Webb Space Telescope Launch Delays Continue
James Webb Space Telescope: Technical Challenges Have Caused Schedule Strain and May Increase Costs, GAO
“The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project has made significant progress since GAO’s last report in March 2019, such as completing testing of the observatory’s individual elements and integrating them together in August 2019. However, new technical challenges have required the project to use more schedule reserve extra time set aside in the project’s schedule to accommodate unforeseen risks or delays than planned. As of October 2019, the project had used about 76 percent of its available schedule reserve and no longer plans to launch in November 2020. The project is now managing to a March 2021 launch date but estimates only a 12 percent likelihood that this date will be achieved. NASA plans to reassess the launch date in the spring of 2020.”
After all that, it better make it to its orbit and provide good science. No blowing up on the launch pad.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that view. It has been used to excuse really bad management failures. Once a spacecraft is up and returning great results, all seems to be forgiven and the fact that it was an order of magnitude over budget and years behind schedule is forgotten. Could we possibly remember that, despite being an engineering and scientific triumph, it was (or will be) a management catastrophe?
I’m sure the Lessons Learned doc will be chock full of great advice.
As someone who has contributed to lessons learned documents, I can assure you that virtually no one reads them. I can’t even access one I wrote, since it’s stored behind the JPL internal web site’s security protections. I might be able to get a friend at JPL to copy and send it, but good luck if you don’t have similar connections.
Sorry, I had forgotten which is the sarcasm emoji…
In terms of the other science that has remained undone, and technology undeveloped because this supermassive black hole of a management disaster ate every lunch in town, a much greater catastrophe.
We shall see…
Which is going to take longer jwst or Orion with crew to get to orbit? Now it seems to be a neck and neck race for last place.
If JWST gets delay long enough. The satellite deploying variant of the Starship might be operational. In the unlikely event the JWST fly up in the Starship, will have great video coverage.
This should surprise exactly no one.
Cheers Neil
How truely good. Another euphemism which comes to mind is a “dog’s breakfast”, which is a polite way of saying something is a big mess.
My fear is it will get to orbit, eventually…. but then it may take an embarrassing turn. Like failing to deploy the elaborate system of mirrors and sunshades. I marvel at the complexity and the risks accepted when designing it and more importantly, how and what they tested (or not) on the ground. Hopefully, I am mistaken and everything works great. =)
To be fair, someone recently reminded me that the mirror isn’t as complicated as it’s often described. It does have 18 segments. But it only has two major joints. The center 12, and two panels of the outer three on each side. They are all individually articulated, to a small degree, but there are only two mechanisms which have to unfold by 90 deg. or so. That’s not too bad by the standards of spacecraft articulations and deployments. The sunshade, on the other hand, still strikes me as a nightmare. (And I’m someone whose colleagues have nightmares about two-joint deployments.)
I have nightmares with anything that deploys. Just look at what happened to Galileo.
This Ars article (https://arstechnica.com/sci… states the telescope has 300 single points of failure. That’s beyond scary. How that got out of the design reviews is beyond me.
The Galileo antenna failure is a bad example of management spin control. It failed because the spacecraft was sent back and forth across the country due to launch delays and no one bothered to check the dry lubricant on the deployment mechanism. But the project managers didn’t say “oops, my fault.” They said lots of thing about complex mechanical deployments and how space is hard. If you look at the history of commercial spacecraft and Earth-orbiting scientific spacecraft, that’s (to be polite) something that falls out of the rear end of a cow.
As I wrote previously, the JWST sunshade does worry me. The mirror deployment isn’t as bad as I’d thought, but the sunshade is something I lack confidence in. I’m good with two articulations, maybe even five. But when you start talking about dozens or even hundreds, I get uncomfortable.
At least Starship should be around to haul it back to Earth to fix…
If and when Starship flies. I’m still waiting for the proof. But if it does (and an L2 halo orbit is a bit farther than the Moon), I expect more than hauling a failed spacecraft back to Earth. I expect a few people in spacesuits with crowbars, prying it open and fixing it in place.
JWST is worth the wait. My concern is that we have nothing to fill in the gap if Hubble fails and JWST isn’t in place yet.
Many years ago, there was news that the National Reconnaissance Office had gifted NASA two partially-completed space telescopes. It would have taken a lot of work to complete the telescopes and get them into space, but I thought then that it would have been a good idea to do so with at least one, as there would not have been so much pressure on JWST.
The wait, maybe. The cost in other missions unproposed, unselected, and unblown, as well as the technology for them undeveloped to anything close to TRL 9…. priceless and unforgivable.
Yes. But it’s more than that. At what point did we accept this ugliness? When did we sell our souls?
When the rent came due and the kid’s tuition had to be paid. I have trouble blaming people for doing what they can to pay the bills. I do have trouble with a situation where people need to do something inefficient and farcical to pay the bills. But that’s not quite the same thing as blaming the people stuck in that sort of situation.
The gap actually starts today with the shut down of Spitzer. Even though Spitzer lasted well beyond its minimum mission they were trying to keep it extended until Webb was launched. But as Webb kept being delayed they basically ran out of money and couldn’t keep it going any longer.
That’s what WFIRST is. Recycled NRO leftovers.
And, arguably, not worth it. The budget growth for WFIRST has been attributed to refurbishing a NRO bus and mirror, and shoehorning the planned instruments into it. I’m sure that isn’t the whole story, but it is one thing people have pointed out. There were, by the way, two NRO leftovers, and NASA decided the second wasn’t worth adopting.
I agree. If the “donation” had been made two-three years earlier, maybe it’d make sense.
Still, I’ll bet a beer WFIRST launches before Webb.
I’ll take that bet, since Congress has said no. As I understand it, this year’s appropriation bill said WFIRST doesn’t get more funding until NASA’s gotten JWST off the ground. The language was one of those things only a student of bureaucratic language would cherish. They managed to say something really nasty without actually using an impolite word.
See you in four years or so.
And there lies the problem. All this should not be forgotten. It should be remembered and corrected.
Watching Neil Armstrong as a 20 year old, I’ve been a NASA junkie my entire adult life.
Observing NASA for these decades, I consistently default to broad leeway, figuring better educated folks made the right decisions. JPL Open House was an annual pilgrimage, the years available.
And why not? Where else on Planet Earth existed such a concentration of intellectual talent? And where else the staggering achievements of Pioneer, and Voyager, and all the splendid achievements?
Nowhere, that’s where. America through NASA was leading the scientific world (and still does in many arenas, I hasten to add). In retrospect, those were the good old days.
In 2005, and then 2008, my worldview began an inexorable change. Before the early part of the 21st century, NASA’s achievements stood alone. No other entity stood capable of the NASA magic.
The space community experienced at first a slow rumble coming from a faraway Pacific paradise, a rumble the grew until exploding our collective Weltanschauunga. It was SpaceX, of course, offering what the community sorely needed: a performance yardstick. We knew progress was often slow, and quite expensive. Now, progress and cost could be compared against a worthy opponent.
NASA was not the only target of course. Handwriting was on the wall; ‘Old Space’ could certainly read it.
Briefly, SX designed, built, and achieved orbital insertion of a new engine and rocket in about 5 years. F1 cost is usually pegged at $90 million of SX own money. Cost of F9 is harder to pin down. Fewer than 5 years to develop and launch is widely accepted.
So I started on this long-winded diatribe in an effort to understand WTF happened to Webb. At one time, I would have allowed considerable forbearance toward the project. Why? Space is hard! Takes a lot of money!
No more. Now we knowWebb for what it truly is: an emblem of a stunning scientific achievement, yes. It is also an example of laughably poor management and oversight.
And the attitude of this Space Cadet and NASA acolyte?
No más, bebé.
Without disagreeing, some details could be added.
Rocket Lab is a very interesting company. The Electron launch vehicle is stealing the market for small satellites in the same way the SpaceX Falcon has done for larger satellites. And they fly from Mahia, New Zealand.
When it comes to planetary science, JPL did build and operate the Cassini spacecraft. But they only built and operated two of the dozen scientific instrumentns on it. The rest and virtually all of the scientific work was done at universities and government labs scattered around the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom, and in one case, Argentina. So it was not really an American or a JPL mission. That is a trend I like, although I am uncomfortable about how parochial the Europa Clipper mission ended up.
“Where else on Planet Earth existed such a concentration of intellectual talent?”
The old and now nonexistent Bell Labs for one and there are many more that are just as good but just not in the public lime light or in your sphere of interest.
Or the Berlin rocket club? That’s one which will produce blank stares, even from people professionally involved in spaceflight. But the A-4 didn’t magically appear because someone wanted to bomb London and Antwerp.
I think the general public will be disappointed when they realize JWST is an infrared telescope that can essentially only take black and white photos.
Have the general public been disappointed by the images from the Juno spacecraft? Those are from a cell-phone quality camera and a bunch of people fiddle around in photoshop to make them look impressive. The images you see are not at all what Jupiter really looks like. JWST has one good imager with multiple filters. I’m sure they can turn those data into something which looks impressive.
It’s actually worse – the primary thing JWST has going for it is a suite of integral field spectrographs. Try explaining spectroscopy in a pr piece.
It splits light into different colors, just like a rainbow. And I get to hear how I study magnetic bubbles. Whatever that means… Good luck explaining Werner bands Z shifted so far that they’re in the mid IR. That’s not going to make it to the front page of an American newspaper.
It’s also worse in that JWST is fundamentally an infrared telescope and is really the successor to Spitzer (nee SIRTF), designed for the most part to do high-z optical science redshifted into the infrared. I personally think the lack of uv/optical instrumentation is deliberate. When HST goes belly up, that will really put the pressure on to approve LUVOIR as the next flagship mission.
I did like the idea of using a NRO spare telescope as a UV observatory. Unfortunately, NASA decided to use one for WFIRST and not use the other spare. LUVOIR is really overkill in my mind. I just want something Hubble-class which can see down to 120 nm (well, I also like the EUV, so maybe a bit further…) Once we lose HST, we’re back down to sounding rockets for anything shorter wavelength than blue. (Or, as the PI for the UV spectrometer on New Horizons once said, his instrument is working and he could be talked into using it for general purpose astronomy.)