The Astronomy Thread
- Thread starter Araxen
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Kiroy
Marine Biologist
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And that estimate, coming from a large protective bureaucracy, has got to be incredibly optimistic
10b and 30 years for something with what i'd guess has a 50% chance of working. Government folks.
I wonder if you contracted musk to do this what the cost/timeline/success rate would be.
I'm going to say 1b / 3 years / 90%+ realistic
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Brahma
Obi-Bro Kenobi-X
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Might have to wait longer than that. The telescope only has the ability to view a small portion of the sky at any given time as the entire spacecraft most rotate to point he mirror but that is heavily constrained by the limits of the sunshield blocking sunlight. Scott Manley has a good video on one of the big limitations of the telescope;
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Masakari
Which way, western man?
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It's amazing how over-budget and behind-schedule the satellite was. Maybe it has a clandestine DOD purpose similar to Hubble and the Keyhole satellites that resembled it.
By the way, here's a cool NASA site for the Webb: Where Is Webb? NASA/Webb
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Brahma
Obi-Bro Kenobi-X
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Jeez. Just looked at the whole thing. There really is a high chance something goes awry.
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Musk would have done it at a quarter of the cost and we'd have gotten forty telescopes by now.
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CaughtCross
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Funny enough, the JWST was actually made by Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, which is only a few miles away from Space X in Hawthorne.
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We'd have an array of smaller telescopes that are 100 times better than this one.
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Masakari
Which way, western man?
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It's entirely possible that the JWST could have held pass-through funding for an undisclosed DOD project.
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Tripamang
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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It makes zero sense to spend all that money figuring out how to build it only to produce one. Realistically the second would of cost a couple billion more? There is no shortage of work that could be done with more and dividing the cost across more units would be a more palatable price tag and it could earn more of the cost back with additional bookings. Unless there is something here I don't understand this process just seems retarded.
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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I dont think much of the cooling systems have Earth based applications, which is where a huge chunk of the cost comes from.
Chanur
Shit Posting Professional
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An array of telescopes linked together for a massive lens seems like a cool idea.
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ShakyJake
<Donor>
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Burns
Avatar of War Slayer
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How many Gov projects come in under budget? Are there any repercussions for knowingly under bidding by large margins, to make it look good, so the politicos you paid off (legally, of course) can get general support? The $10 billion final price was only 3.33 times over budget...
So, the price tag isn't that unfathomable (for government work). They need to engineer every moving part to have a ludicrously low failure rate. Which means testing, testing, redesign, testing, and more testing. Only to have it fail, after 1000s of test, to achieve the target window and then have to start over.
On the livestream pre-game, they show a non-explosive actuator that they use in deploying the sun shield. Every single one needs to work right or it will fuck the shield; there are 178 of them. That is not something they can just trust a manufacturer on, they would need to test thousands of those things in a simulated environment to get trust worthy numbers.
Here is the timestamped (31:16) video of the sun shield material, then the actuator. They also go on to talk about how they need the mirrors to be close to absolute zero to avoid any feedback in the sensors:
So, the price tag isn't that unfathomable (for government work). They need to engineer every moving part to have a ludicrously low failure rate. Which means testing, testing, redesign, testing, and more testing. Only to have it fail, after 1000s of test, to achieve the target window and then have to start over.
On the livestream pre-game, they show a non-explosive actuator that they use in deploying the sun shield. Every single one needs to work right or it will fuck the shield; there are 178 of them. That is not something they can just trust a manufacturer on, they would need to test thousands of those things in a simulated environment to get trust worthy numbers.
Here is the timestamped (31:16) video of the sun shield material, then the actuator. They also go on to talk about how they need the mirrors to be close to absolute zero to avoid any feedback in the sensors:
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