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Astronomy

Hearing on NASA Space Telescopes

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
December 6, 2017
Hearing on NASA Space Telescopes

NASA: Preliminary Observations on the Management of Space Telescopes, Cristina Chaplain GAO
“GAO’s ongoing work indicates that these projects are each making progress in line with their phase of the acquisition cycle but also face some challenges. For example, the current launch date for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project reflects a 57-60-month delay from the project’s original schedule. GAO’s preliminary observations indicate this project still has significant integration and testing to complete, with very little schedule reserve remaining to account for delays. Therefore, additional delays beyond the delay of up to 8 months recently announced are likely, and funding available under the $8 billion Congressional cost cap for formulation and development may be inadequate.”
Chairman Babin’s Opening Statement: NASA’s Next Four Large Telescopes
“It has been mentioned to me that with Hubble you could take a single picture into a meeting to show what was discovered but with W-FIRST you’ll have to wallpaper their entire office. The capability has increased 100 times from Hubble. W-FIRST is a critical new flagship mission and we need to make sure it stays on course. The assets provided to NASA from the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO, seem like a good fit for the mission but the program needs reasonable timelines and a realistic budget.”
Hearing charter
– Statements by Ranking Member Johnson and Ranking Member Bera
– Prepared statements: Thomas Zurbuchen, Thomas Young, Matt Mountain, Chris McKee

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

9 responses to “Hearing on NASA Space Telescopes”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    Hopefully it won’t be a budget buster like JWST. We can’t afford to have a single project like that eat so much money again out of NASA’s tight budget.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that the NRO mirror and structural components had a big impact on cost, but it may have helped to get support for the project. I feel the problem with Webb was that it was a bigger leap in technology than was appropriate at the time; the jump from the original more modest proposal to what was actually done was not well thought out. A more incremental approach would have reduced risk and maintained the design/development teams, and we might already have several years of data. But that’s just me.

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      NASA is always trying to balance “bleeding edge technology” with keeping an operational (science) program under budget. Unfortunately, from a budget perspective, they often do a terrible job of it. I personally think it’s worst on “flagship” projects like the James Webb Telescope. Those projects get a lot of hype and attention and I don’t think that management does enough to reign them in since they feel the project enjoys broad support. IMHO, of course.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        I had a similar reaction to Dr. Woodard’s comment, and have often felt that the overruns on Webb et.al. are a price paid for original research.

        Unfortunately these additional costs are trumpeted as ‘over-runs’ — which they are, truthfully, but they also include the uncounted benefit of knowledge expansion.

        Maybe it’s inherent in the way ‘programs’ are run, something I know next to nothing about, other than through comments of people actually involved in the trenches.

        Or something.

        • cb450sc says:
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          Significant parts of the JWST cost overruns were due to deployable structures like the sunshade that the vendor assured everyone they knew how to do. They couldn’t tell you what they had built previously, or why, but we should accept that as a defense contractor (nudge, nudge, hint, hint) they knew how to do it. Well, that turned out to be a giant pile of BS. Usually the spacecraft is one of the easier parts of a mission to design, being based on known technology; it’s the science instruments that tend to be bleeding edge. But everyone, including myself, saw giant red flags when the mission was well into it’s final development phase and there still was no credible spacecraft design and no design reviews, just vague powerpoints about how it would probably work. I mean, literally the telescope assembly was being finished and there was still no S/C design.

          The truth is that if it had started out at the size it is now (the primary was significantly descoped) it would have been possible to go with a much simpler design. There was a window of about a year when it would still have made fiscal sense to scrap the existing overly complicated system. After that, cost to completion was below the redesign cost. But there was too much political momentum at that point.

      • fcrary says:
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        I think part of it is a tendency to combine the technology with operational science missions. There is relatively little funding for technology development for its own sake (i.e. without a specific application to a specific mission.) There is also selection pressure to make science missions (and instruments) as new and visibly better than past ones (or ones proposed by others in a competitive selection.) That means the missions end up funding the technology development. That drives up cost, and adds cost and schedule risk.

    • Zed_WEASEL says:
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      Hmmm.

      How does going from a 1.3 meter diameter telescope to a 2.4 meter diameter telescope not increase cost? You need a bigger spacecraft and bigger launch vehicle.

      NASA should have turn down the NRO telescopes. At least for the WFIRST mission.

      • cb450sc says:
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        Politically it would be very difficult to throw these away. Congress made a pretty big deal about the “gift”. The larger mirror enabled a lot of commensurate feature creep, which blew the cost up. OTOH, it also made the mission substantially more capable than Euclid and thus easier to justify.