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Mather: Next telescope after #JWST would probably need to be 2-3x bigger that #JWST. Need to find a way to do it for the same price.
— Tony Darnell (@DeepAstronomy) June 4, 2014
Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member... More by Keith Cowing
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Priceless. Just do what NASA does: propose a wildly under-projected, unrealistic budget and timeline, start work on JWST v 2.0, let costs creep up, push delivery date back, don’t tell anyone all the gory details until project is so far along and so much has been spent that failure now is not an option.
Failure is always an option. Remember the superconducting supercollider? At some point, we decided it just wasn’t worth it and canned the entire thing.
um…Desertron wasn’t a NASA project.
Historically, cancellations or reorganizations of NASA programs is quite common.
What are we doing with all the mirrors? Give them to SpaceX?
(Rhetorical question, do not answer)
The cancellation of SSC was a bit more complex than that.
Same price? you’re OK with another $8.8 billion space telescope? how about less than half that price? that would be a start, or actually building something on or under budget, that would be even better. JWST initial budget estimate was $1.6 billion…
and something not 8 years behind schedule 🙂
The ATLAST technology Development Plan http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/… outlines an approach to develop critical technologies over 6 to 9 years for about 250M (8m to 16m)
Concurrently, with the technology investment, a serious mission concept competition is held to narrow the final concept for about 48M.
—
The original projection had no contingency funding and did not anticipate a 25% cut in budget by the departing 2008 Congress (See Figures 5.3 and 5.6 in the link: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/499…
The 8.8B cap includes the 4 year slip in schedule.
So with the technology program first, followed by a competition that uses technology data rather than estimates–prior to turning it into a flagship–perhaps its cost will be significantly less and peer reviewed versus the alternatives.Seems like a much better plan.
Right. $10B price tag should be just about enough to 3d-print it on orbit in any sane world. Can we try that ?
And i specifically push on that button because – then, after spending $10B we have a capability to print ( or deploy, or assemble ) large structures on orbit. With JWST, we have the capability to .. build a JWST ( and deploy its mirror )
Yep… well less than half the price and on time — then we’d be talkin’. How likely is that?
Well, if NASA ever came to its senses and asked me what to do in the way of telescopes, I’d point out the obvious.
NIR-VIS-UV space-based astronomy has in no way run its course with HST, so NASA needs to launch another monolithic mirror telescope of the same basic type. Maybe with a somewhat larger mirror, like 4-5 meters. But just another 2.4 meter instrument would be worth it.
If NASA doesn’t do it, somebody else should. (Does one hear China or India expressing interest?)
Hence WFIRST-AFTA, which indeed will be the next UVIS mission and has a 2.4m primary.
Hopefully my next project this fall. 🙂
How far will WFIRST-AFTA go in the UV? I didn’t think it was going to the short wavelengths that HST does.
Maybe we ought to look into how to MAKE large mirrors in space, so we could have multiple 5, 10 or 100 meter mirrors, huh ?
I mean with a decade of time, and the budget reaching ten billions, we ought to be able to figure out some combination of additive manufacturing, polishing and coating to make this work.
That was my thought when I heard about the NRC report: why not spend $$$ on learning to make stuff in space? It’s a long road for sure. But shipping everything from one well to the next won’t work. Same with telescopes, which might be a bit over the techno-hump for in-situ construction, but the argument remains.
Start with fuel and refuel able rockets. Must be a simple reason why this doesn’t make sense.
There’s a reasonable intermediate point; ship the parts to the ISS on the scheduled logistics flights and assemble it there, then tug it out to a higher orbit.
I don’t think it’s denial; more of a paradigm shift. The next space telescope could have a multisegmented mirror and be robotically assembled in space. It could use some of the technology developed for the Keck telescopes.
All is ask for the successor to JWST is that they please, please, build two of the most important/expensive components at twice the price.
Just be sure to leave the good component here on earth and launch the flawed one into space..just like they did with the Hubble!
How about tying those two NRO “gift” scopes together into one massive interferometer?
Then… don’t let NASA even touch it! Get one of the Aerosp Co’s (for an incentive, like intellectual property rights?) to take a whack at it…
Or even better, give the whole thing to those clever kids at Embry Riddle (or even a partnered group of Tech-based schools) and see if we can maybe crowd-source that bad boy into orbit.
Or SpaceX? And as I write this I can hardly believe it…the same beloved NASA that has done so many wonderful things, the NASA that is repository of our country’s technological prowess and reputation, and indeed continues to lead in so many areas but has lost the flashlight (not entirely of its own accord). And now, the butt of so many jokes…
Maybe it’s time for private money to build space telescopes, just as they build large telescopes down here on Earth. Keck Space Telescope, anyone?
Cute, that’s how Mather got his Nobel “Price”:-)
“For the same price”. No. Just no. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at how fundamentally detached from reality that tweet is.
No, DeepAstronomy. The only space telescope’s you’re getting post-JWST are NRO spin-offs to the tun of a quarter of the JWST, just like Hubble was. Not enough? Be creative. Was demolishing one decade of budgets and squeezing out other promising programs not enough for you? Now you want to go for two? At the same time JPL wants to do Mars sample return? At the same time HSF will be expanding the SLS and hopefully buying more commercial flights? Are you joking?
Probably the only program in all of government more egregious and embarrassing than the JWST is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. And you liked it so much, you want to do it again?
I agree that there is a lot that can be done with a 2.5m (or even smaller) mirror that hasn’t been done. We need to look at all the options with realism rather than wistful thinking.
It could be done. Just use the same systems as the JWST.
There is a big suspicion that Hubble saved money by using some of the same systems as spy satellites.
that’s not a suspicion. the Hubble design was heavily based on a KH-11 spy satellite mirror and satellite bus, modified with scientific instruments, and placed in a much higher orbit and designed to look outward, rather than down at Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
the “telescopes” that the NRO donated to NASA would be much the same thing, what NASA got were the mirrors and satellite buses, so they’d be much more directly related to the spy satellites they came from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
This doesn’t completely explain the misfiguring of the HST mirror. One would assume the KH mirrors were an equivalent paraboloid.
well, two things.
one, that was just plain a screw up based on the sensor used to test the mirror. everyone knows that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
two, the design was BASED on the KH-11 mirror and bus, but the focus of the mirror was very different from the ones used on spy satellites. Hubble has a much more narrow focus and a far more limited field of view.
To amplify what Hug Doug said: The Hubble Space
Telescope was definitely a KeyHole reconnaissance satellite looking up instead of down, and that was no accident. A few years ago I unexpectedly found myself having a private
conversation with a recently retired NASA senior executive who had held a very high position of responsibility in the Astrophysics division at HQ around the time that HST was being started—I’m respecting the individual’s anonymity, so won’t name names. This individual made the surprising (to me) statement that in that period, the CIA was covertly advocating and supporting the HST project. When I asked why, this individual stated that they wanted our adversaries to know how good our reconnaissance capabilities were, without giving away classified information.
Any technically capable adversary could take the publicly available performance specifications of HST and reverse engineer them to figure out how good a job it would do, when pointed downward. The idea was to reduce uncertainty in the calculations behind the whole strategic balance of power. In the final analysis, the HST rolled out of the front door of the same factory where KH spacecraft rolled out the back door.
On a perhaps related note: The JWST is ALSO essentially a spy satellite looking up instead of down and rolling out the
front door of a company that is also selling the downward looking version out the back door. It is just that both the wavelength band and the customer are different than for KH. If there were any savings to be had on JWST by using spy satellite technology and systems, it would already have occurred.
When it comes to cost savings in design we are talking about the telescope that follows the JWST.
this individual stated that they wanted our adversaries to know how good our reconnaissance capabilities were, without giving away classified information.
Not necessary.
All one needs to do to assess the resolution capabilities of a single lens/mirror space telescope is to observe the maximum payload fairing diameter of the launch vehicle. The best theoretical resolution capability is a simple calculation based on aperture and distance to target, and one could reasonably assume our spacecraft are close to that.
Simple high school physics.
there’s a pretty big difference between knowing what something might theoretically be and actually seeing something happen 🙂
and I think rather than demonstrating our capabilities to our enemies (who likely did have a fair guess to what those capabilities were), this was more along the lines of showing off to the public.
“they wanted our adversaries to know how good our reconnaissance capabilities were, without giving away classified information.”
Subtle, and clever. The two more recently donated NRO telescopes would do a similar thing, if NASA can dig up some funding to use them!
Though I’d be more hesitant to say something similar about the JWST – it’s just too large to be practical as a spy satellite (by that I mean it would be far too easy to spot from the ground, as well as producing a lot of drag due to the low orbits spy sats use), and both its design and purpose are very different from what would be required for a spy sat. Maybe some of the recent spy sats use segmented mirrors, but those would still be much smaller and that would be about all that might be in common with the JWST.
JWST looking at the earth would see a big white spot. There is a reason for putting it at L2 and that tennis court size folding sunshield.
excellent points. thank you for your support 🙂
What’s the launch date for this thing?
I guess we should just kiss any other science projects goodbye if this is actually being seriously considered.
Noticed a new group has been formed to do science in a different way. Can’t find it – damn, but remember sounded interesting and headed up with a Board of very experienced members. I’ll keep looking as I think it will add to this discussion.
Cheers
Edit: Remembered the name now: 2BoldlyGo but still can’t find the original article.
The first step in reducing the cost of the next big thing is to fire all the NASA managers who had anything to do with JWST.
Mather is the last person who should be talking budgets.
What was the context of the tweet Kieth? Why did this even come up?
A NASASocial event focused on JWST at GSFC yesterday.
I guess I read this not as denial but as looking ahead in the long (long) term, as Lyman Spitzer did when he proposed a UV-optical space telescope in the 60s. The cost goal is unrealistic now but if and when we begin building in space, we are in a different paradigm.