Congress, NASA, Other

Briefly: ISS hearing, a Nobel justification for JWST

The House Science, Space, and Technology Committee announced this week that its space subcommittee will hold a hearing next Wednesday, October 12, on “The International Space Station: Lessons from the Soyuz Rocket Failure and Return to Flight”. Scheduled to testify so far are William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator of NASA’s new Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, and former astronaut Thomas P. Stafford. Other witnesses may be added.

Tuesday morning the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three astronomers for their work discovering the accelerating expansion of the universe, research carried out in part using the Hubble Space Telescope. Within 24 hours, one newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, stepped in to argue that the award is evidence that Congress should continue to fund the James Webb Space Telescope. The loss of JWST “would jeopardize all the advances made since Hubble was launched as well as America’s position of leadership in astronomy and space exploration,” the editorial warns, adding its concern that “there’s a real danger that the Webb Space Telescope could fall victim to the kind of budget and tax-cutting frenzy that a generation ago resulted in the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider.” Baltimore does have a stake in the future of JWST, since the Space Telescope Science Institute—where one of yesterday’s Nobel laureates, Adam Reiss, works—would operate the telescope, but the editorial states that “the Webb telescope’s immense importance for advancing scientific knowledge and research far outweighs its economic impact on the region.”

99 comments to Briefly: ISS hearing, a Nobel justification for JWST

  • NASA Fan

    JWST is already impacting astrophysics, i.e. there are NO astrophysics missions in the queue – what ever money is left ain’t enough to mount a significant mission. Don’t look for an astrophysics mission till a few years after JWST is launched…if there is any money left in the astrophysics line.

    Bleak days are ahead for science……good enough reason for Dr. Weiler to retire.

  • Doug Lassiter

    My head reels hearing stuff like this — that a Nobel Prize for the discovery of dark energy should be taken as a reason to continue JWST. The fiscal black hole that JWST has fallen into is precisely what is standing in the way of WFIRST — the proposed mission that is being designed to pin down the nature of this dark energy. WFIRST was the top priority of the last astronomy Decadal Survey. Though NASA will continue to throw bits of study money at it, the mission won’t get a “new start” until JWST is launched which, if we’re lucky, might be the end of 2018. WFIRST probably won’t launch until the middle of the next decade. So much for decadal priorities.

    There is no shortage of great scientific reasons to continue JWST, but this one is just daft. It is hardly helpful to JWST for its advocates to spout this nonsense, as well as the law-dropping notional extrapolation that its cancellation “would jeopardize all the advances made since Hubble was launched”. Huh?? Hearing from the Baltimore Sun that JWST science is more important than the economic impact to the region is just as laughable as hearing about passionate defense of “exploration” from the Houston and Huntsville newspapers.

  • I fail to see how three guys splitting a million and a half bucks justifies billions for a new space telescope.

  • Robert G. Oler

    If Nobel prizes were the reason to do anything then we should all love the current President who got one simply for not being Bush the last…this argument is goofy it is the last gasp of a space industrial complex that has simply run off the tracks. Its time for Webb to become “dark matter” RGO

  • Actually we wrote about this last night. It is the exact opposite from the New York Times:

    So they were dispirited last year when NASA announced that cost overruns and delays on the James Webb Space Telescope had left no room in the budget until the next decade for an American satellite mission to investigate dark energy that Dr. Perlmutter and others had been promoting for almost a decade.

    We wrote about it here:

    http://www.teapartyinspace.org/?q=content/jwst-killing-nobel-prize-caliber-science

    We have lead the charge for this. I could only imagine what we could do in astrophysics if this fiscally irresponsible earmark was removed. It is absolutely shameful what Senator Mikulski is doing with JWST. She is hold NASA and SMD hostage over a pet project.

    This just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter what side of the isle you are on, the left with Senator Mikulski or the Right with Senator Hutchison, they get these pet projects and corrupt good government. No one in the free market, let alone their right mind, would support a project 8-14 years behind schedule and at least $7 billion over budget.

    That is why we are AGAINST JWST. It is not that we dislike science, but because JWST is killing science. We see more examples everyday, despite what the spin-doctors would want us to believe.

    I hope you all have the opportunity to join us tonight for our first, national telecon. Obviously, JWST will be a hot button issue.

    http://www.teapartyinspace.org/?q=content/first-tpis-telecon-you-are-invited

    Respectfully,
    Andrew Gasser
    TEA Party in Space

  • A single word in the above story says it all, “Baltimore”. Maryland, aka Senator Mikulski, $516,000,000 earmark bailout for JWST and her state. That was a smack down political coup, where staff press secretary writes they story then hands the story to the ‘Sun’ to run. (speculation but highly likely, been there done that)

    I was a JWST supporter until this year. The keyword is ‘was’. My belief in limited government and tax dollar discipline is paramount.

    Mothball whatever we can of JWST. If we ‘must’ spend $516M on the technology, then darn well spend it on two or three demo missions to see if the shield design will unfold in the future. Isn’t that what the real holdup and the cost of billion$ is all about anyway?

    Gary Anderson

  • STScI could fold up tomorrow and Mikulski wouldn’t break a sweat.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Gary Anderson wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 10:39 am

    those are good words and I join you (and the Tea Party in space in general) in the opposition to WEbb. If I had to state simply (grin) why I oppose it, it is not so much “big government” as it is “ineffective government”.

    At the core of why we are now in trouble as a nation is not in my view that government spends to much, it is that what is spent is spent for the most part to support institutions and “things” which have no value to the country as a whole in relationship to their cost. But they are supported because the infrastructure that creates those things has gotten its hands into the pockets of the politicians through campaign contributions and other things.

    Webb to me is that. The simple test for this is “at what level of cost would the program not be worth doing?” It is clear that for both Webb and SLS there is no such level. Any cost is defendable by the folks who support both efforts.

    We are there on a lot of things…the F-35 for instance. How much more expensive would it get before even its fans said “to much”? The answer none because the reply will always be “if we dont go on we have wasted all the money spent before”. Its not just money…one of the reasons for staying in Afland is now “all the lives spent so far will have been wasted”…

    That alone in my view should cause us to pause and think about where we are going as a nation on certain things…and that is why I oppose Webb..(and SLS)

    Robert G. Oler

  • Doug Lassiter

    There are different ways to approach this, and I’m inclined not to agree with the TP perspective. Yes, lateness and over-budget are bad, but this is hard stuff. If no one in their right mind would support these failures, then certainly Shuttle, ISS, and even Apollo deserved no support. To some extent, one can say that if the astrophysics community needs this mission so badly, they will pay for it. They would do that by cancelling other mission plans.

    But that’s NOT what’s happening. The Senate bill which funds JWST at $530M evidently does this by taking money from other science divisions, and the cross-agency support account. In fact, as Rep. Wolf has properly noted, NASA itself hasn’t clearly decided exactly who would get their money pirated to pay for the huge JWST overruns. That is, the problem is now so bad that NASA astrophysics can no longer pay for it! Cancelling or postponing future astrophysics missions isn’t enough.

    For example, it’s looking like the NASA planetary science division might end up paying several hundred $M for JWST by the time it is launched. We’re told that planetary scientists will use JWST, so that expense can be rationalized. Well, it’s not clear if that use really represents an established priority of the planetary science community. Would they have chosen to do that if they were asked to do so?

    So the problem isn’t that JWST is killing astrophysics science. That’s a decision that the astrophysics community has to make — whether JWST is important enough to kill other astrophysics science to do it. I don’t care what the astrophysics priorities of the Tea Party are. The problem is that, to some degree, JWST is now killing other science.

    So the problem goes well beyond “over budget and behind schedule”.

  • Mark R. Whittington

    Without a doubt, having the JWST would be a fine thing. But just as with space exploration, commercial space, and all the rest, if we want it, we’re going to have to be adults and pay for it.

  • Stargazer

    NASA Fan’s comment that “there are NO astrophysics missions in the queue” is quite simply incorrect: NuSTAR launches Feb 2012, GEMS launches in 2014, and NASA is partnering in both the Lisa Pathfinder (ESA, launch June 2012) and Astro-H (JAXA, launch 2014). Meanwhile, the Explorers phase A studies selected this past week include 5 astrophysics mission concepts: FINESSE, TESS, and EXCEDE all for exoplanetary science, NICER for neutron star X-ray observations from the ISS, and GUSSTO for ISM and star formation studies. And that’s to say nothing of SOFIA

    Yes, the Webb budget issues are having an impact, but come on, enough with the hyperbole. Webb and WFIRST are far from being the only interesting or important things happening in astrophysics these days.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Mark R. Whittington wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 11:17 am

    ” if we want it, we’re going to have to be adults and pay for it.” you mean it wont pay for itself?

    I am curious Mark…how expensive would SLS have to be before you would say it is to expensive RGO

  • amightywind

    I think everyone would agree that there should be a successor to Hubble. Everyone except for Luddites like Oler and Glasser, that is. The question is if it is worth pursuing the dubious design of the JWST. If we are going to spend 3 years debating the basic design of a shuttle design vehicle, he might as well do the same with a scientific instrument that will be used for 20 years.

  • Rhyolite

    If the choice were JWST or nothing, I would pick JWST. But that’s a false choice. The real choice is JWST or something that is more likely to succeed, preferably in a form that doesn’t put most of our space science eggs in only one basket.

  • @amightywind:

    I think everyone would agree that there should be a successor to Hubble. Everyone except for Luddites like Oler and Glasser, that is.

    Not sure what Luddism has to do with wanting to cut JWST.

  • Doug Lassiter

    amightywind wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 11:53 am
    “If we are going to spend 3 years debating the basic design of a shuttle design vehicle, he might as well do the same with a scientific instrument that will be used for 20 years.”

    You understand that the mission lifetime for JWST is 5 years. It may last 10. No plans for servicing, and the thing isn’t designed to be serviced anyway.

    Stargazer wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 11:38 am
    “Yes, the Webb budget issues are having an impact, but come on, enough with the hyperbole. Webb and WFIRST are far from being the only interesting or important things happening in astrophysics these days.”

    The missions you list, with the exception of NuStar, which is very near term, are either very small SMEXs (GEMS) or international partnerships, of which our investment is small and our return will be limited. You’re counting concept studies as missions? Geez. Can I sell you a bridge?

    Of course “interesting and important” things will continue to happen. Just nowhere near on the scale of interest or importance than we might otherwise see. It is somewhat of a hyperbole to say that these remaining opportunities should count for as much in “interest and importance” as a flagship mission, or even a Midex in development.

  • SpaceColonizer

    Hubble will need a successor eventually.

    If you can GUARANTEE me that cancelling JWST will cause NASA to finally shape up and stop underestimating the cost and schedule for projects (which end up causing even further cost increases and delays on their own when the extra money doesn’t come), then fine, cancel JWST. If we can start over from scratch with another successor and be assured that that project will be properly budgeted, then I’m OK with that. However I see no reason to believe that cancelling JWST will whip NASA into shape, since the cancellation of Constellation (a bigger ticket item) sees to have done nothing.

    So accepting that current reality, there is really only one question for me. What costs more: Canceling JWST and starting an analogous project that is just as likely to have cost overruns and delays, or continuing with JWST? I find it hard to believe that the former can be cheaper than the latter. Also I find it hard to believe that the replacement could be launched sooner than a fully supported JWST.

    And with regards to other programs being in danger: the $3-4B+ per year earmarked to be wasted on SLS if it’s not stopped is a much greater concern than the <$1B per year projected for JWST.

  • common sense

    What bugs me with the cut everything philosophy is that we may lose on great things. Yes JWST appears mismanaged. BUT if you compare the potential ROI with that of MPCV or SLS then well there simply is no comparison. So at this stage I would rather have the astrophysics community but not only them, the scientific community come to a consensus. I would like our government bean counters to provide alternatives such as if we keep JWST then this and that programs will suffer, or not. And tell the community to make a decision.

    Cuts at all costs are as idiotic as spend at all costs. There MUST be a reasoned, fact supported decision.

    Or are we gong to have that kind of endeavor outsourced to the private sector??? Come on people. THINK.

  • Matt Wiser

    ” amightywind wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 11:53 am

    I think everyone would agree that there should be a successor to Hubble. Everyone except for Luddites like Oler and Glasser, that is. The question is if it is worth pursuing the dubious design of the JWST. If we are going to spend 3 years debating the basic design of a shuttle design vehicle, he might as well do the same with a scientific instrument that will be used for 20 years.”

    Agreed. First time I’ve heard of Oler called a Luddite, but that does sum up his position on spaceflight in general-but HSF in particular.

    Glad to hear that General Stafford will be on The Hill again. He’s always been a straight talker, and doesn’t care whose toes he steps on. Now, if Chairman Hall would invite Lord Musk for a richly deserved Q&A-with the critics of Commercial Crew in a Panel 2, it’d be perfect.

  • Now, if Chairman Hall would invite Lord Musk

    Why do you continue to worship Elon Musk?

  • Das Boese

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 10:53 am

    At the core of why we are now in trouble as a nation is not in my view that government spends to much, it is that what is spent is spent for the most part to support institutions and “things” which have no value to the country as a whole in relationship to their cost. But they are supported because the infrastructure that creates those things has gotten its hands into the pockets of the politicians through campaign contributions and other things.

    Well, that’s a fancy way of describing corruption, which I think is a particularly large threat for your country because your political system is one of the oldest functioning democracies around, most of it made at a time when today’s global economy and corporate power were simply inconceivable to anyone living then.

    And then there’s this peculiar, uniquely American distrust of anything and everything government, which lends itself well to abuse by those seeking to weaken it for ideological reasons and/or personal gain.

  • Bennett

    “Now, if Chairman Hall would invite Lord Musk for a richly deserved Q&A-with the critics of Commercial Crew in a Panel 2, it’d be perfect.”

    Hall is afraid to invite anyone testify who would call him on his BS. Personally, I would love to watch Elon tell these folks “That’s simply not true, and here’s why…”

    Elon responding to the congressional porkers’ questions would probably turn out to be the best NASA TV program ever shown.

  • amightywind

    You understand that the mission lifetime for JWST is 5 years. It may last 10. No plans for servicing, and the thing isn’t designed to be serviced anyway.

    Part of my criticism of the JWST design. Seems odd to drop requirements for Hubble features that have proved to be so valuable.

  • @Bennett:

    Hall is afraid to invite anyone testify who would call him on his BS.

    Yeah, that’d never happen.

  • DCSCA

    The desperate, hungry budget cutters at the Super Committee table will axe this turkey and be feasting on the savings come Thanksgiving.

  • Ben Joshua

    It seems that good and talented people dedicated to space exploration have their jobs held hostage by a politically designed program. If the middle echelons at NASA and among the contractors were asked to design the next steps in space telescopes, planet hunting and astrophysics, what would those steps be?

    After the Challenger and Columbia disasters, and the Hubble mirror issue, single point failures should be a concern with JWST. It is going where the repair truck can’t. After all that time and money, what if a malfunction or unperceived design error renders it less than optimally useful?

  • Doug Lassiter

    amightywind wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 3:51 pm
    “Part of my criticism of the JWST design. Seems odd to drop requirements for Hubble features that have proved to be so valuable.”

    Amen to that. But Ed Weiler wanted nothing to do with HSF. Not too surprisingly, because HSF actually didn’t offer anything wholly credible to something beyond LEO, as it did to something in LEO, like HST.

    But given that we now are developing hardware that could get humans to JWST (wherever one might bring it, EM L1 perhaps) by 2025 or whenever, the lack of serviceablility is a critical omission. It has been suggested that instead of terminating JWST, several years and a few billion dollars be added specifically to make it serviceable. Where would that money come from? Well, at least partly from HEOMD. That is, if HEOMD is going to get their budget shaved on behalf of JWST (yet to be determined …), they should at least get some involvement in the mission. SOMD paid $2-3B dollars in Shuttle launches for HST servicing. So there is strong precedent.

    common sense wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 2:45 pm
    “So at this stage I would rather have the astrophysics community but not only them, the scientific community come to a consensus. I would like our government bean counters to provide alternatives such as if we keep JWST then this and that programs will suffer, or not. And tell the community to make a decision.”

    Precisely right. Lay out the choices, and be honest about the costs (not all of which are monetary). For example, if JWST were to be terminated, what options would the astronomy community have with the $5B committed to it but as yet unspent? If JWST were to be preserved, exactly who would pay for it? Whose hide would it come out of? The stakeholders here are not just the science community, but the taxpayers, via the Administration and Congress. This decision might require a formal, study like the Augustine Committee to do it right.

  • Doug Lassiter

    SpaceColonizer wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
    “However I see no reason to believe that cancelling JWST will whip NASA into shape, since the cancellation of Constellation (a bigger ticket item) sees to have done nothing.”

    Has nothing to do with whipping. NASA has huge cost problems on the largest (“flagship”) programs. Constellation being one of them. NASA just doesn’t know how to manage them responsibly. If one reallocates JWST funds towards Explorer and Discovery missions, for example, which have brought huge scientific return, it will likely be a safe investment. Even many larger science missions (Spitzer, Chandra, and Fermi in astrophysics) have done a pretty good job. Those missions have kept to cost and schedule, but they are an order of magnitude smaller than what JWST is turning out to be.

  • It has been suggested that instead of terminating JWST, several years and a few billion dollars be added specifically to make it serviceable.

    It’s not obvious to me that making it serviceable would add cost. It might actually make it cheaper, if the entire concept was rethought (particularly with something like Falcon Heavy available).

  • Ben Joshua wrote:

    It seems that good and talented people dedicated to space exploration have their jobs held hostage by a politically designed program.

    Any government taxpayer-funded program is going to be held hostage to politics. That’s why I, for one, support commercial space.

  • NASA Fan

    @Stargazer
    NuStar was a SMEX mission selected for continued Phase A study in Feb of 2005. 7 years later, still not launched. Anyway, it had a $105M Cost Cap, including launch vehicle. The recent years investments are crumbs.Can’t image the politics that have kept that mission alive. Wonder what the RY dolllar layout on that has been? (the original SMEX missions were to be 3 years from start to finish (howz that working now?))

    Astro-H is an instrument, and is the third carbon copy of it’s two predecessors, both of which suffered at the hands of mission failures. Its’ probably around $100m spread over 5 years?. Peanuts

    GEMS is another SMEX, cost capped at $120M not including LV. Peanuts

    Not sure what path Lisa Pathfinder is searching for, because the big momma mission LISA was cancelled, and is back in the 10 year planning cycle again because Astrophysics Division is broke. As an ESA partnership, it’s peanuts again.

    Yes a number of astrophysics missions got selected for step 2 proposals via the Explorer AO. But only one will go ahead, maybe with a MOO thrown in for good measure. Capped at $200M over 5 to 6 years- again, peanuts.

    I’m sure the WFIRST crowd , first out of the decadal starting blocks is hopeing for a JWST cancellation to free up monies for them, as w/o that, or some miracle partnership with ESA , they are looking at an end of the decade start.

    The era of ‘flagship’ science is over for NASA for the next 20 years. No . way OMB/Congress is going to trust NASA for quite some time with that kind of money. Politicians may be shortsighted when it comes to the future, but they have long memories and hold grudges.

    Small and cheap is where astrophysics needs to head given the future budgets within SMD. Explorers , Discyovery, New Frontiers…keep it under a billion and no one may notice.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Das Boese wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 3:19 pm

    “Well, that’s a fancy way of describing corruption”

    in a word “yes” although I would quickly add this (and It should be a part of any of this thrown up in my face by others grin).

    What is “wrong” in this country is not so much outright corruption but it is simply that the process and infrastructures that have grown up post WW2, particularly during the cold war have in almost all segments of our country gotten so intertwined with the political process that they no LONGER STAND ALONE ON THEIR MERITS.

    This is actually the ultimate destination that Ike was talking about in his military industrial complex speech…although it has gone far past the MIC and it is into almost all segments of the federal governments life…aided in large measure by the GOP notion that (until recently) it is OK to deficit spend.

    When you only have X amount of revenue and the notion that the federal budget should be contained by that X then projects either have to work or they have to be fixed or they have to be cancelled or even never started. When I think it was LUna 2 went around the moon and took pictures of the “far side”, Ike was asked if he thought that the US should do that and his answer was something like “Yes but I am not willing to deficit spend to do it”

    Today and for the last 30 years, but particularly in the last 10 years we are willing to deficit spend.

    And that infrastructure that is supported by that spending has become adept at the politics of keeping the spending going. Hence the “if we dont build SLS then (x) will happen” even though there is no proof of that or even that if it happened X is bad. It is that keeping the stakeholders employed is more important then the program itself.

    You notice that Mark W is quite silent on the notion of how expensive SLS would have to be before he would be against it. That was not always true…he was quite vocal about the station and how expensive it had gotten…solely because that was during the Clinton years and the “moon thing” fits inside a Bush frame.

    Deficit spending allows groups which cannot make a geniune case to continue their projects “outs” to continue them anyway…thats not corruption per se but it is killing The Republic. The same reason that the US government is reluctant to let Bank of America go down (and it will) is the same reason SLS gets support, even though it will fail.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Mr Earl

    Rand Simberg said:
    “(particularly with something like Falcon Heavy available).”
    Falcon Heavy is not available.

  • Coastal Ron

    Mr Earl wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 7:58 pm

    Falcon Heavy is not available.

    Not today, but it is available for pre-order for a 2014 (or earlier) flight – $80M will get you about 80,000 lbs to LEO (non-cross feed version).

    And except for the vagaries of Congress in funding the FAA, we don’t have to worry about whether there is enough taxpayer money (or political stomach) to build it. The SLS can’t say the same.

  • E.P. Grondine

    Hi AW, RGO –

    I asked Siri what the first mission of the SLS would be.
    He told me flying a crew out to fix the JWST.

    Before Ed Weiler was busy blowing NASA’s science budget, he was busy spending the National Science Foundation’s and the US Air Force’s money:

    http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/ccc/ce091702.html

    I don’t intend for my last words on this to be, “I tried to warn you….”

  • DCSCA

    “there’s a real danger that the Webb Space Telescope could fall victim to the kind of budget and tax-cutting frenzy that a generation ago resulted in the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider.”

    Danger?? Reminding Congress of another expensive boondoggle wisely terminated, saving billions of tax dollars, ain’t the best salesmanship. The Supercollider was cancelled and America, as well as the world, went on — and science didn’t stop..

  • stargazer

    amightywind wrote: You understand that the mission lifetime for JWST is 5 years. It may last 10. No plans for servicing, and the thing isn’t designed to be serviced anyway.

    Part of my criticism of the JWST design.

    Agreed, a serviceable JWST would be great. But it’s a telescope 5x the area of Hubble yet with only half the mass. Serviceability is just too expensive in mass (access doors, rails, handholds, etc.). It’s got nothing to do with Ed Weiler’s preferences. A service-friendly design for this thing just isn’t possible given the constraints of launchers today. Now, give me an affordable launcher capable of putting 20 metric tons of payload at LEO, and I’ll give you a design for a serviceable JWST…

    To say nothing about the fact that we lack any capability to service something at L2 to begin with, and when the JWST project was started there was no such capability on the books. Bottom line is, a serviceable JWST would cost way, way more than $8B, ’cause you’d need to build the SLS first as a subsystem to get astronauts with wrenches out there. :-)

    Not that I’m opposed to the idea of servicing it! Actually I think that would be a superb use of human spaceflight; the synergy between manned space and Hubble is one of NASA’s greatest accomplishments – but right now while everyone is clamoring for JWST to stop being so expensive, now is not the time to add major functionality. This is a mission that’s well past CDR and has all of its science instruments either complete (MIRI) or nearing it (all the NIR instruments), the instrument bay truss is already fabricated, and so on. I fear that redesigning it to make it as servicing-friendly as Hubble would make the cost overruns thus far look benign. Sadly I suspect this ship has already sailed… but WFIRST or whatever else comes later, by all means those ought to be serviceable!

  • stargazer

    Doug Lassiter wrote It is somewhat of a hyperbole to say that these remaining opportunities should count for as much in “interest and importance” as a flagship mission, or even a Midex in development.

    Where did I say they should “count for as much” as a flagship? I believe no such thing. Absolutely, those are small missions, and have only a fraction of the capability of a flagship. My point was only that NASA Fan’s original statement “there are NO astrophysics missions in the queue” is factually wrong. That said, I fully agree that JWST is by far the biggest fish in this pond. The fact that big flagship missions produce scientific results that simply cannot be achieved by the Explorers is precisely why I still support JWST. There’s no other way to get there.

    As for WFIRST: Remember, its top rank in the most recent Decadal was predicated on the assumption of JWST flying first. The community assumed they’d already be getting JWST, and the Decadal committee was explicitly prohibited from ranking it since it was already under way. So WFIRST’s top rank tells you nothing about how it compares to JWST, only that it beats out IXO and LISA. Hypothetically make it a blank slate and ask the community to decide between WFIRST and JWST in ranking them, and I very much doubt WFIRST would end up on top. Yes, JWST is several times more expensive, but it will provide several times more capabilities than WFIRST. For the kinds of science I do (imaging of exoplanets and young solar systems) WFIRST provides literally no useful capabilities while JWST has me salivating. WFIRST microlensing would let you find many exoplanets, and get statistics on their masses. JWST coronagraphy and especially transit spectroscopy will let us spectroscopically measure their compositions and characterize their atmospheres, down to terrestrial mass planets. It’s a whole different ball game.

    Look, it pains me to see how badly mismanaged this thing is. I’m as boggled at the budget numbers as the next guy. But when Doug Lassiter asks “ if JWST were to be terminated, what options would the astronomy community have with the $5B committed to it but as yet unspent? “, my response is that the community has no guarantee that those funds would be available at all, and in fact the House budget numbers don’t free up those funds for other projects, they take them away from NASA entirely. That’s what’s got a lot of astronomers petrified right now. If we had a clear path to roll the JWST funds into some other missions, then maybe I’d be more open to the idea of terminating it. But right now, I suspect any JWST cancellation would be the death knell of flagship space astronomy for decades, at least as bad as the SSC cancellation was for particle physics. We can worry about the hypothetical damage to astronomy from JWST’s high costs, but I fear the damage from cancelling a flagship mission like this would be even worse.

  • Falcon Heavy is not available.

    It’s likely to be, at a lot less cost, and long before JSWT.

  • Bennett

    @Prez

    It’s true that Gwynne Shotwell is not afraid to confront the bogus information used as “evidence” by those who would gain if the status quo continued unchallenged.

    Elon can be wonderfully diplomatic, but at some point he just might use more creative terms or a more direct approach than Gwynne allows herself.

    Ultimately it wouldn’t matter as these critters only hear what they want to hear, and they know that NASA’s budget/direction is not what the voters or the MSM is focused on, and rightly so.

  • Byeman

    “Now, if Chairman Hall would invite Lord Musk for a richly deserved Q&A”

    For what reason? There is no reason for Musk to testify. Musk has done no wrong. The committee has no jurisdiction over him.

  • Rand Simberg wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 6:28 pm

    It’s not obvious to me that making it serviceable would add cost. It might actually make it cheaper, if the entire concept was rethought

    Indeed the entire concept should be rethought. As I understand it, the most expensive components – the mirrors – are all or nearly all completed. Electronic components like CCDs are nearly free by comparison. Why not 3 smaller space telescopes using the same mirrors, operating as a team? Having several widely-spaced space telescopes all focusing on the same spot with their separation precisely measured would act a long baseline optical interferometer.

    They could be launched one at a time, with the first getting into service in just a couple of years, on any one of a number of existing rockets.

  • @Bennett:

    It’s true that Gwynne Shotwell is not afraid to confront the bogus information used as “evidence” by those who would gain if the status quo continued unchallenged.

    Specifics? The hearing struck me as awfully cordial, but most importantly it broached on the key make or break point for commercial buy: the price per unit up-mass in a potentially saturated lift market.

    Elon can be wonderfully diplomatic, but at some point he just might use more creative terms or a more direct approach than Gwynne allows herself.

    To what end? Commercial lift has and for the immediate future will, within the envelope of satellite market growth, depend on an effective public monopsony.

  • stargazer

    Ed Minchau wrote: As I understand it, the most expensive components – the mirrors – are all or nearly all completed. Electronic components like CCDs are nearly free by comparison. Why not 3 smaller space telescopes using the same mirrors, operating as a team? Having several widely-spaced space telescopes all focusing on the same spot with their separation precisely measured would act a long baseline optical interferometer.

    Oh, this is just ridiculous from a technical perspective, a complete non-starter. Optical interferometry requires the mirrors to be co-phased to a tiny fraction of a wavelength of light, no more than 100 nm for observations at 1 micron. From an optical perspective, a segmented telescope *is* an interferometer, after all. (Specifically: Cophasing segments to within the coherence length at your observing wavelength results in constructive interference between their wavefronts yielding the combined aperture point spread function) . The process of unfolding and aligning the mirrors is exactly equivalent to what would be required for commissioning an interferometer. And now you want to do that on a much longer baseline? Sheesh.

    We spent a the better part of a billion bucks on SIM technology development without getting to a flight-ready technology level. (And that was for only 2 apertures of 0.5 m diameter!) A segmented filled aperture like JWST is in fact the simplest possible interferometer for the desired collecting area, and the only one that’s remotely technically feasible for 18 segments with current technologies.

    Besides which: the optical prescriptions for the JWST mirrors are each segments out of a parent parabola. If you move a mirror to a different distance from the optical axis, it has completely the wrong curvature to bring the light to a common focus. The laws of physics do not allow us to just spread out the existing mirrors and get a coherent diffraction limited optical system.

    And, incidentally, your statement about CCDs being nearly free by comparison is not relevant. The detectors on JWST are infrared H2RGs, which retail for the better part of a million bucks a pop. Furthermore, by the time that you’ve built them into a complete instrument with optics and mechanisms and electronics, and tested the whole thing cryogenically, you’ll have spent a couple hundred million. (And that’s not even something one could blame NASA or NGAS for. ESA’s contribution to JWST is one and a half science instruments plus the launch vehicle, and their total for that comes to just under a billion Euros. Which gets at another reason why cancelling JWST would hurt more than it would help: This is a long-standing international collaboration with our partners at ESA and CSA. Throwing that away now is not going to do good things for their willingness to partner with us in the future.)

  • Doug Lassiter

    stargazer wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 10:45 pm
    “But when Doug Lassiter asks “ if JWST were to be terminated, what options would the astronomy community have with the $5B committed to it but as yet unspent? “, my response is that the community has no guarantee that those funds would be available at all, and in fact the House budget numbers don’t free up those funds for other projects, they take them away from NASA entirely. That’s what’s got a lot of astronomers petrified right now. If we had a clear path to roll the JWST funds into some other missions, then maybe I’d be more open to the idea of terminating it. But right now, I suspect any JWST cancellation would be the death knell of flagship space astronomy for decades, at least as bad as the SSC cancellation was for particle physics.”

    Wow. Where to start? First of all, flagship space astronomy is dead for decades. Get over it. JWST did that to the astronomy community, and it did it in spades. Even completing JWST in 2018 for $8B won’t recover that promise. Secondly, I don’t believe anyone here tried to compare value of WFIRST with JWST. So I’m not sure who you’re arguing with there.

    Yes, the “save-JWST-at-all-costs” people have their scare tactics, which are founded on JWST money possibly not being made available for other missions. While I can’t deny this possibility, I keep asking for evidence of this, or some precedent, and no one is forthcoming with any. Yes, if the astronomical community just throws up its hands and walks away, the money will go elsewhere. Is the astronomy community dumb enough to do that? That there isn’t a clear path to other missions is hardly a chronic problem.

    Congress was comfortable investing about a billion dollars a year in space astrophysics. Why would they be less comfortable in doing so if a particular mission goes south? Constellation was terminated for broadly similar reasons, schedule and cost mismanagement. Did that lead to Congress pulling money out of HSF? Nope.

    Sure, if JWST were canned, its FY12 and perhaps FY13 fund allocations would probably be lost to the astrophysics division. But with proper leadership in that community, and serious congressional negotiations, I’d like to believe that a clear path could be established that could justify keeping the rest.

    You may salivate all you want about JWST science (and it is indeed terrific science!), but cancellation of JWST will remove opportunities for THAT SCIENCE only. The point is that there are many other space astrophysics science flavors that could benefit enormously from even a fraction of the $5B yet to be spent on that mission if a new clear path could be achieved.

    Oh, and …

    “Now, give me an affordable launcher capable of putting 20 metric tons of payload at LEO, and I’ll give you a design for a serviceable JWST…”

    You mean L2. We can easily put 20 mT in LEO. In fact, I’d be happy to give you 20 mT at L2, but with two ELV launches. One for an EDS. But still, serviceability with a modern implementation of it (as opposed to HST heritage serviceability) with a bottoms-up design, won’t double the mass of a space observatory. Yes, the decision not to make JWST serviceable was precisely from Ed Weiler. At the time, that decision made some sense. FWIW, Congress is now mandating that such provisions for servicing be a part of observatory-class planning. No doubt this Authorization legislation came from frustration about JWST.

  • E.P. Grondine

    The Decadal Planning Team had no NEO astronomers on it.

    None.

    Now that Weiler is gone, the time when NEO astronomers have to beg the cosmologists for the few crumbs which fall from the table has got to come to a stop.

    I suppose we should recognize Ed for his role in the development of asteroid guidance and navigation systems, but then only a look by future historians at the archives will show what really influenced his decision making in all of this.

  • Robert G. Oler

    stargazer wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 8:24 am

    good comments.

    how much more expensive would Webb have to get until you thought it was not worth doing? RGO

  • David Davenport

    … to get astronauts with wrenches out there.

    Three astronauts. And don’t forget the hammers and crowbars.

  • Coastal Ron

    Prez Cannady wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 7:42 am

    Commercial lift has and for the immediate future will, within the envelope of satellite market growth, depend on an effective public monopsony.

    That describes ULA, and maybe Orbital Sciences to some degree, but not SpaceX.

    http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

    NASA business is important to SpaceX, but you could say that the capabilities that SpaceX brings to the table are more important for NASA, especially for those within NASA and Congress that support the ISS.

    Getting back to the original subject, even if Chairman Hall were to ever call Elon Musk to testify there are no open issues that would prove to be an embarrassment to SpaceX or the commercial aerospace industry in general.

    I think Hall would be more concerned about Musk pointing out the clear lack of need for the SLS, and how NASA purchasing it’s payload launch needs from U.S. commercial launch companies would save the U.S. Taxpayer $Billions. That would just give detractors of the SLS public ammunition, and I doubt Hall would want that.

  • David Davenport

    amightywind wrote: You understand that the mission lifetime for JWST is 5 years. It may last 10.

    Considering JWST cost in terms of ( $/expected mission life ) => astronomically expensive astronomy.

  • Bennett

    @Prez

    To what end?

    Personal entertainment.

    YMMV

  • David Davenport

    … You understand that the mission lifetime for JWST is 5 years. It may last 10.

    I.e., the JWST’s expected lifetime is too short. This another strong objection to the current JWST design.

  • Doug Lassiter

    David Davenport wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 11:46 am
    “Considering JWST cost in terms of ( $/expected mission life ) => astronomically expensive astronomy.”

    HST was of order $15B (including shuttle launches, and in recent dollars) for, let say, 20 years of operation. Lately, it’s getting much cheaper per year, as we’re not building new instruments for it (though deorbit will probably be costly).

    If JWST survives 10 years (it doesn’t have the propellant to do stationkeeping for any longer than that, in the most favorable stationkeeping scenarios) it can now be expected to have a life cycle cost a bit less than $10B. That’s $8.7B for the 5 year mission plus an extra 5 years of ops.

    So even if JWST lasts as long as it possibly could, it’s going to be more expensive, in dollars/unit observing time, than HST. It might be quite a bit more expensive.

    That’s not an argument for or against JWST, just an interesting fact.

  • Stargazer

    Doug Lassiter wrote: Secondly, I don’t believe anyone here tried to compare value of WFIRST with JWST. So I’m not sure who you’re arguing with there.

    There are a lot of folks who are saying “The problem with JWST going over budget is that it’s preventing WFIRST, which was the top priority of the decadal”. My point is, we don’t know how the community would have prioritized JWST vs WFIRST, because that question was never asked.

    RGO asks how much more expensive would Webb have to get until you thought it was not worth doing?

    Right now, we’re on track for Webb costing about half as much as we’ve spent on Hubble. I certainly think that Hubble was worth the money we spent on it. (Do you?) The real problem here is not that JWST is going to cost $8-10B — that’s what a flagship takes. The problem is that people ever believed the early budgets claiming it could be done for a small fraction of that. I’m OK with a Webb that costs half of what Hubble did…

    Doug Lassiter points out that, if we assume JWST lasts 10 years, and let’s optimistically assume Hubble makes it to 25 years, then JWST will cost maybe 50% more than Hubble in terms of dollars per unit observing time. But that’s a silly metric. For one thing, it ignores the fact that HST’s operational efficiency is only about 50% due to orbital visibility of targets as it moves around the Earth; JWST at L2 will have an efficiency better than 70%, so that makes them a lot closer in dollars/time than you imply. Besides, dollars per photon matters more from a physical perspective, and JWST’s got 5 times the collecting area. So the per-photon cost of JWST images are going to be a small fraction of Hubble images. Like you said, it’s not an argument for or against JWST, it’s just an interesting fact.

    And yeah, I meant L2 not LEO in my earlier post. Brain slip while writing a late night post and distracted by my 9 month old. ;-) I’m all in favor of making these missions serviceable in the future. One way or another it looks like we’re going to get some heavy lift capacity and humans beyond LEO, plus robotic servicing is getting more feasible all the time. I’m a huge fan of requiring planning for servicing in future missions, don’t get me wrong. I just think right now when everyone’s already ticked off about the cost is the wrong time to redesign JWST specifically.

    Thanks for a good discussion, all.

  • Stargazer, I suggest you look at JPL’s Distributed Spacecraft Technology page.

    The detectors on JWST are infrared H2RGs, which retail for the better part of a million bucks a pop

    So the detectors are less than 1/8000th of the cost of JWST. As I said, nearly free in comparison.

  • Coastal Ron

    Doug Lassiter wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 1:52 pm

    If JWST survives 10 years (it doesn’t have the propellant to do stationkeeping for any longer than that, in the most favorable stationkeeping scenarios) it can now be expected to have a life cycle cost a bit less than $10B.

    What if stationkeeping was not an issue – how long could it operate?

    What if a company were to create a replaceable “tug” that mated up with the JWST and took care of the stationkeeping?

    Sure you would have equipment breakdowns that would degrade the usefulness of the JWST over time, but what would an extra year or two of usefulness be worth? $100M? 500M? $1B?

    Using existing satellite busses and a Falcon 9 (or Falcon Heavy if needed), it could be cost effective. I don’t know if Congress would want to dump more money into JWST, but it it’s a capability that could prove useful in the future, so who knows.

    Just a thought…

  • Matt Wiser

    Rand: No I don’t worship Musk. In fact, I personally think he’s in way over his head. That started with his “retiring on Mars” nonsense. He’s got this image of a “amateur” or “rocket boy” that is still out there, and he hasn’t done much to counter that. What he needs to do is shut up and let his rockets do the talking for him. Musk’s been thinking very far ahead-and he needs to concentrate on what’s in the near term-get that capability going, and move onto the next project.

    Chairman Hall has indicated that he does want to hold hearings on Commercial Crew, and that Musk would be one of those who’d be called to testify. With Solyndra very fresh in people’s minds, this would be a very good subject to discuss-should taxpayer money be used to subsidize commercial crew and cargo entities? It’s been said previously that if private companies want to develop crew and cargo services for NASA, then they should use their own money-not NASA (taxpayer) funds.

  • Rand: No I don’t worship Musk.

    Then why do you call him “Lord Musk”? You just make yourself look foolish.

    With Solyndra very fresh in people’s minds, this would be a very good subject to discuss-should taxpayer money be used to subsidize commercial crew and cargo entities? It’s been said previously that if private companies want to develop crew and cargo services for NASA, then they should use their own money-not NASA (taxpayer) funds.

    It remains ignorant to call a fixed-price contract for milestones a subsidy. And your last statement is idiotic as well. If NASA needs the service (as they do) and have peculiar needs (as they do) why shouldn’t they pay for it?

    Of course, in your fervent ongoing irrational desire to ignorantly bash SpaceX, you’ve pulled the thread off topic as well.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 3:43 pm
    “. With Solyndra very fresh in people’s minds, this would be a very good subject to discuss-should taxpayer money be used to subsidize commercial crew and cargo entities?”

    goofy. Solyndra hasnothing to do with this…and commercial crew/cargo is not a subsidy. It is a fixed price contract for services. It is no different then the government buying from my company B-747 flight training and dictating special things that they want in it…and having payment for the changes that they want from the established Part 121 program…

    You have moved into Whittington ville RGO

  • Stargazer

    Ed Minchau wrote: So the detectors are less than 1/8000th of the cost of JWST. As I said, nearly free in comparison.

    Nice job selectively quoting so as to miss the point entirely. A single detector, sitting on its own with nothing around it, costs less than 1/8000 of the mission cost. But it’s also useless. A set of detectors built into a functional, tested, diffraction-limited cryogenic instrument with space qualified mechanisms and thermal budgets and software, costs at least a quarter billion dollars. Overall the instruments and their testing make up 25% of the project budget, according to the slides shown in that webcast a week or so ago.

    Nothing about JPL’s distributed spacecraft testbed changes the fact that the mirrors built for JWST have the wrong optical prescription for putting them on a long baseline optical interferometer.

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 3:43 pm

    He’s got this image of a “amateur” or “rocket boy” that is still out there, and he hasn’t done much to counter that.

    $3B in customer backorders destroys that theory. And before you whine about the NASA portion, that’s less than half their backlog.

    Ask the people that matter, like the SpaceX customer SES (a world-leading satellite operator), if they think Musk is an “amateur” or “rocket boy”. They don’t risk their company on amateurs.

    What he needs to do is shut up and let his rockets do the talking for him.

    “He” doesn’t do that – his 1,500 employees do…

    Musk’s been thinking very far ahead-and he needs to concentrate on what’s in the near term-get that capability going, and move onto the next project.

    You clearly don’t know the roles of management.

    CEO’s are supposed to be setting strategy and providing vision (i.e. where is the company going), and the executive team (COO, CTO, CFO, etc.) is supposed to be executing the strategy (order backlog and what’s next), so Musk is doing exactly what good CEO’s are supposed to be doing.

    Again you show your bias against anything SpaceX, as CEO’s of all industries provide “forward looking statements” about the long-term goals of their companies. I think you continue to be jealous that he was in Iron Man 2 and you weren’t… ;-)

  • And nothing about JWST justifies wiping out the lifetime earnings of 8 thousand US citizens (because that’s what 8 billion dollars is) for something that will be cancelled by a future Congress.

  • Vladislaw

    Matt “often wrong” Wiser wrote:

    “In fact, I personally think he’s in way over his head. That started with his “retiring on Mars” nonsense. He’s got this image of a “amateur” or “rocket boy” that is still out there, and he hasn’t done much to counter that. What he needs to do is shut up and let his rockets do the talking for him.”

    Okay Matt, think about what you just wrote … I mean … REALLY think. In the entire history of the human species the only enity on the entire planet that has ever put something into space and recovered it was the combined effort of an entire Nation’s space efforts. This has been so difficult that of the almost 200 countries only a VERY small group of governments have pulled this off. UNTIL SpaceX accomplished it. No other company, big or small, in the history of the planet has every achived this milestone accomplishment.

    That is like telling Orville and Wilber Wright, after their first historic flight, to shut the hell up!

    What have you accomplished in your life, that is so ground breaking, that you think it gives you the right to tell SpaceX to shut up, as if they are not credible. They pulled off a HISTORIC flight. They have the credibilty that you lack. They have accomplished, in spaceflight, something for the record books, you have not.

  • @Coastal Ron:

    That describes ULA, and maybe Orbital Sciences to some degree, but not SpaceX.

    http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php

    This is the manifest, which tells us nothing of launch configurations–specifically, which customers are bunking with others. What matters is up-mass. Assuming SpaceX fulfills all 12 flights, that’s 72 tons up. By my calculation, this represents half of SpaceX’s lift through 2017, assuming they lift all 66 nodes of the NEXT constellation.

    NASA business is important to SpaceX, but you could say that the capabilities that SpaceX brings to the table are more important for NASA, especially for those within NASA and Congress that support the ISS.

    You could say that, though I don’t know what it has to do with anything we’re talking about.

    Getting back to the original subject, even if Chairman Hall were to ever call Elon Musk to testify there are no open issues that would prove to be an embarrassment to SpaceX or the commercial aerospace industry in general.

    What makes you think Hall would call up Musk for the purpose of embarrassing him? Were the knives drawn when Shotwell testified earlier this year?

    I think Hall would be more concerned about Musk pointing out the clear lack of need for the SLS, and how NASA purchasing it’s payload launch needs from U.S. commercial launch companies would save the U.S. Taxpayer $Billions.

    More importantly, what makes you think Musk even has a dog in the SLS fight? He has his contract, and he’ll have a crew and cargo system in operation years before NASA launches any heavy lifter. If he does come in, what makes you think he won’t jump off your script and lobby for legislation friendlier to say…a RAC-2 recommendation?

    That would just give detractors of the SLS public ammunition, and I doubt Hall would want that.

    I think the fact that HEFT reported out SD HLV in the first place tells you all you need to know about the weight Washington gives to SLS detractors.

  • Coastal Ron

    Prez Cannady wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 7:51 pm

    What matters is up-mass.

    OK, if you feel that’s important, but that’s not what you were talking about.

    Assuming SpaceX fulfills all 12 flights, that’s 72 tons up.

    Now you’re talking about the SpaceX CRS contract? Again, how is this related to the original conversation?

    By my calculation, this represents half of SpaceX’s lift through 2017, assuming they lift all 66 nodes of the NEXT constellation.

    OK again. You’re looking at lift mass, and I was looking at revenue. Add in Falcon Heavy and you get even more lift mass for less revenue.

    What makes you think Hall would call up Musk for the purpose of embarrassing him?

    http://www.dallasnews.com/business/headlines/20101213-ralph-hall-gearing-up-for-new-role-as-chairman-of-house-science-and-technology-committee.ece

    Hall is definitely not as supportive of commercial space efforts as he is of NASA government contracts, despite the Republican claim that government is the problem and private business is the solution – and he looks at SpaceX as an Obama supporter, so he has no incentive to be friendly to them.

    More importantly, what makes you think Musk even has a dog in the SLS fight?

    If NASA could spend the SLS funds on exploration systems instead of building an unaffordable rocket there would be a lot more potential business for SpaceX (they are already on the NLS II contract). But even more bottom line, every dollar NASA spends on something that is not needed is one less dollar that can be spent on something that is needed – and we need more HSF hardware in space, not mega rockets. I think Musk would agree with that.

    I think the fact that HEFT reported out SD HLV in the first place tells you all you need to know about the weight Washington gives to SLS detractors.

    No one ever said the Senate couldn’t write good pork legislation – garbage defined, garbage designed… ;-)

  • Robert G. Oler

    Stargazer wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    interesting post, I’ll reply tomorrow I want to think about what you wrote RGO

  • Matt Wiser

    The analogy with the Wright Brothers is the wrong one. They kept tinkering, kept flying, and ultimately attracted military and private interest in their work. Musk, OTOH, has flown exactly ONE orbital flight with a boilerplate Dragon. And NO, I don’t worship him. Do I wish him well, yes. Along with Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and Orbital. The sooner those companies get operational with crew and cargo, that frees up NASA resources for BEO missions. I’m more in tune with General Tom Stafford; don’t remember his exact words, but it’s similar to this: the view that if NASA stepped aside, and left development of low earth orbit spacecraft entirely to private entities, is fantasy. General Stafford has said words to such effect at a House hearing last year, using the word “naive” to describe those who feel that way. Captain Gene Cernan and Neil Armstrong’s views, along with Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft’s, are equally valid.

    And the question of government funds-call them grants, loans, subsidies, or whatever-to these commercial companies-the startups especially, ought to be examined. This subject came up last year in its own separate thread, but ought to be revisited in the post-Solandrya hearings. If government funds are going to these firms, then the taxpayers have a right to know where the money’s going and for what. Not to mention what kind of funds: grants, loans, or what? Charlie Bolden was quoted (rightly or wrongly) as saying the “B” word which is so toxic in D.C. today: “Bailout.” (came up at last year’s final Senate hearings, if you’ll recall-the one where Dr. Holdren testified alongside Charlie). Again, there are those who honestly feel that if private companies want to develop their own spacecraft for commercial space operations-crewed or for cargo-use their own money. Anybody have a good answer for that?

  • Doug Lassiter

    stargazer wrote @ October 5th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
    “To say nothing about the fact that we lack any capability to service something at L2 to begin with, and when the JWST project was started there was no such capability on the books. Bottom line is, a serviceable JWST would cost way, way more than $8B, ’cause you’d need to build the SLS first as a subsystem to get astronauts with wrenches out there.”

    Let me set you straight on this one. We’re not talking about sending astronauts out to Earth-Sun L2. The strategy of moving large facilities back and forth between Earth-Sun L2 where JWST would operate and Earth-Moon L1 (or Earth-Moon L2, is that what you meant?) where JWST would be serviced is established. That transfer (in either direction) is well understood to take a few tens of meters/second of propulsion (easy!) and a few months. JWST has that propulsive capability built in right now. Once you’ve made that transfer, you’re doing your servicing in cis-lunar space. Not out in the boondocks at Earth-Sun L2. Still not trivial, and yes, we currently lack any capability to service something at Earth-Moon L1, but doing that is a lot easier than doing it four times farther than the Moon. This strategy was laid out many years ago, and has been incorporated into many design concepts. You do science operations at Earth-Sun L2, and do servicing close-by at an Earth-Moon L point. Earth-Moon L1 or L2 is your “backyard garage” where you do maintenance (whether by humans or telerobots) on such space observatories that do their jobs elsewhere.

    I tend to agree that making JWST serviceable is unlikely to save money. Major design reengineering is expensive. But that’s not the point. The point, which is a policy point, not a technical point, is that by credibly involving HSF in JWST (as opposed to just taking money from HSF, which is likely to be tried), you make the mission a higher priority to the agency as a whole. So if it costs the agency more, and takes longer, that’s OK. Which leads us back to HST. SMD never paid for shuttle launches to HST. SOMD did. Why would SOMD have done that? Well, because SOMD was in the business of making astronauts into heroes, and HST servicing did precisely that. So one has every reason to believe that SOMD (now HEOMD) would look favorably on fiscal support for a JWST servicing mission. That includes development of SLS, if that’s really what one needs to get to Earth-Moon L1. Many would say that one doesn’t. I’m guessing that Gerst would feel far more comfortable about going to JWST at Earth-Moon L1 in 2025-2030 and rescuing a major national investment than to go much farther away to pick up rocks and plant a flag on some random NEO, doing something that could largely be done without people.

    Unfortunately, Obama promised to go to an asteroid, not just a NEO. JWST could be the latter, but not the former. Maybe if we bolt a rock onto JWST along with a docking adapter, it’ll work as an asteroid? Maybe equip it with a hole to plant a flag on it? Just a thought.

    Coastal Ron wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 3:24 pm
    “What if stationkeeping was not an issue – how long could it operate?
    What if a company were to create a replaceable “tug” that mated up with the JWST and took care of the stationkeeping?”

    That is an interesting thought. But, as you say, while the depletion of stationkeeping propellant can be predicted with some accuracy, the failure rate of other components cannot. So going out to essentially replace the JWST stationkeeping propulsion system won’t help a lot if other internal subsystems are failing. But to the extent that the instrument complement on JWST remains of high scientific value (that is, the best science that JWST can do with this instrument complement will already have been done) it might be a good strategy if one had some assurance that everything else was going to stay functional.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am

    “The analogy with the Wright Brothers is the wrong one. They kept tinkering, kept flying, and ultimately attracted military and private interest in their work. Musk, OTOH, has flown exactly ONE orbital flight with a boilerplate Dragon”

    that is not only a selective view of history AND current events, but it shows how little you know of both history and engineering or how willing you are to bias those thoughts toward your political notions.

    Musk has flown more then 1 boilerplate Dragon. He has so far flow a few Falcon 1’s most of which were “tinkering, keeping flying” and learning which resulted in two falcon 9 launches that clearly met the definition of success…they both achieved orbit. This is not only a tremendous engineering feat, but an organizational one as well. That you have no real clue of the level of achievement it is…just speaks to you. Along the way Musk and SpaceX are attracting business in much the same way that the Brothers in the bike business did.

    Another analogy would put Langley with SLS. Like the Wright brothers Musk understands (or seems to anyway) a few vital facts that have so far at least made him successful.

    Other then their engine I bet you cannot tell me the SINGLE most important factor in the design of the Wright Flyer that made it successful.

    When you can tell me this then you will have demonstrated that you are more then just a Wind with slightly better prose.

    I am pretty sure you cannot RGO

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am

    The analogy with the Wright Brothers is the wrong one. They kept tinkering, kept flying, and ultimately attracted military and private interest in their work. Musk, OTOH, has flown exactly ONE orbital flight with a boilerplate Dragon.

    SpaceX does tinker and fly. They flew three test Falcon 1’s before they worked out their problems, and then two successful launches after that. They have flown two Falcon 9 flights, following the pattern of fixing previous problems and adding more complex tasks to the next flight.

    All along attracting more customers, both government and private, due to the success of their flights. Sound familiar?

    The first flight of the Falcon 9 carried a non-functional “boilerplate” Dragon, but the next carried a functional Dragon that successfully demonstrated that it’s design works. Definitely not boilerplate.

    John Shannon, former Shuttle PM, recently made comments on AVWeek about the approach SpaceX is taking:

    “I love the fact that SpaceX, for example, is testing at McGregor [Texas] daily,” Shannon says. “They are doing propulsion testing like you ought to do propulsion testing. . . They’ve got a very hungry attitude in that they want to have problems that they can go correct and make the system more robust.”

    Sounds like the spirit of the Wright brothers is alive at SpaceX.

  • Musk, OTOH, has flown exactly ONE orbital flight with a boilerplate Dragon.

    Why do you just make things up?

    Oh, because reality doesn’t suit your irrational hatred/worship of Elon Musk.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am

    I should also add this…the Dragon was more then a boilerplate…that you call it that shows more engineering goofiness RGO

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am

    And the question of government funds-call them grants, loans, subsidies, or whatever…

    I’m going to walk you through this, so don’t worry. First look up “willful ignorance”. OK? That’s what you’re doing.

    Now go look up “grants”, loans”, subsidy” and whatever else you imagine NewSpace is being given. This is for comparison.

    Here is how Michael Griffin’s NASA explains COTS:

    Phase 1 is called the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Demonstrations. Under COTS, NASA helps industry develop and demonstrate its own cargo space transportation capabilities. Industry leads and directs its own efforts with NASA providing technical and financial assistance.

    And here is how Michael Griffin’s NASA explains CRS:

    Phase 2 is a competitive procurement for cargo services to support the ISS.

    This is what your hero Michael Griffin set up. No loans, no grants, no subsidies. Don’t like it? Talk with him.

  • Hallie Wright

    And nothing about JWST justifies wiping out the lifetime earnings of 8 thousand US citizens (because that’s what 8 billion dollars is) for something that will be cancelled by a future Congress.

    I can imagine the shock on the face of counselors at the homeless shelters when all those families roll in with a story of being ruined by JWST!

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 1:32 am

    the startups especially, ought to be examined.

    What about the non-startups? Why pick on those companies that get the least amount of government money, but are growing the fastest?

    If government funds are going to these firms, then the taxpayers have a right to know where the money’s going and for what.

    It’s kind of hard to know your REAL motivations, since you’re being so vague. What startups, what firms, what contracts? Could you be anymore vague? It is clear though that in your world a “startup” is a bad thing.

    But let’s get back to this “willful ignorance” thing again. You apparently keep forgetting that the COTS program has had not one, but two GAO audits, and both are public:

    2009 – http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09618.pdf
    2011 – http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d11692t.pdf

    Is that good enough? Or are you really meaning public testimony in front of “tough” questioners? You know, show trials.

    And for CCDev, the milestones are public, as is the progress:

    http://www.parabolicarc.com/2011/09/06/nasas-ccdev-2-progress-report/

    Now I’m sure you’ll gladly reciprocate with similar information from the Constellation program? Same level of public disclosure showing where $10B went?

    Because to do otherwise would be hypocritical, and you don’t want to be known as a hypocrite too, do you?

  • Robert G. Oler

    Stargazer wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
    ” I certainly think that Hubble was worth the money we spent on it. (Do you?)”

    You had a thoughtful and good post so I wanted to think about it. I’ll start here and try and address the points you make.

    Was/is Hubble worth it? My pittiful efforts at Amateur astronomy hardly qualify me to make a professional judgment on the pros and cons of Hubble v say KECK of the Gemini…what I do know is this; is that compared to say KECK, Hubble sucks of lots of money enormous amounts of money; money that could go to either building more KECKs or otherwise allowing a lot more “tube” time on earth based (or perhaps not as expensive space based) astronomical setups…and anything that HST does has to be weighed against the notion that the cost of Hubble mean that out of every proposal that gets “time” there are X (and that is a large number) that do not..and if we had spent the money on cheaper space based assets or earth based ones then more of “X” would see “the light”.

    What I do know professionally is that the cost of Hubble and JWST have just about frozen the field both from a “new instrument” standard and from the notion of innovation.

    A trick of engineering is to “know ones limitations” and while trying to push them also understand when the cost/effort benefit dont work. During WW2 the US did not have jet fighters/missiles or even super battleships…but it had Admiral Rockford who worked very hard at trying to figure out what weapons advances were “worth it” and which ones were not…and at best he got a single one wrong…the atomic bomb. (OK he wasnt perfect).

    Today we seem to have projects which push the state of the art (webb is an example in my view) to far and as a result get overly complex and run the cost up way in excess of what the results warrant.

    I dont know how many KECKs or other instruments that one could build instead of building Webb…but I get its a lot. And since the cost goes up every day I suspect that the number gets larger every year.

    On that basis no I dont think Hubble was worth it. It was cheaper to simply build more Hubbles then launch a shuttle to fix it…but the shuttle was “free” because we were going to fly those anyway…thats the goofy logic we have today.

    Robert G. Oler

  • Vladislaw

    Matt Wiser wrote:

    “And the question of government funds-call them grants, loans, subsidies, or whatever-to these commercial companies-the startups especially, ought to be examined. This subject came up last year in its own separate thread, but ought to be revisited in the post-Solandrya hearings. If government funds are going to these firms, then the taxpayers have a right to know where the money’s going and for what.”

    Solandrya and COTS/CCDEV are apples and oranges. Solandrya was given loan guarantees. Meaning if they failed to pay off loans they took out, then the government was on the hook. The government was not a customer.

    What NASA is doing is TOTALLY different. NASA wants a service. That service is not available domestically. NASA is paying for milestones that ultimately will lead to a domestic company providing a new service that does not currently exist.

    It is not a grant, it is not a loan, it is not a subsidy. NASA defines milestones and provides a fixed price for accomplishing each milestone.

    The company has to fund each milestone on their own dime until it is completed. Once NASA signs off on each of the milestones they want accommplished as complete, then and only then does the company get paid.

    NASA is purchasing each milestone, that they believe, will lead to the creation of a domestic service provider.

    So again, no grants, no loans, no loan guarantees, no cost plus-fixed fee, no escalator clauses, no subsidies.

    Just a fixed price for each milestone.

  • stargazer

    Robert Oler, thanks for the thoughtful response.

    First, as a preface, let me say that I have used Hubble, Keck, and Gemini. I have sat on the review committees that decide which fraction of proposals should be chosen (always hard decisions, as you indicate. For Hubble about 1 in 10 can be done, for Keck it’s 1 in 5). The greatest part of my professional work is in the development of improved adaptive optics systems to let Keck and Gemini see more clearly through our turbulent atmosphere. And so I’m quite confident in stating that comparing the scientific utility of space and ground facilities is an extremely complex question with no easy metrics to look to. Both are useful, both have strengths and weaknesses. I’ve made measurements with Hubble that Keck could never achieve, and discovered things with Keck that are beyond the reach of Hubble. In some cases, the laws of physics forbid terrestrial telescopes from making measurements that Hubble can make with ease (for instance any work in the ultraviolet, or in the bands of the near-infrared where the atmosphere is opaque). In other cases, our observational technologies are simply not there yet (adaptive optics is not a panacea: image fidelity and stability still trail behind what Hubble can do, and correction of fields of view wider than an arcminute is only now becoming barely possible at a subset of wavelengths while Hubble has been delivering sharp images across much wider fields for two decades across the entire UV-visible-IR range.) So, they both have their strengths.

    All that said, you’re correct that Hubble has cost far more money than Keck, by well over an order of magnitude. But allow me to draw a more subtle distinction between operating versus construction costs. Today, the Hubble program’s annual budget is very near $100M/year, of which a third is grants handed out in support of research programs and the rest covers the operations staff and ground facilities. In comparison, Keck’s annual budget is $30M/year (which is widely seen as an highly efficient shoestring operation; Gemini’s budget is about twice that. And neither of those observatories hand out any grant money; you have to bring your own funding). So from a purely _operations_ standpoint, the cost of Hubble and the cost of Keck/Gemini are hardly different.

    The huge difference, of course, comes in the development costs. Keck I cost about $100M to build in 1990, and the second one was a bit cheaper. Building a state-of-the-art instrument for somewhere like Keck or Gemini these days costs about $10-20M. Hubble cost billions before it launched. Essentially all the increased cost of space facilities comes during up front during development! And there’s the rub. *If* there were a way to, as you suggest, redirect those development funds to terrestrial science, then I’m sure we could do some tremendously wonderful things. But we can’t, for political reasons.

    Doug Lassiter is correct above when he pointed out that Congress has for many years now funded space astronomy at a consistent level of about $1B/year. In that same time, ground based astronomy has consistently been funded at $150M-$200M/year. When I was a young grad student I used to think like your suggestion, “oh, if only we could get NASA’s funds for ground based facilities”, but I’ve come to understand that that is just not ever going to happen. Developing space astronomy missions is seen as worthy of high funding because of its relationship to the aerospace industry, and all the national security implications thereof. (Technology from JWST is being considered for a future generation of spy sats, among other things. We’re now in an era where the spy sat guys want to piggyback on astronomical technology, as opposed to the inverse back in the Hubble era.) Ground based astronomy is nowhere near as vital to our nation’s interests, not in the views of Congress for the last several decades.

    So that’s why I disagree with your perspective. Not because I don’t think increased funding for ground based astronomy would be a bad thing (I’d love it, in fact, since building hardware for such puts much of the bread on my table). But I think if we hadn’t spent the Hubble money on Hubble, it would have gone somewhere else in the aerospace government-industrial complex — and not to ground astronomy. Ah, space politics. :-)

  • Vladislaw

    stargazer wrote:

    “First, as a preface, let me say that I have used Hubble, Keck, and Gemini.”

    Great post, it was really informative, you should expand on it and send it to Jeff’s other site, “The Space Review”.

  • Matt Wiser

    So Oler is not only against HSF, but also against Hubble. Just about the best astronomical tool invented since Galileo….an instrument that has rewritten the textbooks a dozen times over (at least).

    All right, then. Milestone based contracts. No problem with that, as long as the agency is transparent, and shows where the money’s going. Which should be for any contract-milestone based or traditional. (no company picnics or executive retreats on taxpayer money-which has happened in the past, especially in DOD)

    I don’t hate Musk. Let’s just say that I strongly dislike him. Mainly because of that “retiring on Mars” crap. He’s also getting way, way ahead of himself, with that announcement last week of developing a fully reusable rocket. Lots of engineering problems to be solved-such as RTLS after a stage is used, giving a stage that’s gone into orbit a heat shield-very unlikely-this would probably work as long as the stages in question are still in the atmosphere, but once you’re clear, forget it. If he’d let his rockets do the talking instead of his mouth, the skeptics would have reason to change their minds. Until he flies cargo and crew often, safely and reliably, count me as skeptical. This goes for the other commercial providers as well. Said it before, but the Commercial Space Foundation said it best at last year’s symposium: “We need to stop talking and start flying.” They need to take their own advice.

  • @Wiser:

    So Oler is not only against HSF, but also against Hubble. Just about the best astronomical tool invented since Galileo….an instrument that has rewritten the textbooks a dozen times over (at least).

    Which textbooks?

  • Doug Lassiter

    Stargazer wrote @ October 6th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
    “So the per-photon cost of JWST images are going to be a small fraction of Hubble images. Like you said, it’s not an argument for or against JWST, it’s just an interesting fact.”

    At the risk of coming across as trying to minimize the potential of JWST compared to HST, I find selective numerical comparisons of their capabilities amusing.

    The per photon cost of JWST is indeed far less than JWST. But the number of independent detectors on JWST is at least a factor of two smaller than on HST, depending on how you count them. The surface of the Earth gathers stellar photons with incredible economy, but it does so in one (very big and photometrically low quality) pixel. The spectral resolution offered by JWST is a factor of five lower than offered by HST (yes, in different parts of the spectrum). One can say that HST actually provides more information than JWST will, but on brighter target fields. The field of regard of JWST is much smaller than HST, in terms of how much of the sky one can look at at any given time of the year. Another couple of interesting facts. So numerical weighting of value is a little tricky. The bottom line is that JWST can do many things that HST can’t in order to answer what are now specific high priority questions.

    The real pity of JWST is that, as I said, mostly because of our fiscal incompetence with it, there won’t be any more flagship missions for a very long time. That being the case, what JWST is teaching us about precision deployment of large optics in space may not be used for a very long time. That’s one way to think about whether the mission is “worth it”. One would like to believe that what we’re paying for in JWST is not just the science from JWST, but for the technologies that we’ll be able to use to build future very large space telescopes. Worth some thought as to whether what we’ve learned renders a second JWST, or a future telescope with JWST-like architecture, less than a flagship proposition. If it doesn’t, then JWST is a practical dead-end. Again, not an argument for or against JWST, but just an observation.

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 9:25 pm

    All right, then. Milestone based contracts. No problem with that, as long as the agency is transparent, and shows where the money’s going.

    So for the years and years that the COTS program has been public you’ve been unaware that it is a milestone-based program? Despite numerous people pointing it out to you over and over? If this is news to you, then maybe you have a memory issue…

    Which should be for any contract-milestone based or traditional.

    The vast majority of government contracts are not visible nor reviewable by the public. Have you ever seen any contract details from ATK? How come you don’t complain about the lack of public transparency with their contracts? I’m thinking there is some hypocrisy going on here.

    (no company picnics or executive retreats on taxpayer money-which has happened in the past, especially in DOD)

    So the sins of others is why you come down so hard on NewSpace? You do realize that the DoD is still spending vast sums of money, right? Maybe you should move over to the “DoD Politics” blog…

    I don’t hate Musk. Let’s just say that I strongly dislike him. Mainly because of that “retiring on Mars” crap.

    So you blame our President for not promoting a vision for space (or at least not your Moon vision), but when someone is risking their own money to make their vision for space come true, one that would benefit your descendants, you “strongly dislike him”. You are just a bundle of contradictions, aren’t you?

    And just so you know, I put Musk’s goals in the same category that I put other people’s goals – it will be nice if they happen, but otherwise they don’t affect me. If he is one of the millions of people that are trying to make the future better, great. What’s not to like?

  • stargazer

    Doug Lassiter wrote: Another couple of interesting facts. So numerical weighting of value is a little tricky.

    We could keep trading these facts back and forth forever, and it still wouldn’t make the comparison an easy win one way or another. Like you said, it’s merely amusing to try to make comparisons on selected details. JWST will have multi-object slit spectroscopy and integral field spectrographs, neither of which HST has. JWST’s field of regard is still half the sky, and it can stare at any point in that field for weeks at a time uninterrupted, which HST can only do near the poles. Because JWST’s angular resolution is so much better, one can say that JWST will actually provides more information than HST does, but packed more densely on the sky. And so on. I think at this point we’re agreeing: From a scientific standpoint, both missions have their unique strengths. It’s an open question whether HST can stay alive long enough to operate simultaneously with JWST, but there are a lot of folks hoping it can, for precisely these sorts of complementary reasons.

    (At the risk of wading into the SpaceX sidetrack on this thread, I’d love to see a proposal for servicing HST from a Dragon plus whatever custom service module would be needed… Could be a great way to test space telescope servicing in a post-shuttle world. Even just doing gyro swaps would be a huge deal; you wouldn’t need to install new instruments to make it a compelling mission.)

    Thanks for explaining about the option of servicing at Earth-moon Lagrange points instead of Earth-Sun L2; I hadn’t realized that. Sounds like a very compelling option. I’ll have to read up on it more. Any references you would recommend?

    The real pity of JWST is that, as I said, mostly because of our fiscal incompetence with it, there won’t be any more flagship missions for a very long time. That being the case, what JWST is teaching us about precision deployment of large optics in space may not be used for a very long time

    I agree this is a concern. The question is, which option results in the best path forward over the next few decades: pressing ahead with JWST and making it a success, or walking away from it now? If we look to the history of Hubble, its development gobbled up the largest portion of space astronomy funding in the 70s and 80s, with much sound and fury then too over cost overruns, then in the 90s and early 00s funds became available for other large-ish missions (Spitzer, Chandra), and now we’re back to a flagship dominating the budget. I can see a path where a successful (though expensive) JWST development in the teens gives way to funding for several medium-large (Chandra/Spitzer/WFIRST/etc-class) missions in the 20s, and the next flagship would be developed in the 30s for a launch around 2040. The two decades since Hubble launched have hardly been a bad time for astronomy. I don’t think that a similar gap until the next flagship after JWST will necessarily be a bad thing. Let’s hope, anyway.

    Meanwhile, a good test as to whether the technology for JWST scales economically is going to be whether NGAS succeeds in selling some segmented scopes to the security community. That’ll be interesting to watch (as much as is possible, for what will presumably be a very black program.) With as cheap as UAVs are getting for surveillance, I’ll be curious to see if the DoD is still willing to invest in this scale of space hardware.

  • Robert G. Oler

    stargazer wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 2:42 pm

    First off I am ENVIOUS of your tube time. The “largest photon bucket” I have had my mark 1 eyeball to is a chum was kind enough to get me time on one of the telescopes at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. I was out there on a conference and he gave me an hour of “after hours time” ..I was going to treat it as a true observing session with a “plan” but the seeing was perfect and instead we just roamed the solar system…my 15 inch dobson which I built while in Iraq seems “light” now. Mostly I search out geo synch or near one satellites…

    second, this is a wonderful exchange, as things go here it is full of light with little heat…and oddly enough we dont disagree on much.

    I have said here for the longest time that Webb has substantial military backing. Go look at the Webb size and what it takes to get a certain resolution on Earth from Geo orbit and well it all becomes “perfectly clear” to quote Dave Bowman. And as a practical matter I realize that dollar “sinks” are never quite interchangeable. There is a “(blank) industrial complex” that grows up now around almost every large federal project which not only sustains and nurtures the project but also keeps the money “there”…and space based astronomy finally broke into the high dollar market with Hubble…and Webb keeps that going.

    And I would add this (in the sort of “heat” category)…It never bothers me that the US, which I consider an “Imperial power” (and this is not quite what it sounds..mostly just “a world dominating power”) has assets at the disposal of its people which are not really cost accountable but do things which are not possible with other instruments or devices. This is what makes us in part an imperial power….and its a good thing.

    Where I would point the discussion to is this. Space astronomy needs to understand (as do all “industrial complex” programs) that times are changing, and changing rapidly in a political environment. Thanks to bad politics on both parties part, and a lot of wasted dollars spent by both Bush and Obama administrations in the last 11 years…we are on the cusp of massive not only government spending change…but also a change in how the people view their government AND how government projects and programs are held accountable…

    the Marches now spreading across the country are the first real wind of this. The ideology truly crosses party lines (the 1200 pilots from UAL and CAL who marched are mostly I am sure “conservative”) and is in my view going to spread across the US and dominate the debate next year in our politics.

    it is going to be very hard to sustain Webb unless the folks building it truly get a handle on the cost and make some serious efforts toward deployment. That is not just going to be Webb it is going to be government wide. These are small fry projects in terms of real waste machines like SLS and F-35…but they probably are as out of control…and that needs to change.

    If I was the guy making the call I would probably cancel Webb and move it into an effort like which happened when the TOPS program was cancelled and the “Voyagers” (ie the improved Mariners) were subbed in its place. I dont pretend to know how that is possible, ie what descopes could be done and still come up with 9X percent of the science (or 8X or whatever)…but I bet you that in the end this is where the effort goes.

    Sls will on the other hand simply die. There is no rationale for it.

    Ever so often I am reminded of the opening to Rendezvous with Rama where some guy had wanted tube time on the lunar observatory to look at “rama” but got denyed it and then the plans changed because time came open after (I think I have this correct) “a 25 cent capacitor failed” …something like that.

    if you ever find open tube time on the Keck and need a good amateur to fill it…LOL Robert G. Oler

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 7th, 2011 at 9:25 pm

    “I don’t hate Musk. Let’s just say that I strongly dislike him. Mainly because of that “retiring on Mars” crap.”

    that is a goofy reason. I suspect its wealth and performance envy! RGO

  • I don’t hate Musk. Let’s just say that I strongly dislike him. Mainly because of that “retiring on Mars” crap.

    What a monumentally stupid reason to dislike someone — because they have an inspiring vision.

    If he’d let his rockets do the talking instead of his mouth, the skeptics would have reason to change their minds.

    He shouldn’t use his mouth to talk? It seems like a better orifice for it than what you seem to use. And his rockets have been doing plenty of “talking,” even if you are ignorant of it, or pretend that they haven’t been.

  • Matt Wiser

    Rand: Musk is way, way ahead of himself. There’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, but he’ll be of retirement age when the first missions to Mars fly in the mid 2030s. He may not “retire on Mars,” but it’s more likely his grandkids might have that opportunity. Musk is not the Messiah when it comes to HSF-despite what SpaceX zealots would have you believe. He’s just another entrepeneur with a service to offer NASA and other paying customers, that’s all. As for his rockets doing the talking: more is needed. He’s flown exactly ONE Dragon LEO test flight, and has flown NO ONE to LEO so far. Only when Space X (or any other provider) demonstrates it can fly cargo and crew to ISS and do it reliably and safely will the concerns of those who are skeptical of the whole idea of Commercial Crew be satisfied. No different than the transition from props to jets in Commercial Aviation back in the ’50s…..lots of doubters then, too. (and given early jet tech and the number of accidents of some early jetliners-they had a point) Only when jets proved safety and reliablity did things really take off. Same thing here.

    And he may have more trouble-along with Sierra Nevada and Orbital: Boeing is seriously considering development of a crewed variant of the X-37B spaceplane developed for the USAF; though AF use isn’t mentioned, commercial crew and cargo is. Watch out, because if this works-and Boeing’s Phantom Works is very good at what they do-we’ll have a mini shuttle.

    http://www.space.com/13230-secretive-37b-space-plane-future-astronauts.html

  • Doug Lasiter

    stargazer wrote @ October 8th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
    “I’d love to see a proposal for servicing HST from a Dragon plus whatever custom service module would be needed… Could be a great way to test space telescope servicing in a post-shuttle world. “

    HST servicing by astronauts without Shuttle has been proposed. Design studies at GSFC/LMCO have been done for Orion, and maybe even with Dragon. But it’s a poor way to test future space telescope servicing. Strategies for doing such servicing and building serviceable telescopes would be very different now than they were in the HST/Shuttle era, especially if one were considering robotic servicing. So it isn’t clear that such HST servicing would bring value that goes beyond just rescuing HST, the value of which could be considered arguable.

    “Thanks for explaining about the option of servicing at Earth-moon Lagrange points instead of Earth-Sun L2; I hadn’t realized that. Sounds like a very compelling option. I’ll have to read up on it more. Any references you would recommend?”

    There are MANY references one can point to. Google “L2″, “servicing”, and “observatories”, and you’ll find a few easily. The premise was worked out in some detail by the Decadal Planning Team, and in a number of observatory concept studies that followed. Several good references by Farquhar on the orbital dynamics. But the idea that space telescopes that need to operate at Earth-Sun L2 would best be serviced there is flat out wrong. HEOMD (HEFT/HAT) is considering the development of a habitat at Earth-Moon L1, following broadly on the DPT plan, and servicing space telescopes that operate at ES L2 or L1 (to the extent that we can afford to have any around to service) is one of many things that could be done at such a habitat.

    “I can see a path where a successful (though expensive) JWST development in the teens gives way to funding for several medium-large (Chandra/Spitzer/WFIRST/etc-class) missions in the 20s, and the next flagship would be developed in the 30s for a launch around 2040. “

    I define a flagship mission as maybe >$2B LCC. If you’re going to define a flagship mission as $10B, then I’m guessing a better guess might be “never ever again!” Now, many people call WFIRST a flagship mission. In some quarters, the whole Great Observatory complement of missions (GLAST, HST, Chandra, Spitzer) have been looked at as “flagships”. My point was just that a large (10+m class telescope) probably won’t happen for a VERY long time. To the extent that JWST redefines the cutting edge of space astronomy as what you do with a telescope that size, once JWST is done (say, 2025 or so), it’ll be many decades before we’re at the cutting edge again in that particular kind of astronomy. That’s a poor legacy to leave to future generations of astronomers. By 2040, if that’s when we could afford one again, on-orbit assembly of large apertures will probably be the way large space telescopes are built, basically obviating what we’ve learned about single shroud deployment from JWST. Or an SLS will eventually allow us to loft a large telescope that doesn’t need construction or deployment (though that in itself is a technological dead end).

    That is to say, JWST as a TRL-raising exercise for autonomous deployment of large, precision space optics is perhaps no longer something that is worth much to us. I understand that this is a provocative statement, but I think it might be true.

    “Meanwhile, a good test as to whether the technology for JWST scales economically is going to be whether NGAS succeeds in selling some segmented scopes to the security community. “

    True, but in which case the technology that is developed for JWST gets chalked up as being of value to national defense, as opposed to being of value for science.

    But I think we’re getting off topic here. The issue is whether JWST should be continued in the face of large and repeated cost overruns and questionable fiscal confidence in the future. The issue is whether the budgets of other NASA divisions, including both science and HSF, can be justifiably raided to continue it. The issue is whether space astrophysics would actually be better served, in the long run, with a more confident portfolio of less technically challenging missions. The issue (largely addressed by the Casani report) is what lessons one derives from the many management problems with the mission. Those who try to address these issues by just trotting out all the excellent science that JWST would do, and take the “save at all costs” position are missing those issues entirely. Lack of appreciation for the wonderful science that JWST promises simply isn’t the issue, as many naïve JWST advocates seem to believe it is.

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 9th, 2011 at 2:16 am

    And he may have more trouble-along with Sierra Nevada and Orbital: Boeing is seriously considering development of a crewed variant of the X-37B spaceplane developed for the USAF

    Not quite – you didn’t read the rest of the article, which is behind the pay wall. Clark summarized it over at HobbySpace:

    http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=32968#c

    John Ebon, Boeing’s manager for their exploration systems, said that for the CCDev program they had done a trade study comparing a X-37 derivative vs a capsule can decided the capsule was the way to go.

    The X-37 is only being looked at as a cargo carrier of last resort. Oh, and Boeing is also working with SNC on the Dream Chaser.

    The commercial crew competitors are set, and now it’s just a matter of who can finish their vehicles and how much money is available from NASA and Congress to start crew transportation services.

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 9th, 2011 at 2:16 am

    “Rand: Musk is way, way ahead of himself. ”

    he has gone farther on far less money then NASA did with Cx and the same is true with SLS and Orion.

    the sad thing with you is that you are so blinded by your “dislike” or whatever goofy thing it is that you are incapable of seeing what a great accomplishment Musk and SpaceX have done…and what a good accomplishment OSC seems on the verge of. goofy RGO

  • Coastal Ron

    Robert G. Oler wrote @ October 9th, 2011 at 12:43 pm

    and what a good accomplishment OSC seems on the verge of.

    I see that as the unintended consequence of so many people dissing SpaceX so much – they miss all the other great work being done in the commercial aerospace sector.

    And not just Orbital Sciences and their cargo spacecraft, but CCDev crew participants (Blue Origin, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Boeing) and the sub-orbital folks (Virgin Galactic, XCOR, Masten, Armadillo, etc.). And then there are the companies that build the little things that make the bigger things possible, like Altius Space Machines and Paragon Space Development Corporation.

    There is a lot of innovation going on out there, and SpaceX just happens to be further along than everyone else.

    It’s fitting to remember the accomplishments of Steve Jobs in this regard, and how his “Think Different” TV ad applies to these new innovators of space too:

    http://www.proposedsolution.com/articles/classic-apple-advert/

  • Robert G. Oler

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 9th, 2011 at 2:16 am

    “. (and given early jet tech and the number of accidents of some early jetliners-they had a point) Only when jets proved safety and reliablity did things really take off.”

    a fairly fact empty comparison.

    First off you lack precision on your point. “Jets” what is that? The turbojet engine or is it a jet powered airplane? There is a difference and it affects the point you are trying to make.

    There was a period in the development of turbojets for airplanes that they were safety issues…but those were worked out fairly early in the development of the power plant, because unlike the Germans or British the US never really forced the engine into an operational airplane “before its time”. By the time of the P 80, F84 and F86 (which was a very very short time after the development of the powerplant in the US), the engine had been made very “safe” in terms of operational use. The main US contribution to that was twofold, some work on the combustion chambers and most important “the jet fuel control”.

    That one development (which was a GE thing) more or less took the powerplant from being very tempermental to “routine”.

    What was lacking was that the powerplant had to be ‘economical’. That was found out only through experimentation and use. There is a reason the US military put the turbojet on operational airplanes even though it was not economical to operate…they needed and the US could pay for the performance. The later is not always true…the german economy at the end of WW2 really could not support the cost of the turbojets in their military airplanes…they would have been far better with a larger number of piston powered airplanes.

    If you meant “jets” as in jet airplanes…then your point is absurd. There were no real incidents of jet powered airplanes in commercial (or SAC service) having issues because of the powerplant…the one issue that plauged commercial jet service at its infancy was that the Brits had no idea how to do pressurization…but Boeing had learned those lessons in the B-29…and had no real issues with either the B-47, B-52 or the 707.

    Musk will rise or fall on the same issues that were in play in the 707 development…is his product economical enough based on what he can charge. He is being very very careful in that respect, he is after all a business man.

    the reality is that your comparison is like most of your rhetoric…useless. It is Sarah Palin world, ie something that sounds good and so you say it effortlessly but that is only because you dont have a clue what you are saying…

    and I dont mind flaming you out every time.

    RGO

  • Musk is not the Messiah when it comes to HSF-despite what SpaceX zealots would have you believe.

    Stop making things up about what I believe. You must be the one who believes that — you’re the one who keeps calling him “Lord Musk.”

  • Robert G. Oler

    Coastal Ron wrote @ October 9th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
    “I see that as the unintended consequence of so many people dissing SpaceX so much – they miss all the other great work being done in the commercial aerospace sector.”

    exactly. The experimentation and implementation going on in the space community concerning “people” flight is in my view nothing short of breath taking…and the tonic that the industry needs. It is also the “thing” that nitwits on the right wing of the GOP always site when they say “let private industry do it” except in this case of course people like Whittington like Whittingtonspace so much, they ignore their own rhetoric.

    A lot of these notions will fail, not have enough money or just be wrong; but that is what happens when one is having an economic revolution.

    Robert

  • David Davenport

    … always site when they say “let private industry do it” …

    “Cite” instead of “site,” Mr. Euler.

  • Matt Wiser

    Oler: I take it you don’t remember-or didn’t look up- the Comet crashes that DeHaviland had to endure before they worked out the aircraft-both engines and airframe? And Boeing learned from that: they didn’t unveil the 707 until they knew that reliable engines were available. The USAF had some problems with the B-47 due to powerplant issues in 1951-52 as well.

    Rand: He brought that upon himself: every time he makes a presser (like the National Press Club appearance last week), he comes across as arrogant. No real eye contact with the camera or audience, always referring to notes, etc-he’s not a good speaker. And he keeps getting way, way, ahead of himself-but at least he admitted that this idea for a fully resuable rocket may very well fail-which is a first for him.

  • Coastal Ron

    Matt Wiser wrote @ October 12th, 2011 at 2:25 pm

    He brought that upon himself: every time he makes a presser (like the National Press Club appearance last week), he comes across as arrogant. No real eye contact with the camera or audience, always referring to notes, etc-he’s not a good speaker.

    Not everybody is a good teleprompter reader like Bush 43 – and let’s remember how hard a time HE had speaking when he had to talk sans notes.

    If you’re looking for a reason to dislike someone, you can find anything to focus on. Musk communicates just fine, and people like to hear what he says, which is why he gets invited to speak so often.

    And contrary to your opinion, Musk is likely to keep telling everyone that we need to become a multi-planet species, and that one of the reasons he started SpaceX was to help that along. If you don’t like that, tough, but some people like to know what motivates a person to do what they do, and people understand what Musks’ companies goals are because they understand his personal goals.

    but at least he admitted that this idea for a fully resuable rocket may very well fail-which is a first for him

    Again, selective hearing. Musk has been quite public about the odds of his previous launches being successful – he thought the first Falcon 9 launch only had a 50% chance of being successful (it was close to 100%). You hear what you want to hear, but not necessarily what is being said.

  • And he keeps getting way, way, ahead of himself

    Only to ignorant bigots who hate visionaries.

    -but at least he admitted that this idea for a fully resuable rocket may very well fail-which is a first for him.

    No, it’s not. More ignorant bigotry.

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