Why has this cost $8 billion - and is that a price worth paying?

>$8b
I always wonder what the bulk of the cost is for these things.
Doesn't look like much in raw materials.
Is it production cost or is it man hours?

>have $3.75 trillion budget
>half goes to poor leeches and old boomer fucks
More money to build cool shit 2016

They had/have a live cam you can watch as they build it and know exactly what is going on with the project. Seems like a shit ton of man hours with very delicate and complex machinery, at least from what I've seen.

Space observatories and other science platforms go up all the time. Not all of them are high profile.

NASA got given a bunch of hubble spec spy scopes from the airforce and just left them lying around a warehouse. They dont give a fuck. Its just jobs for the boys

Source?

Grant chasers are fucking faggots.

Lots of sites will tell you about past / present / future science missions. An example is spaceflightnow.com/launch-schedule/ which tells you upcoming flights and their payloads. Missions to and from the ISS also carry alot of small science projects with them.

It's ironic, isn't it. Because the cost of launching such a thing in space is so high they keep making design changes to get the best telescope possible.
But that ends up costing them a more by a factor 10.

That has nothing to do with JWST level stuff though. Most shit that goes up now is only communication and Earth-pointing satellites.

>they keep making design changes to get the best telescope possible
That's not true, the hardware has been fixed for years. JWST's instruments have actually got less ambitious after the failure of Canada's Tunable Filter Imager. In that case the hardware was only changed because the instrument as designed couldn't be delivered. You can look at instrument papers from 10 years ago and it hasn't changed. When building an instrument for a mission you build it once, it is only changed is something is seriously off-spec.

It's just two and they are only optics and basic structures, they would cost several hundred million minimum to make into an observatory. WFIRST which will be one of those telescopes is still a 1.5-2B mission.

literally the best use of taxes imaginable

consider that this is 0.05% of your taxes and 60% is allocated for nigger single mothers

A lot of new technology had to be developed to make it work. All that technology had to be integrated so it all worked together.

Systems integration is a pretty big fucking issue. Systems are now so complex that it is not possible for a single person to understand the whole system.

Because of this, it's really challenging to put systems together and make them work. If one person makes a change in one subsystem and people working on other subsystems aren't aware of it, bad things can happen. Usually we find out about these bad things when we try to put everything together, this means we have to start over and rebuild almost everything. This happened with a truck Mercedes made recently and it cost them a lot of money to fix.

A part of me kinda want this thing to have a Hubble-ish problem while at L1, requiring a repair mission. Then we can finally see a bit of speed in the Orion/SLS program

This; scientific and military spending is blown out of proportion, it's trivial in comparison to social services.

Regardless of your general principles, you shouldn't have your head so far up your ass that you can't recognize the JWST as a ridiculously bad project.

Yes, it's a good idea to put up a space telescope of this type, but not seven years late and five times the original cost.

>What happens if the launch vehicle fails?
That's why they use Ariane 5 this time. The most reliable launcher to minimize the risk of failure.

I would be happy paying the same amount of taxes, with no reduction or even some additional, if I knew that all the welfare/etc. money would instead be going to space shit and/or general research.

would rather spend 8 billion on.

>welfare

or

>cool space shit

now fuck off faggot

There are a lot more space observatories than just two in a lifetime. Sure, clueless people are only interested in pretty images, but there's so much more beyond that in other energy domains (x-ray, infrared, gamma in particular) that you can usually do a lot more astrophysics with. Also, space observatories are not always necessary, many things can be done here on earth for a lot cheaper, even things that we once thought were impossible (i.e. gamma observatories in the highest energies. Those energies usually don't penetrate the atmosphere, but we now have telescopes that can actually image air showers generated by those gamma rays. Shit is absolutely amazing, but nobody talks about it, because no pretty images).

Compare to:

- $8 TRILLION gone missing from the DoD budget (so far)
- $16 TRILLION wasted in Secret Bailouts (www.gao.gov)

Debt is future tax.

>DoD
>missing

Isn't it like 20x the resolution of hubble?

I can't fucking wait, we need more space observatories.

No. Hubble actually has lightly higher resolution because even though it is smaller it's diffraction limited at shorter wavelengths where JWST is not. If they could be compared at the same wavelength (which they can't because Hubble stops before JWST is DL) JWST would have about slightly less than 3 times higher resolution.

>it can produce hi rez images of exoplanets
lol

It can't, lrn2 diffraction limit.

>welfare

God no. Welfare harms society to its very core.

Remember JWST isn't all that large and won't really revolutionize anything. It, like Hubble, will be in space and will be able to stare at something for a long long time to get better results than even larger scopes on Earth. That is the only reason stuff like this is any good.

Now imagine if we had the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope in space instead.

>will be able to stare at something for a long long time

That's not why Hubble had advantages. For most Hubble programs the maximum time on target is

>JWST isn't all that large and won't really revolutionize anything
Oh and this is complete bollocks too. JWST's advantage is even more pronounced than Hubble. In the optical where Hubble operates the sky background is 100 times higher on the ground. In the near infrared at ~5microns the difference is a factor of a million. JWST will be more sensitive in imaging than any facility current or planned. It will not in spectroscopy because ground based telescopes can resolve out the background. It will absolutely revolutionise the study of early galaxies and reionisation.

JWST will revolutionise the field. Remember even Hubble being 4 times smaller than the largest ground based telescopes is still more published today than any other facility.

Wow, what an epic moron. Do you even know anything about how satellites and telescopes work, kid? This is as bad as muffler bearings. lol lol lol

0/10. You should work on being more subtle.

>Twas merely an act

Remind me again why congress is given any authority over NASA whatsoever beyond deciding how much money to give them?

Why this 20+ year, $8+ billion telescope's not worth the price: SpaceX is going to spend about $10 billion developing a rocket that can launch hundreds of tons to LEO for a few million dollars in incremental launch cost, as opposed to a few tons to LEO for hundreds of millions of dollars, thanks to full, efficient reusability.

This is the kind of shit we should have been spending money on. Nothing else matters by comparison, because it makes everything else vastly cheaper.

It's been obvious since the 60s that the primary focus should be on drastically reducing launch costs. But everything has been turned into budget-inflating, profiteering bullshit, *especially* the stuff that was claimed to be about reducing launch costs.

>Remind me again why the customer is given any authority over the store whatsoever beyond deciding how much money to give them?
Seriously, guy?

Your kind should be banned from using technology the moment you start complaining about investing in advancing technology.

Shittons of bureaucratic delay on top of a mountain of ultra light weight moving parts, which need to survive a trip to orbit, are designed to operate in deep cryo, and have extraordinarily tight tolerances, and nobody knew how to build at the time the contract was bid on.

well we don't need to spend money on it because spacex is already spending their own money to do so.

>well we don't need to spend money on it because spacex is already spending their own money to do so.

SpaceX doesn't have the $10 billion they think they'll need to build this architecture.

In any case, it'll be difficult to build an optical instrument at that scale anyway. Mirrors are really finicky beasts to cast, and any segmented system will need to be carefully engineered and tuned. The only advantage a super heavy lift launch system has is that weight isn't as much of a limiting factor in the systems engineering, which is only part of the design equation.

Space telescopes are the best goddamn thing NASA can spend their money on. Not shitty 'human space missions,' not on some stupid ISS, not on shitty shuttles, not a shitty super heavy lifter.

Space telescopes have been shown to give us the most bang for our buck in terms of science

Stop being an edgy fanboy, any resources we spend on garbage projects is resources we are not spending on more important and/or fruitful reaearch.

>It's been obvious since the 60s that the primary focus should be on drastically reducing launch costs.
You got no clue. It's been obvious since the 60s that the primary focus should be on drastically reducing payload costs.

That's idiotic. The payload costs are high because access to space is severely limited, because of high launch costs.

They have to make sure everything will work on the first try and can't test anything, then their launch costs over a hundred million dollars and has to be scheduled years in advance. You only get one try, so the more you spend, the more you're risking, and the more spending is justified to make really sure it will work.

Something similar happens to the launch vehicles themselves. Once it's accepted that they're going to be expensive, and they're only going to be used once, costs (and schedules) spiral further as testing is very limited (you can't flight-test an individual expendable rocket before you put a real payload on it, and you can't use hundreds of units for quality assurance when a good career for a launch vehicle is a hundred flights over a couple of decades) and "failure is not an option".

Since the high payload costs are based on the need to get it right on the first try to avoid a very high expense for nothing, the payload cost should be thought of more as a multiplier of launch cost than as an independent figure.

Now the JWST is a particularly egregious example of an out-of-control payload, costing perhaps 30 times as much as the launch. So reducing the payload cost to near zero would yield a 30 times improvement. But the launch cost and flight rate can be improved by a factor of 1000 or more.

I agree. Optical telescopes are not everything, sure, but those images Hubble sent back inspired millions of people to go into astronomy or astrophysics, I'm sure of it. Hell, I'm one of them. In the end, that's the great appeal of astrophysics: Seeing what you could never see with the eye and understanding things that are way out of our reach. Things that are insanely large and energetic or happen on time scales so unbelievable. Looking through our telescopes and using knowledge accumulated here on earth, we can puzzle the pieces together and truly understand who we are in this vast world.

On the other hand sending a few guys a few kilometres above ground seems like a huge waste of money. I really hope they are shutting that piece of shit down and start spending the money on actual science.

what were the launch costs projected for that behemoth?

can we use that instead of the SLS and send massive payloads to Jupiter and Saturn?

SpaceX is basically just investor bait at this point. They STILL haven't managed to build an actually reliable rocket and are already dreaming of sending actual humans that might not want to explode twenty seconds after launch to other planets. Whenever some catastrophic failure comes up, all they do is make another completely overblown buzzword story up and celebrate a big press release.

We already send up astronauts to the ISS all the time.

>space industry gave us nothing

SpaceX doesn't. Currently all NASA astronauts fly on Soyuz.

>nothing changes

>It, like Hubble, will be in space and will be able to stare at something for a long long time to get better results than even larger scopes on Earth. That is the only reason stuff like this is any good.

I suggest you get a used cheap Newtonian or catadioptric telescope and compare views of an object as it rises. Our atmosphere is, after light pollution, the number one factor that limits seeing.

Space rendezvous technology gave us LASIK. The shuttle program gave us material tech that makes exiting freeways safer. The science done on manned missions have improved life in myriad ways.

>The science done on manned missions have improved life in myriad ways.
Yeah, but that was twenty years ago. Nothing much happened since then. At the moment the ISS is financed barely enough to somehow keep it running for no good reason. The science/cost ratio for the ISS is catastrophic.

At this point hoping for improvement is science fiction for SpaceX. They need to prove their reliability first before sending humans up (the funny part is they even plan some kind of tourism. Who the fuck wants to pay money to burn into pieces in the upper atmosphere?). At this moment all they have proven is that the reliability of their rockets is complete shit. For every failure they lose more and more credibility. Every blown up rocket needs two years to make up for.

"We are only constrained by the artificial limits we place on ourselves. Life has no limits!"

We can save the world ! B-b-but it costs money.

Humanity is so stupid...

The research they've been doing these last few years (or at least what I've paid attention to) seems to be focused preparing for longer missions. 3D printing for part fabrication, vegetable production for food that isn't dehydrated, the effect of long term weightlessness on physiology, etc. I'm not arguing that it's less efficient than telescopes but I think the work being done is is beneficial.

SpaceX is still in the design and testing phase. They can still send up cargo and humans despite that fact. They do not need to wait for 100% reliability and they shouldn't.

All that research is usable in 100s of other non-space fields too.

They have worse reliability than Proton, and the reliability of Falcon 9 has decreased over time

I don't see your point at all.

You don't get astronauts from the same pool as store clerks, and the following training isn't cheap either. SpaceX rockets better be pretty fucking reliable if we're gonna send people or equipment worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It literally does not matter. You can literally get a store clerk to be an astronaut. Projecting god complexes to man-apes is retarded.

How so?

Not that guy, but if spacex kills nasa astronauts then they can say goodbye to all federal funding forever.

Industrial manufacturing and materials
Farming
Psychology
Health and medicine

Those aspects have 100s of applications.

That's not how shit like that works, kid.

Also, they don't need to send up NASA astronauts.

Jesus Christ, you are naive. Rockets isn't like software that you can get from alpha to a stable release within a year. Shit takes an enormous amount of testing, not only to get it working, but also to gain trust. If their first manned mission ends with three dead astronauts, then they can basically shut SpaceX down. Just ask NASA how fucking difficult situations like that are.

>Also, they don't need to send up NASA astronauts.
They're doing so in 2018

But those things can be done on the ground, without a 200 billion dollar lab. The application to space is the only thing that's novel and that's only useful to manned spaceflight.

>That's idiotic. The payload costs are high because access to space is severely limited, because of high launch costs.
Not because of high launch costs but because of the reliability requirements of operating high tech in a very harsh environment that can't be fully tested on the ground and can't be maintenanced during its lifetime in space. From the POV of satellite operators launching a payload is already fairly cheap. Reducing launch costs even by drastic amounts would reduce overall costs only in the single digit percentage range.

If launch costs were the primary concern with satellite operators Arianespace wouldn't be market leader. Because they're not the cheapest. Their strengths are reliability and punctuality. And that's what counts. A failed launch is a disaster for a satellite operator. Insurance only covers the cost of rebuilding a lost satellite. But it doesn't cover the lost revenues when a customer chooses a competitor when you didn't deliver according to your contract because the launcher blew your satellite to pieces. And it doesn't cover the opportunity costs of having so much capital bound for years without a profit. A too much delayed launch can also have consequences almost as bad.

>Now the JWST is a particularly egregious example of an out-of-control payload, costing perhaps 30 times as much as the launch. So reducing the payload cost to near zero would yield a 30 times improvement. But the launch cost and flight rate can be improved by a factor of 1000 or more.
Nope. Reducing launch costs to 10% would reduce overall mission costs of the JWST only by a couple of percent. You can't afford not to make satellites reliable just because the launch costs very little. But these costs far outweigh launch costs. And having a cheaper launch doesn't mean you can send people to a lagrange point to repair your space telescope just like that. Man-rated space operations are even more expensive than all other.

It doesn't work like that. They can kill off as many people as they like. They are a company, not a government agency. Private sectors kills off people all the time and no one so much as bats an eye.

The world doesn't run on dreams and unicorn farts, suburb kid.

>they don't need to

I don't know how to break this to you, but not everyone is capable of being an outstanding engineer or scientist in peak physical health. When something goes wrong in LEO Jack Shithead can't submit a support ticket to have someone come fix the problem.

>they don't have to fly NASA astronauts
So you think they'll just cancel the 2.5 billion commercial crew contract?

God; you're a moron.

You are an idiot. As a private company they are even more vulnerable to stuff like that.

Any monkey can push buttons and with today's tech (1960s tech) everything can be automated.

Shows what you know. Companies literally murder people legitly and get away with it scott free. It happens every single year. Some random accident involving 3 people isn't going to do jack shit to SpaceX as a company. That is just how the world works, kids.

>I'm not stupid, everyone else is!

>outstanding engineer or scientist in peak physical health

They are not stupid, they are just sheltered and naive. They are good people who think that companies are also good and that good things happen to good people who do good. That is utterly untrue.

>When something goes wrong in LEO Jack Shithead can't submit a support ticket to have someone come fix the problem.

You mean just like how pilots of airliners can't get out and fix the engines in mid flight before crashing?

>That is just how the world works, kids.
THE EDGE

The truth isn't edgy. It is just the truth, kid.

You know, calling other people "kids" isn't really making you anything more than some undergrad.

Sure thing, kid. Sorry you get easily triggered.

listverse.com/2013/02/21/10-evil-corporations-you-buy-from-everyday/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott

Killing people is legal in the USA. Everyone there does it. Everyone has guns. Companies are allowed to kill their employees and their customers. The USA government kills people regularly for nothing more than making money.

sott.net/article/273517-Study-US-regime-has-killed-20-30-million-people-since-World-War-Two

>Posts animals that were briefly sent into space to make sure it was safe for outstanding engineers and scientists

Literally proving the point

>The costs of spaceflight and the capabilities of astronauts are comparable to commercial air travel

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy

Space flight should be done by robots, not humans. It is already as automated as grant chasers will allow. They only allow humans on board to stake a claim for PR. That is the truth of it. Musk is a fool.

Why do people care when airliners crash, then?

They don't. Only the families of the victims care. Everything else is just media sensationalism for entertainment.

>The costs of spaceflight and the capabilities of astronauts are comparable to commercial air travel

They are.

Well, they might be. But that has consequences. Increasing speed increases cost. Concorde doubled the speed, but the tickets were ten times as much as for normal airliners. Extrapolate that and achieving orbital velocity should cost about 64.000 times as much as an airline ticket. Could be true.

Actually JWST's launch isn't even included in the 8 billion figure, that's NASA money only. ESA is supplying launch services.