we'll have to start somewhere.
| ligerzer0 wrote:
| What I find scary is that we might invest lots of resources
| into "reversing" climate change, and while under this belief
| that the reversal is just around the corner, we let the
| degradation continue at unnecessary rates, pretty much creating
| a race between the ability to reverse it, and it reaching a
| point of no reversal
| KerrAvon wrote:
| What's scary is that we might not invest any resources either
| to deal with or reverse climate change, because the
| billionaires in charge are planning to jet to New Zealand
| until the waters recede (they're not generally very bright).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| They aren't smart, but they are old and they know that. The
| don't expect to live long enough to see the bad shit they
| are causing, so they don't care.
| harshreality wrote:
| That managing projects require a combination of social ability
|
| > he can go into a room, he can sit in a cafeteria, and by the
| time he leaves the cafeteria, he knows half of the people.
|
| and ability to think technically/rationally
|
| > He earned a bachelor's in math from Virginia Union and a
| bachelor's in electrical engineering from Howard.
|
| ...to be able to carefully reason through what's required for a
| technical project, and get stakeholders on board.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I don't doubt Robinson's technical ability at all, but the
| credential that matters is the track record at NASA.
| Bachelors degrees in math and EE don't signify much at all;
| plenty of irrational thinking and people in SV have better
| STEM degrees than that. Personally, I'd trust someone more if
| one of the degrees was in the humanities, showing an ability
| to deal with questions that aren't solvable with algorithms.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| My most brilliant engineer had a high school diploma.
|
| He regularly stunned the Ph.Ds in Japan, and they were no
| slouches.
| vba616 wrote:
| Lewis Hamilton started karting at about 8 years old. I
| don't even follow F1; I _guessed_ that, and Googled it to
| confirm, because that 's how _all_ race drivers start -
| let alone the best ever.
|
| It would be a different, and strange, world where people
| typically got to be professional drivers by taking out
| loans at 18 to buy brand new 500 hp sports cars and
| majoring in "Race Car Driving" at universities.
| motoboi wrote:
| Yeah, but can he make decisions with incomplete
| information in the middle of department fights being
| aware of backstabbing?
|
| This is what put projects on track again.
| yaya69 wrote:
| Plants
| dylan604 wrote:
| watered with what water?
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