NASA Is Delaying The Launch Of Its $9 Billion Space Telescope — Again, Buzzfeed “Make no mistake, I’m not happy sitting here telling you this,” NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen told reporters on a briefing about the delay. He deflected criticism from spacecraft contractor Northrop Grumman, saying, “we are part of the team that caused this problem and we are going to have to solve it together.” Blowing the budget cap for JWST means that Congress will have to vote to reauthorize completion of the telescope, which has already drawn ire from lawmakers. NASA plans to ask for the authorization and extra money in February. “Program delays and cost overruns don’t just delay the JWST’s critical work, but they also harm other valuable NASA missions, which may be delayed, defunded, or discarded entirely,” Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee told BuzzFeed News in a statement. His committee will hold a hearing to address the report next month. The witnesses will include the NASA administrator, James Bridenstine, and Northrup Grumman CEO Wes Bush. “I expect to see progress on keeping projects on budget and on time,” said Smith.”
"TRW also will be responsible for integrating the science instrument module into the spacecraft as well as performing the pre-flight testing and on-orbit checkout of the observatory."@NASA#JWST
FWIW @NorthropGrumman bought TRW 2 months earlier in July 2002 – so 100% of contractor performance responsibility for #JWST is on Northrop Grumman. But 100% of the responsibility for oversight of Northrop Grumman performance on #JWST is on @NASA#WhatAMess
Remember, it’s NASA. Just a billion here, a billion there on delays and cost over runs, and its gone. And if you want to see it disappear faster, just double the NASA budget 🙂
And we have had this discussion many times, Herr Professor.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that NASA is trying to do something here that is truly monumental. I applaud them for even conceptualizing this critter. It is what I want NASA to do: to think big, to take big risk/high reward projects.
But here is the shameful little secret: yes, this instrument is one of a kind. But the project? No. Not so much.
NASA has experience with many projects of similar size and complexity involving many tens of thousands of people. But here, on this instrument, they look like a bunch of rank amateurs. And that is the part that makes me cry.
If it fails because that Big Step was just an inch too far? I can live with that. Sure. It’s a lot of dough. I get that.
If it fails through bureaucratic malaise? Un-damn-forgivable.
I’m not sure I’d call it high risk/high reward. Well, that’s what it’s ended up with, given all the deployments. But I think the approach was to avoid risk by turning it into a high _cost_/high reward project. From what I’ve read, a lot of the cost overruns, either directly or indirectly, are about pulling out all the stops when it comes to risk reduction. Being over ambitious, and dealing with schedule pressure (poorly, it seems) are also factors.
I agree. But one problem, I believe, is that reliability of a new design cannot generally be accurately determined by analytical failure analysis because, historically, many contingencies result from failure modes which are unanticipated and thus not included in the analysis. Consequently spending money on “risk reduction” soon reaches a point of diminishing returns.
That would suggest a more evolutionary approach; instead of a series of multibillion dollar missions to fix and maintain the Hubble, every few years we could have fabricated and launched a replacement based on the original design, with improvements. Thus we would have operational experience with the majority of the components for each version and could modify the design to eliminate failure modes revealed by experience.
Back in the Seventies it was also proposed that the Space Station would be useful for assembly and checkout of space telescopes and similar observation systems before they were moved to thier operating orbits by the then planned space tug. If the payload could operate in an orbit not too far removed from that of the Station, it might even have sufficient propellant to return to the Station if necessary for servicing.
When it comes to risk reduction by analysis, as opposed to experience, I think we’re on the same page and we’ve both said so before. I’m not agreeing with the idea that, by spending enough time and money, you can take risks to near zero levels. At least not without flight tests and experience. But lots of people do feel that way, and it’s a part of the high cost of projects like JWST.
As far as an evolving design and incremental improvements are concerned, Hubble did that. The optics didn’t change. Most of the spacecraft systems were repaired on servicing missions, rather than upgraded. But the command and data handling (spacecraft-level microprocessors and data storage) have been substantially upgraded over the years. When it comes to the instruments, the improvements are even more dramatic. The current WFC3 is a third-generation version of the original WFPC instrument (despite the rather rude deletion of the “P” for planetary…) Unfortunately, low Earth orbits aren’t a good place for astronomy, and that’s where servicing is easiest.
For something like JWST, it might have been better to do a series of more modest telescopes. Not necessarily serviceable, but inexpensive enough to be replaced every five or so years, and not so critical to NASA goals that failure is not an option. Maybe one with a segmented mirror (and observing in the visible and UV, to avoid the thermal issues.) Maybe another with a modest mirror and a deployed sun shield.
But that’s about a series of incremental improvements. It’s hard to get people (and sources of funding) excited about that. Doing everything at once and striving for order of magnitude improvements seems to be what excites people.
instead of a series of multibillion dollar missions to fix and maintain the Hubble
That cost came from using the Shuttle, and the Shuttle program cost almost the same amount whether they flew or not. Hence there was no multi-billion dollar savings from not doing Shuttle servicing. Therefore nothing available to build more Hubbles.
This is not to disagree with the general concept. Incremental development is better than “giant leaps”.
Given the delays maybe they should just wait for the BFR to be operational and use it. Then if there are deployment problems there will be astronauts able to fix it, or return it to Earth.
Interesting idea however as a WAG it would take at least five years to modify it to be serviceable in space, especially since they would have to make all of the instruments, electronics, gyros etc. serviceable since they can’t predict what will fail. Not to mention figure out a way that a future, not yet designed spacecraft will be able to approach the telescope and grapple it without causing contamination or damage. And figure out how to ensure that astronauts in bulky spacesuits won’t damage anything.
And what if the failure is things not unfolding correctly, it seems doubtful astronauts would be able to poke and prod the sunshield or mirrors without damaging them.
I think it would probably require an equal amount of time to redesign it so that it can be recompacted back into its launch configuration so that it can fit inside a return vehicle. Either that or ditch the sunshield? Or even worse also ditch the mirrors and just bring back the bus and the instruments, meaning rebuilding all of that again. Unless you could somehow leave the sunshield and mirrors loitering in space until you can bring the bus and instruments back.
Even if they only cover some not all possible failures, I still think five years is a reasonable guess for the required modifications. Add five years to 2021 = 2026 and who knows how many more billions. Not saying it shouldn’t be considered but at this late stage I doubt if this would be approved.
For some reason I think I am being optimistic about any of this adding only five years to the project, considering the track record so far …..
According to IEEE computer terminology, 0 divided by 0 is NaN (Not a Number), rather than 1.0. I think you’d need some creative math to take a limit of x -> 0 if you want to say zero failures out of zero attempts means 100%.
You do know that the cargo hold of the BFR is about twice as wide as the Shuttle’s cargo hole. Instead of the complicated folding they need to fit it on an expendable it could be launched with only the Solar Shield needing to be folded. And they could replace the complicated version they have now with a simple hinged one, since it would only be going from 9 meters to 14 meters unfolded.
But sadly, you are probably right. All they will be able to do is launch it on an expendable and hope it doesn’t become a very expensive piece of space junk.
As long as the mirror structure can stand the g-forces of reentry without being folded.
In hindsight, when the project was originally conceived they didn’t envision servicing missions to L2 being possible for decades. Of course they also didn’t envision that it would be decades before the telescope actually launched.
I’ve wondered why a sort of standardization regime isn’t part of NASA’s work flow. Perhaps I am underestimating the differences between say, Hubble and Webb (Chandra I get). But why do we go back to a clean page every time?
Webb and Hubble are very different beasts. The requirements for Webb called for infrared instruments and a large mirror. Thermally, the IR instruments mean operating temperatures which are extremely cold. The thermal requirements push it to having the sun shield and an Earth-Sun L2 orbit. The size of the mirror and the size of the sun shield don’t fit in any existing launch vehicle (SLS, BFR and New Glenn weren’t even a glint in someone’s eye when Webb was designed.) So that pushed the design to the complex, unfolding deployments.
But, in general, NASA does have a habit of doing things from scratch, even when it isn’t really necessary. Even when it comes to seemingly trivial things like a battery, you don’t often see people buying an existing one with 30% more capacity than the spacecraft needs. That’s inefficient. The tendency is to design and build a custom one which is just right for the requirements. That’s part of an old tradition to maximize performance and optimize everything to the requirements of a specific mission.
The motivation is high launch costs and infrequent flight opportunities; if you can only do it once during your professional career and just getting it into space costs hundreds of millions, people start thinking in terms getting everything out of the spacecraft they can. Dramatically lower launch costs might change that (or at least undermine then mindset behind that traditional attitude.)
As Mr. Pemberton notes, JWST can’t be reconfigured for maintenance (actually, the instruments and electronics are inaccessibly packed in between the telescope and the sun shield) and minimizing deployments by using a larger payload diameter is a complete redesign and rebuild.
But you’re also suggesting something NASA wouldn’t touch management/policy reasons. Even if you replaced BFR with SLS, and made it all inside NASA, you’d be putting a rocket which has never flown on the critical path for a multi-billion dollar scientific project. The JSWT project has no control of BFR development (or SLS development.) If delays cost $1 million per day, how could they budget for potential delays in the launch vehicle development? If, during a review, the managers were asked how they would mitigate that cost/schedule risk, what could they say? Yes, I know Europa Clipper is baselined to launch on SLS, but that was mandated by Congress. In general, this sort of cross-program dependency is something NASA practices discourage.
Nor is this a NASA thing. It comes up all the time. For example, electric cars. A company trying to make them has a gaping hole in its business plan if charging stations aren’t going to be available. A company planning to build charging stations has a problem if they are depending on someone else to make and sell electric cars. Tesla is trying to make it work by doing both in house. Without that, it’s the same sort of cross-program risk flying JWST-like telescope on a BFR would involve.
Plus that means NASA would have to acknowledge the BFR exists… Hopefully when JWST launches it will work and be successful.
But if not then BFR should be able to “pickup” the pieces and some how fix it. Yes, it is not designed for it, but Hubble was not designed to have a corrector lens added to it either. BFR has a big enough cargo bay for folks to be creative, and salvaging a XX billon dollar instrument will encourage them to be so.
HST and JWST are very different beasts. HST wasn’t designed for corrective optics (COSTAR), but it was designed to have five, easily replaceable instruments in the optical path. On orbit, swapping out HSP (High Speed Photometer) for COSTAR was no harder than replacing WFPC (the Wide Field and Planetary Camera) with WFPC2.
For JWST, if it fails (and I hope it won’t; I’d like something worthwhile to come out of the whole mess), and when (if) BFR is available, I don’t think repairs would be viable. Neither on orbit or a return to Earth for repair and reflight. It would be more like a recovery for a postmortem and possibly salvaging the instruments for reuse on a future telescope.
if it fails (and I hope it won’t; I’d like something worthwhile to come out of the whole mess)
Sometimes I wonder if they need a failure like that to break the existing culture.
If JWST delivers even half of what’s promised, all prior issues will be forgotten, as criticisms will be dismissed. Just as they were for the delayed, 100% over-budget and broken-on-delivery HST. Just like they were for the 100% over-budget MSL. Etc etc.
One good thing for SLS (I suppose there has to be one) is that their budget and schedule have never been all that exact and specific. In the case of JWST, there is a long history of making specific statements about the cost and launch date, and then failing to deliver on time and on budget. I think that’s worse for the program’s credibility.
Bite the bullet, learn the lessons we must face, and carry on. Needless to say, we need something like the spirit of Winston Churchill in 1940, to oversee Northrop-Grumman henceforth.
Not meant to be snarky: it’s just the notion of ‘learn the lessons’ is, in this context, so completely laughable. As Mr. S above points out about SLS this looks like business as usual.
I think Dr. Zurbuchen is mostly sincere about this. Getting JWST is going to take work, even with this new delay and added cost overruns. Some of blame certainly goes to Northrup Grumman, but this report makes it clear there is more than enough blame to go around. The last thing we need for the people involved to start pointing fingers and playing blame games. Focusing on getting things done may also protect the guilty, but I think the intent is to get JWST up and up in a functional state.
I’ll admit I’m seeing this from a more personal level. I actually know Dr. Zurbuchen; we worked in the same department at the University of Michigan for a few years in the early 2000s. So I’m seeing this as the first time he, personally, has had to deal with this sort of mess. He’s only been in his current job as head of NASA’s science directorate for a bit under two years.
But if you’re thinking of the institution rather than the person in charge of it, I see your point. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (and NASA as a whole) aren’t very good at holding contractors accountable for mistakes. I’m not sure how much of that is inherent to NASA, and how much it is due to Federal Acquisition Regulations.
I do know that, I, personally, probably wouldn’t sue or get into an argument if someone sold me a shoddy product or failed to deliver. It’s usually not worth the aggravation. But I wouldn’t buy anything from that person or company again. Being charitable and forgiving is all very well and good, but I think there need to be consequences for seriously dropping the ball. That doesn’t seem to happen with government contracts.
This has become normalized now, hasn’t it? It was 10 years ago that JWST caused NASA to rip-up many of its international commitments. It put the hobbles on LISA, EXOMars and others at ESA. It is still going on now ten years later.. really? How is this in anyway acceptable? What is driving this? The information out there is all nebulous hand-wringing stuff. If it was the technology then the mission should have been descoped. If it was the implementation then it should have been redesigned. Either way these things should not bite ten years out of a mission schedule. Worst case scenario is 3 to 5 years… How did we get here? Boiling frogs?
I’ll add EJSM (Europa Jupiter System Mission) Laplace to your list. That really annoyed the people in Europe, because we went back and forth on it. The original idea was that the US would fly a spacecraft to Jupiter and which would eventually end up orbiting Europa. ESA would simultaneously, with lots of synergistic science, fly a similar mission ending up orbiting Ganymede.
The US bailed on that at the same time we bailed on LISA and our European partners had to seriously revise their mission as a stand-along Jupiter mission (selected as the JUICE mission, currently in development.) Then we changed our minds again, and decided to fly a Europa mission (which, after a couple iterations ended up being Europa Clipper.) But without the coordination with the ESA mission, simultaneous operations or the originally planned synergy. To my mind, that’s really jerking people around and I’m not surprised they weren’t happy about it.
There is no science that will be generated in the 5-10 year mission span of this telescope that justify the delay or cost. None.
It’s very existence has drowned out countless other programs.
It’s very existence is a monument to everything that is wrong with NASA.
Decades ago NRO started launching satellites built around the basic design of the KH-11 KENNEN, which was also the basis of the Hubble Space Telescope. And every few years, they launched an upgraded version of it. They iterated on a proven design. And what’s been the result? They’ve launched like 16 of them over the years, and have built at least 2.5 more they never launched (one of which is now WFIRST). Modern KH-11s are supposedly quite different. The marvel of an iterative design process over decades.
And where are we with NASA? Well let’s see… the JWST, a one off, whose complex mirror will likely never be used at this scale ever again due to the existence of larger launch vehicles. We have WFIRST, which NASA has considered killing. We have (including WFIRST), the 2.5 NRO donated Hubble-cousins, that NASA has treated like a re-gifted tie. And we got a lot of concept art about their next big mega project.
The biggest joke of them all is that they’re seriously kicking around this idea for a big post-JWST telescope. Do they live in some kind of alternate reality where the JWST never happened? Are they that eager for a sequel to this catastrophe?
No. It’s not going to happen.
NASA should certainly keep launching space telescopes of course. But no more clean sheet designs. They double dip with the NRO or somebody else on basic design. And when they want a new one, their starting point is the last one with upgraded optics and such.
I share some of your sentiments; but I also realize that these scopes observe at dramatically different wavelengths, which fact controls the way they are designed. Still, standardization seems obvious.
As to the assertion that no science will be generated? Seriously?
The single thing that will make this investment worthwhile, at least to me, is the ability to observe very high z stars. There is a lot to learn about the early universe that could have enormous implications.
And here I will, as they say, go out of my swim lane: chemical rockets will neither conquer the solar system nor take us to the stars. We must have a (very) different way of thinking about space travel. We need a dramatic breakthrough in our fundamental understanding of the universe and how it was created; observing the easiest (opps! earliest!) stars is a critical step.
That seems to be one of the things many people don’t realize about JWST is that it’s not just about seeing the earliest galaxies, although that alone could be monumental depending on what is discovered. But it will also be able to see details in objects much closer to us. It’s possible that what it uncovers about stars and planets in our galaxy could be even greater breakthroughs than what it discovers about ancient far away galaxies.
That’s not being entirely fair. The series of national security telescopes you mention were all visible light (or perhaps near IR) imaging satellites operating from low Earth orbit. That gives them similar goals and requirements, and makes evolving designs easier. The radar reconnoissance satellites, electronic surveillance satellites, and other national security assets were not designs which evolved directly from the Corona/Keyhole satellites.
JWST has requirements for a larger mirror than can be launched in one piece and thermal requirements which require the L2 orbit and the deployable sun shield. In contrast, HST had none of those requirements. So it isn’t like you could satisfy the requirements for JWST by flying an improved version of HST.
But I do agree that NASA does start over from scratch more often than it should. When the requirements are reasonably similar, evolving an existing design would be a better choice than starting over from scratch. It’s just that sometimes, the requirements really aren’t similar to a past spacecraft.
Rather than reward Northrup Grumman another $1B for a torn sunshade and propellant lines being full of gunk, perhaps NASA should finish the project in-house with assistance from other vendors as needed. Cost-plus contracts have escape clauses; their use reduce abuse.
Remember, it’s NASA. Just a billion here, a billion there on delays and cost over runs, and its gone. And if you want to see it disappear faster, just double the NASA budget 🙂
And we have had this discussion many times, Herr Professor.
Don’t get me wrong. I know that NASA is trying to do something here that is truly monumental. I applaud them for even conceptualizing this critter. It is what I want NASA to do: to think big, to take big risk/high reward projects.
But here is the shameful little secret: yes, this instrument is one of a kind. But the project? No. Not so much.
NASA has experience with many projects of similar size and complexity involving many tens of thousands of people. But here, on this instrument, they look like a bunch of rank amateurs. And that is the part that makes me cry.
If it fails because that Big Step was just an inch too far? I can live with that. Sure. It’s a lot of dough. I get that.
If it fails through bureaucratic malaise? Un-damn-forgivable.
I’m not sure I’d call it high risk/high reward. Well, that’s what it’s ended up with, given all the deployments. But I think the approach was to avoid risk by turning it into a high _cost_/high reward project. From what I’ve read, a lot of the cost overruns, either directly or indirectly, are about pulling out all the stops when it comes to risk reduction. Being over ambitious, and dealing with schedule pressure (poorly, it seems) are also factors.
I agree. But one problem, I believe, is that reliability of a new design cannot generally be accurately determined by analytical failure analysis because, historically, many contingencies result from failure modes which are unanticipated and thus not included in the analysis. Consequently spending money on “risk reduction” soon reaches a point of diminishing returns.
That would suggest a more evolutionary approach; instead of a series of multibillion dollar missions to fix and maintain the Hubble, every few years we could have fabricated and launched a replacement based on the original design, with improvements. Thus we would have operational experience with the majority of the components for each version and could modify the design to eliminate failure modes revealed by experience.
Back in the Seventies it was also proposed that the Space Station would be useful for assembly and checkout of space telescopes and similar observation systems before they were moved to thier operating orbits by the then planned space tug. If the payload could operate in an orbit not too far removed from that of the Station, it might even have sufficient propellant to return to the Station if necessary for servicing.
When it comes to risk reduction by analysis, as opposed to experience, I think we’re on the same page and we’ve both said so before. I’m not agreeing with the idea that, by spending enough time and money, you can take risks to near zero levels. At least not without flight tests and experience. But lots of people do feel that way, and it’s a part of the high cost of projects like JWST.
As far as an evolving design and incremental improvements are concerned, Hubble did that. The optics didn’t change. Most of the spacecraft systems were repaired on servicing missions, rather than upgraded. But the command and data handling (spacecraft-level microprocessors and data storage) have been substantially upgraded over the years. When it comes to the instruments, the improvements are even more dramatic. The current WFC3 is a third-generation version of the original WFPC instrument (despite the rather rude deletion of the “P” for planetary…) Unfortunately, low Earth orbits aren’t a good place for astronomy, and that’s where servicing is easiest.
For something like JWST, it might have been better to do a series of more modest telescopes. Not necessarily serviceable, but inexpensive enough to be replaced every five or so years, and not so critical to NASA goals that failure is not an option. Maybe one with a segmented mirror (and observing in the visible and UV, to avoid the thermal issues.) Maybe another with a modest mirror and a deployed sun shield.
But that’s about a series of incremental improvements. It’s hard to get people (and sources of funding) excited about that. Doing everything at once and striving for order of magnitude improvements seems to be what excites people.
Belatedly,
That cost came from using the Shuttle, and the Shuttle program cost almost the same amount whether they flew or not. Hence there was no multi-billion dollar savings from not doing Shuttle servicing. Therefore nothing available to build more Hubbles.
This is not to disagree with the general concept. Incremental development is better than “giant leaps”.
Given the delays maybe they should just wait for the BFR to be operational and use it. Then if there are deployment problems there will be astronauts able to fix it, or return it to Earth.
Interesting idea however as a WAG it would take at least five years to modify it to be serviceable in space, especially since they would have to make all of the instruments, electronics, gyros etc. serviceable since they can’t predict what will fail. Not to mention figure out a way that a future, not yet designed spacecraft will be able to approach the telescope and grapple it without causing contamination or damage. And figure out how to ensure that astronauts in bulky spacesuits won’t damage anything.
And what if the failure is things not unfolding correctly, it seems doubtful astronauts would be able to poke and prod the sunshield or mirrors without damaging them.
I think it would probably require an equal amount of time to redesign it so that it can be recompacted back into its launch configuration so that it can fit inside a return vehicle. Either that or ditch the sunshield? Or even worse also ditch the mirrors and just bring back the bus and the instruments, meaning rebuilding all of that again. Unless you could somehow leave the sunshield and mirrors loitering in space until you can bring the bus and instruments back.
Even if they only cover some not all possible failures, I still think five years is a reasonable guess for the required modifications. Add five years to 2021 = 2026 and who knows how many more billions. Not saying it shouldn’t be considered but at this late stage I doubt if this would be approved.
For some reason I think I am being optimistic about any of this adding only five years to the project, considering the track record so far …..
….doubt that the BFR could get to L2 out of the box. A paper rocket does have the benefit of 100% reliability though!
According to IEEE computer terminology, 0 divided by 0 is NaN (Not a Number), rather than 1.0. I think you’d need some creative math to take a limit of x -> 0 if you want to say zero failures out of zero attempts means 100%.
Given the pace of the JWST they will probably of years of operational experience with BFR before JWST is ready 🙂
You do know that the cargo hold of the BFR is about twice as wide as the Shuttle’s cargo hole. Instead of the complicated folding they need to fit it on an expendable it could be launched with only the Solar Shield needing to be folded. And they could replace the complicated version they have now with a simple hinged one, since it would only be going from 9 meters to 14 meters unfolded.
But sadly, you are probably right. All they will be able to do is launch it on an expendable and hope it doesn’t become a very expensive piece of space junk.
When the BFR is built and flies, we can talk about it. Until then, it is a paper rocket. Just like SLS.
Well, not exactly like SLS; I’d point out that SX has something of a track record to factor.
As long as the mirror structure can stand the g-forces of reentry without being folded.
In hindsight, when the project was originally conceived they didn’t envision servicing missions to L2 being possible for decades. Of course they also didn’t envision that it would be decades before the telescope actually launched.
I’ve wondered why a sort of standardization regime isn’t part of NASA’s work flow. Perhaps I am underestimating the differences between say, Hubble and Webb (Chandra I get). But why do we go back to a clean page every time?
Webb and Hubble are very different beasts. The requirements for Webb called for infrared instruments and a large mirror. Thermally, the IR instruments mean operating temperatures which are extremely cold. The thermal requirements push it to having the sun shield and an Earth-Sun L2 orbit. The size of the mirror and the size of the sun shield don’t fit in any existing launch vehicle (SLS, BFR and New Glenn weren’t even a glint in someone’s eye when Webb was designed.) So that pushed the design to the complex, unfolding deployments.
But, in general, NASA does have a habit of doing things from scratch, even when it isn’t really necessary. Even when it comes to seemingly trivial things like a battery, you don’t often see people buying an existing one with 30% more capacity than the spacecraft needs. That’s inefficient. The tendency is to design and build a custom one which is just right for the requirements. That’s part of an old tradition to maximize performance and optimize everything to the requirements of a specific mission.
The motivation is high launch costs and infrequent flight opportunities; if you can only do it once during your professional career and just getting it into space costs hundreds of millions, people start thinking in terms getting everything out of the spacecraft they can. Dramatically lower launch costs might change that (or at least undermine then mindset behind that traditional attitude.)
As Mr. Pemberton notes, JWST can’t be reconfigured for maintenance (actually, the instruments and electronics are inaccessibly packed in between the telescope and the sun shield) and minimizing deployments by using a larger payload diameter is a complete redesign and rebuild.
But you’re also suggesting something NASA wouldn’t touch management/policy reasons. Even if you replaced BFR with SLS, and made it all inside NASA, you’d be putting a rocket which has never flown on the critical path for a multi-billion dollar scientific project. The JSWT project has no control of BFR development (or SLS development.) If delays cost $1 million per day, how could they budget for potential delays in the launch vehicle development? If, during a review, the managers were asked how they would mitigate that cost/schedule risk, what could they say? Yes, I know Europa Clipper is baselined to launch on SLS, but that was mandated by Congress. In general, this sort of cross-program dependency is something NASA practices discourage.
Nor is this a NASA thing. It comes up all the time. For example, electric cars. A company trying to make them has a gaping hole in its business plan if charging stations aren’t going to be available. A company planning to build charging stations has a problem if they are depending on someone else to make and sell electric cars. Tesla is trying to make it work by doing both in house. Without that, it’s the same sort of cross-program risk flying JWST-like telescope on a BFR would involve.
Plus that means NASA would have to acknowledge the BFR exists… Hopefully when JWST launches it will work and be successful.
But if not then BFR should be able to “pickup” the pieces and some how fix it. Yes, it is not designed for it, but Hubble was not designed to have a corrector lens added to it either. BFR has a big enough cargo bay for folks to be creative, and salvaging a XX billon dollar instrument will encourage them to be so.
HST and JWST are very different beasts. HST wasn’t designed for corrective optics (COSTAR), but it was designed to have five, easily replaceable instruments in the optical path. On orbit, swapping out HSP (High Speed Photometer) for COSTAR was no harder than replacing WFPC (the Wide Field and Planetary Camera) with WFPC2.
For JWST, if it fails (and I hope it won’t; I’d like something worthwhile to come out of the whole mess), and when (if) BFR is available, I don’t think repairs would be viable. Neither on orbit or a return to Earth for repair and reflight. It would be more like a recovery for a postmortem and possibly salvaging the instruments for reuse on a future telescope.
Sometimes I wonder if they need a failure like that to break the existing culture.
If JWST delivers even half of what’s promised, all prior issues will be forgotten, as criticisms will be dismissed. Just as they were for the delayed, 100% over-budget and broken-on-delivery HST. Just like they were for the 100% over-budget MSL. Etc etc.
My goodness. If those gentlemen are upset about Webb they must be positively apoplectic about SLS.
One good thing for SLS (I suppose there has to be one) is that their budget and schedule have never been all that exact and specific. In the case of JWST, there is a long history of making specific statements about the cost and launch date, and then failing to deliver on time and on budget. I think that’s worse for the program’s credibility.
Bite the bullet, learn the lessons we must face, and carry on. Needless to say, we need something like the spirit of Winston Churchill in 1940, to oversee Northrop-Grumman henceforth.
You must be high 🙂
Not meant to be snarky: it’s just the notion of ‘learn the lessons’ is, in this context, so completely laughable. As Mr. S above points out about SLS this looks like business as usual.
Oh. But we ‘are part of a team!’
How damn magnanimous! The attitude is just infuriating.
And I wonder if those hereabouts with higher NASA-speak skills can unravel that particular quote? Is that NASA covering NG’s ass? vice-versa?
And for extra credit: why would anyone cover for anyone else? Where’s the circular firing squad? Where is the finger pointing?
Mr. Z: “I’m not happy sitting here telling you this” — oh puh-lease! Oh no! He’s uncomfortable!
Near as I can tell all he gets is a little more egg on a face covered with a decade’s worth egg.
This stinks.
But not to worry! Congressman Smith is on the case:”I expect to see progress on keeping projects on budget and on time.”
Good to know.
I think Dr. Zurbuchen is mostly sincere about this. Getting JWST is going to take work, even with this new delay and added cost overruns. Some of blame certainly goes to Northrup Grumman, but this report makes it clear there is more than enough blame to go around. The last thing we need for the people involved to start pointing fingers and playing blame games. Focusing on getting things done may also protect the guilty, but I think the intent is to get JWST up and up in a functional state.
I’d support your argument were this the first case of dramatically messing things up. But it not the first, nor is it the last.
I’ll admit I’m seeing this from a more personal level. I actually know Dr. Zurbuchen; we worked in the same department at the University of Michigan for a few years in the early 2000s. So I’m seeing this as the first time he, personally, has had to deal with this sort of mess. He’s only been in his current job as head of NASA’s science directorate for a bit under two years.
But if you’re thinking of the institution rather than the person in charge of it, I see your point. NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (and NASA as a whole) aren’t very good at holding contractors accountable for mistakes. I’m not sure how much of that is inherent to NASA, and how much it is due to Federal Acquisition Regulations.
I do know that, I, personally, probably wouldn’t sue or get into an argument if someone sold me a shoddy product or failed to deliver. It’s usually not worth the aggravation. But I wouldn’t buy anything from that person or company again. Being charitable and forgiving is all very well and good, but I think there need to be consequences for seriously dropping the ball. That doesn’t seem to happen with government contracts.
How about we learn from this by putting a stake in WFIRST before it becomes “Budget Eating Telescope Mk. 2”?
The way this cursed project has fallen, I fully expect a loss of mission failure after JWST finally eventually lifts off. Say, in 2025?
;-D
Mr. Wes Bush has some ‘splainin’ to do, and not just about JWST ?
This has become normalized now, hasn’t it? It was 10 years ago that JWST caused NASA to rip-up many of its international commitments. It put the hobbles on LISA, EXOMars and others at ESA. It is still going on now ten years later.. really? How is this in anyway acceptable? What is driving this? The information out there is all nebulous hand-wringing stuff. If it was the technology then the mission should have been descoped. If it was the implementation then it should have been redesigned. Either way these things should not bite ten years out of a mission schedule. Worst case scenario is 3 to 5 years… How did we get here? Boiling frogs?
I’ll add EJSM (Europa Jupiter System Mission) Laplace to your list. That really annoyed the people in Europe, because we went back and forth on it. The original idea was that the US would fly a spacecraft to Jupiter and which would eventually end up orbiting Europa. ESA would simultaneously, with lots of synergistic science, fly a similar mission ending up orbiting Ganymede.
The US bailed on that at the same time we bailed on LISA and our European partners had to seriously revise their mission as a stand-along Jupiter mission (selected as the JUICE mission, currently in development.) Then we changed our minds again, and decided to fly a Europa mission (which, after a couple iterations ended up being Europa Clipper.) But without the coordination with the ESA mission, simultaneous operations or the originally planned synergy. To my mind, that’s really jerking people around and I’m not surprised they weren’t happy about it.
There is no science that will be generated in the 5-10 year mission span of this telescope that justify the delay or cost. None.
It’s very existence has drowned out countless other programs.
It’s very existence is a monument to everything that is wrong with NASA.
Decades ago NRO started launching satellites built around the basic design of the KH-11 KENNEN, which was also the basis of the Hubble Space Telescope. And every few years, they launched an upgraded version of it. They iterated on a proven design. And what’s been the result? They’ve launched like 16 of them over the years, and have built at least 2.5 more they never launched (one of which is now WFIRST). Modern KH-11s are supposedly quite different. The marvel of an iterative design process over decades.
And where are we with NASA? Well let’s see… the JWST, a one off, whose complex mirror will likely never be used at this scale ever again
due to the existence of larger launch vehicles. We have WFIRST, which NASA has considered killing. We have (including WFIRST), the 2.5 NRO donated Hubble-cousins, that NASA has treated like a re-gifted tie. And we got a lot of concept art about their next big mega project.
The biggest joke of them all is that they’re seriously kicking around this idea for a big post-JWST telescope. Do they live in some kind of alternate reality where the JWST never happened? Are they that eager for a sequel to this catastrophe?
No. It’s not going to happen.
NASA should certainly keep launching space telescopes of course. But no more clean sheet designs. They double dip with the NRO or somebody else on basic design. And when they want a new one, their starting point is the last one with upgraded optics and such.
I share some of your sentiments; but I also realize that these scopes observe at dramatically different wavelengths, which fact controls the way they are designed. Still, standardization seems obvious.
As to the assertion that no science will be generated? Seriously?
The single thing that will make this investment worthwhile, at least to me, is the ability to observe very high z stars. There is a lot to learn about the early universe that could have enormous implications.
And here I will, as they say, go out of my swim lane: chemical rockets will neither conquer the solar system nor take us to the stars. We must have a (very) different way of thinking about space travel. We need a dramatic breakthrough in our fundamental understanding of the universe and how it was created; observing the easiest (opps! earliest!) stars is a critical step.
That seems to be one of the things many people don’t realize about JWST is that it’s not just about seeing the earliest galaxies, although that alone could be monumental depending on what is discovered. But it will also be able to see details in objects much closer to us. It’s possible that what it uncovers about stars and planets in our galaxy could be even greater breakthroughs than what it discovers about ancient far away galaxies.
That’s not being entirely fair. The series of national security telescopes you mention were all visible light (or perhaps near IR) imaging satellites operating from low Earth orbit. That gives them similar goals and requirements, and makes evolving designs easier. The radar reconnoissance satellites, electronic surveillance satellites, and other national security assets were not designs which evolved directly from the Corona/Keyhole satellites.
JWST has requirements for a larger mirror than can be launched in one piece and thermal requirements which require the L2 orbit and the deployable sun shield. In contrast, HST had none of those requirements. So it isn’t like you could satisfy the requirements for JWST by flying an improved version of HST.
But I do agree that NASA does start over from scratch more often than it should. When the requirements are reasonably similar, evolving an existing design would be a better choice than starting over from scratch. It’s just that sometimes, the requirements really aren’t similar to a past spacecraft.
Hubble has been a huge success. If Webb is as good it will have been worth it. More so than, say, the ISS. http://Www.robert-w-jones.com
Rather than reward Northrup Grumman another $1B for a torn sunshade and propellant lines being full of gunk, perhaps NASA should finish the project in-house with assistance from other vendors as needed. Cost-plus contracts have escape clauses; their use reduce abuse.