Posted on 07/02/2021 6:21:47 AM PDT by zeestephen
Development began in 1996 for a launch that was initially planned for 2007 and a 500-million-dollar budget. It has now spent 10 billion. There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine but so far this has been a perpetual non motion endless delay money sucking machine.
And what if ... the rocket fails ...
My understanding is the Hubble Space Telescope is broken.
So maybe they can up the launch date of the Webb Space Telescope to sooner than October.
JWST will be positioned at the "L2 Lagrange Point," which is not stable. A satellite positioned at L2 needs to undertake "station keeping," which requires the expenditure of fuel. JWST will carry enough fuel for a 10-year mission lifetime. After that, it will drift away from L2, either toward Earth or away from it.
The "upside" of the L2 orbit location is that Earth is always between JWST and the sun, thereby acting as a sun-shield for the telescope; this in turn allows JWST to operate at an extremely cold temperature, which will give it incredible sensitivity and the ability to see far back in time, close to the time of the creation of the universe.
Turn the project over to Elon Musk. The telescope would be in orbit soon after.
My understanding is the Hubble Space Telescope is broken.
their Intel 486 cpu may have packed it in
or the power supply
NASA forgot to uncheck the “Automatically Accept all Windows Updates” checkbox.
Hubble was a star and galaxy hunter. JWST will be mostly a planet hunter.
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