We expected this yesterday, but here it is:
Following an Independent Review Board report on the James Webb Space Telescope project, NASA has announced a further delay to the telescope’s anticipated launch. Coming just three months after a year-long delay to 2020, NASA now says the telescope will not be ready to launch until 2021 at the earliest and that the project will breach its $8.8 billion USD cost cap.
The cited mismanagement at NG and NASA is just staggering. The new overrun is about the amount that it was supposed to cost, in total, originally. What a programmatic disaster.
I hereby rename JWST the Jeebus Wept Sunkcost Trap
— SafeNotAnOption (@SafeNotAnOption) June 27, 2018
[Update after noon]
Here’s the story from Jeff Foust.
[Update a while later]
This can never be allowed to happen again…. The good news is that it does not have to. On Orbit Assembly transcends the limitations around building a big telescope on the ground, shaking the hell out of it for 10 minutes, then deploying it autonomously without fail. https://t.co/lPmq4UgdVi
— Dennis Wingo (@wingod) June 27, 2018
[Thursday-morning update]
Here‘s Marina Koren’s take:
A wiring error caused workers to apply too much voltage to the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, severely damaging them. And during an acoustics test, which examines whether hardware can survive the loud sounds of launch, the fasteners designed to hold the sun shield together came loose. The incident scattered 70 bolts, and engineers scrambled to find them. They’re still looking for a few. “We’re really close to finding every one of the pieces,” Zerbuchen said.
These three errors alone resulted in a schedule delay of about 1.5 years and $600 million, Young said.
I think that’s about Northrop Grumman’s annual net income. If I were NASA, I’d tell them that if they ever want another NASA contract, they’ll eat it themselves.
[Update a while later]
Alex Witze has more, over at Nature.
Just Wait for a SpaceX Telescope
No need to wait. One more delay and SpaceX can deploy this one, bringing up a few dozen engineers to deploy it in the cargo bay of a BFS and making sure it works before tossing it out that hatch. If it doesn’t work? Pack it up and bring it back down.
Ugh. This boondoggle keeps getting worse.
One thing I’d like to see come out of all this (and other NASA screw-ups) is a moratorium on all future NASA missions and projects until the systemic problems that cause messes like this are fixed.
You’ll need to commission a study for that. The cost-plus estimate for that study is $500 million +/- $250 million, assuming FY’20 or later.
FY20 seems optimistic to me.
I think he means FY20xx 😉
It looks like NASA is moving away from this form of contracting and development and embracing a COTS like approach. That is the only way to fix the problem in the long term.
Also, you heard anything about Ken Anthony?
Nary a word. Not a good sign. I remember another Usenet friend who suddenly stopped posting and if it weren’t for the fact that I knew both his real name and where he lived and that it was a small enough town that the local paper’s obituary section was comprehensive, I’d never have known. Never got to meet him in person and that’s a damned shame.
I checked the Arizona obituaries; there’s a search function that checks all the Arizona papers going back six months. No mention of his name.
That graph is stunning. From half a billion to ten billion? Holy Crap!
That’s something to throw back in the faces of those who smugly proclaim the superior cost efficiency of unmanned space exploration!
Bad management and bad political leadership is the true cause of boondoggles like the JWST or the SLS, not unmanned vs manned.
I wonder, for a large infrared space telescope, would one of the permanently shadowed craters of the Moon be a good location?
If we are going to go to such a place anyway in search of lunar ice, why not put a telescope there too?
The permanently shadowed craters on the Moon are at the poles; you could only ever see half the sky. And for infrared work, shielded from the sun isn’t really good enough; it needs to be shielded from Earth as well. And it couldn’t just be “put JWST on the Moon”. 0.16g is not 0g, which probably means the whole supporting superstructure would need to be redesigned from scratch.
Eventually, quite likely. But as a timely substitute for JWST, no.
Uh, won’t a lunar crater which is never exposed to sunlight also never be exposed to earthlight?
Also, isn’t the use of “timely” and JWST in the same sentence, very amusing?
Earth is four times the angular size of the sun, as seen from the moon. So if the sun is just skimming under the crater’s edge, part of Earth will stick over it. Also, Earth and the sun move in slightly different planes (i.e. there aren’t eclipses every month). So maybe so, maybe no.
As for “timely”, I would bet that JWST will either fly or be cancelled before any telescopes get set up at the lunar poles. So for some values of “timely” …
I reckon Earthlight would never be a factor, except possibly during the Summer. And even then sunlight reflecting off of the lunar surface, such as the crater rim, would be a larger problem than any Earthlight ever would.
“0.16g is not 0g, which probably means the whole supporting superstructure would need to be redesigned from scratch.”
Why, the whole thing is ‘tested’ at 1g? So I think it can handle 0.16g?
On orbit assembly of spacecraft versus shaking them for 10 minutes during launch? What a revolutionary concept! But…wait…I think I’ve heard of it before…
I’d like to see a plot like Wingo’s for SLS.
For SLS if you wanted to see anything non-asymptotic you’d need a log/log scale.
Ask for a bid from SpaceX to convert a Dragon Capsule to do the job using COST hardware…? Just joking, well, halfway joking.
I wish I shared the optimism that this will never happen again. From my perspective, this is standard operating procedure, NASA is simply a work program for engineers, no one will be punished, and Congress has no motivation to stop spreading my taxes around. NASA is the utter perfection of the concept of intentions trumping results, and leadership intimately knows that there will never be repercussions for delays and insane cost overruns. That is my opinion from the sidelines
“during an acoustics test, which examines whether hardware can survive the loud sounds of launch, the fasteners designed to hold the sun shield together came loose. The incident scattered 70 bolts, and engineers scrambled to find them.”
Well, it sounds like those fasteners could not, in fact, withstand the sounds of launch. That’s a handy piece of information to have, *before* launch. This is the purpose of testing. Nonetheless, the fasteners were clearly just badly designed from the get go.
I wonder if this kind of mismanagement accounts for the problems that SLS has been having? Quite aside from the argument about whether SLS ever should have been, or should now be built, and I think that, ten years ago, when Obama wanted to have a pretend space program with no launcher to support it, and no one could reasonably foresee the remarkable that would be made by SpaceX, it made sense, there just seems no way that, working from existing technology and infrastructure, it should have taken this long and cost this much. Something has to be seriously wrong with program management. It could be as high as the congressional level, but it has to be a management problem.