I remember when this telescope was first launched and deployed, and how its initial lackluster performance was a great source of mockery and derision of "government overspending for nothing" and a general disdain for space-based science. Since then, it has absolutely revolutionized our understanding of the universe and provided untold inspiration for millions (The famous Deep Field image being the prime example). It is a crowning achievement for NASA and should be used as an example any time some elected official questions the spending on research instruments like this.
My grandfather worked on the Hubble's mirror - the part with all the controversy. It was, simultaneously, both what he was most proud of and most ashamed.
One thing he would point out, that I never see discussed, was that at the time they built the mirror, there was an expectation that it may not be perfect, on account of how the Earth's gravity would slightly deform the mirror during manufacturing. As he tells the story, they'd tried to factor that into the design, but had less confidence in it. This, of course, was not the reason for the eventual problems, but to illustrate that this kind of thing was understood.
The big picture of the failure relates to the Shuttle program as well. At the time Hubble was being developed, its mission was supposed to allow for a lot more around the "shuttle" aspect: not just that it could be reused, but that it could be reused in an actual shuttling capacity, like an orbital pickup truck. So it was supposed to be possible to bring the telescope up into orbit (away from gravitational stresses), see how it worked, and if necessary, bring it back down for corrections. Since the end result of the Shuttle design cut down significantly in its capabilities in this regard, the Hubble program was left without its "Plan B".
It still amazes me that one, the mirrors are sensitive enough to the deformation of Earth's gravity to have an effect and two, that we are now very good at compensating for this now.
Also consider that the mirrors on James Webb space telescope need to account for both deformation from gravity when they are manufactured but also that they are manufactured at room temperature and will be operated at cryo temperatures. But JWST is also special since they have actuators to put stress on the mirror segments to be able to reshape them slightly on-orbit to focus.
My same grandpa that worked on the Hubble mirror also worked on anti-ICBM lasers back in the 70s. Apparently these devices had a tendency to melt their own mirrors, and that led to the development on self-deforming mirrors to deflect heat from hotspots.
(He also worked on the TEAL AMBER and TEAL BLUE satellite surveillance systems, and probably others that he never even talked about.)
Is there a good book I can read about all of this cold-war era tech? I find it endlessly fascinating the number of programs and technology advancements that happened during this period.
You may (or may not :-) find it surprising that there is a vibrant ecosystem of research and development on both defensive and offensive systems on going to this day. The IEEE used to give a talk about "Black Silicon Valley" which was not about people of color and their contributions (although that would be an awesome talk too) but about the origins of the technology focus in Silicon Valley with regard to radio and RADAR development starting in WW2 and continuing on to this day. When I first moved to Sunnyvale my neighbor worked at Lockheed and all he could tell me was that he worked with electricity :-). He said he hoped that some of the stuff he had worked on was disclosed in the future so that he could tell is kids and/or grand kids about it.
Having gone to school in LA where, at the time, ALL of the EE jobs were in the Defense sector, I specifically moved up to the Bay Area to work on cool stuff I could actually talk about with others[1].
One thing of note is that ageism is MUCH less of an issue in jobs that require security clearances. So a number of engineers who are suddenly perceived as "too old" to contribute to the latest hot startup find themselves recruited by the Raytheons and General Dynamics type companies that recognize their skills are valuable.
[1] As an new college grad [NCG] I was not yet aware of the myriad ways in which employers would use non-disclosure agreements to thwart such conversations.
>the origins of the technology focus in Silicon Valley
it's sad to me that most SV focus now is about how to sell more stuff to people whether that's through direct advertising or creating "social" platforms where people get to "influence" you into buying something or paying for something
I don't have a good book to recommend offhand, but wandering a bit offotpic here, I know someone who worked on a military orbital program in the late '70 that was transmitting data from orbit at 800MB/s.
Some congressmen had not heard of this technology and were working to fund a completely different (iirc, civilian) program intending to develop essentially the same capabilities. They had to go give a few TS briefings to the congressmen to dissuade them from writing the redundant funding into the next defense spending bill.
Not a book, and not Cold War, but I think this talk does a good job outlining just how much of the silicon revolution came directly from WW2 military research. It also does a decent job of explaining how technologically advanced the aerial part of that war really was.
There's a book called "Skunk Works" by Ben Rich about the making of different spy planes. There's some mentions in the book about satellites and what existed at the time how projects were carried out.
Check out the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos if you live near Silicon Valley. It has some amazing military tech from the 50s and 60s. Some of the aircraft have to be seen to be believed.
Hey I saw self deforming mirrors as a missile defense intern circa 15 years ago! I thought they were dang cool at the time myself.
I recall (for these designs) self deformation being used to help with tracking and compensate for, ya know, the shock of a little steering boost motors lighting off and such, in some cases.
> It still amazes me that one, the mirrors are sensitive enough to the deformation of Earth's gravity to have an effect and two, that we are now very good at compensating for this now.
I make telescope mirrors.
This problem was well understood since the time of Herschel. We just have better solutions now.
The fact that this is a space scope is irrelevant to the fact that gravity will cause issues. For any telescope, you have to account for differences in the way the mirror is deformed in manufacturing vs in actual usage, and the ways the deformation will change in usage as the scope is leaning at different angles. That is always a thing.
What is particular to the Hubble is that the load in usage is zero (which is unusual), so you have to think about it that way in manufacture. But deformations in manufacture are always an issue you have to account for somehow.
Look at it this way: there is an ideal shape that the mirror needs to have, usually a revolution surface of some conic section (parabola, hyperbola, ellipse, circle). The performance of the mirror will track the difference between the ideal surface and the actual mirror. The error allowance depends on the wavelength λ of the observed radiation.
Telescopes where the error is greater than λ/4 just suck, and are unusable. Good performance begins around λ/8. A great mirror may do better than λ/20.
For visible light, λ/4 is 100 nm, or 0.1 microns. That's 10 thousand times less than 1 mm. On that scale, the mirror is made of jelly. If you put it on a rough surface, it will deform. If you put your thumb on it, hold it for a minute so it heats up from your skin, then pull away, there will be a "mountain" left behind on the mirror, under your thumb, until it cools off again.
In many cases, the support structures for large mirrors are complex mechanisms that ensure the force is uniformly distributed across a large number of points on the back of the mirror. Even amateur telescopes built using the Dobsonian template use passive self-balancing support with 3, 6, 9, 18, or even more points, depending on the size / thickness ratio.
The phenomena are pretty intricate. E.g. in the initial stages, grinding the mirror is a physical process: you use some very hard material to carve the glass into the desired shape.
But when it gets to polishing (smoothing the surface to optical perfection), it's far more complex. The granules of the agent are microscopic, and the process is in that grey area between physics and chemistry. You end up slicing off only a few layers of molecules at each pass.
It goes on and on like this. It's very addictive if you like Physics. :)
It might be possible to handle the size aspect of such multiscale storytelling.[1] Perhaps even down through primary school.
And given a firm grasp of size, and of atoms, it might perhaps be possible to support an integrated and broad modern material science foundation. Maybe... but I'm not being very successful at finding opportunities for exploratory discussion of that. :/
To be fair, Kodak made a sister mirror that wasn't chosen to go up, and when the issue on Hubble was found out, Kodak's mirror was found to be perfect.
It's fun to think that there is a bullet list of directions that would take me from where I'm typing this comment to standing in front of that exact mirror.
I worked in the Commercial and Govt Systems group at Kodak in the mid 90s and took a class on image compression from two guys who were part of the team that figured out how to mathematically correct the early, flawed Hubble images. Was really cool!
> My grandfather worked on the Hubble's mirror - the part with all the controversy. It was, simultaneously, both what he was most proud of and most ashamed.
I think a simple way to explain what your grandfather should feel proud of, is they documented the construction process so thoroughly that they were able to _precisely_ figure out what they did wrong, and fix it, on their first try!
The mirror was precisely polished "to spec" with custom-built equipment that was assembled incorrectly. They correctly saw the distortion issue on the ground with the conventional kit, but rejected the result as erroneous because it tested fine with the "better" testing equipment.
In the end it turned out that for the life of the shuttle program, each launch ended up costing between 700 million and 1.2 billion, so the 1970s goal of an economically reusable spacecraft was definitely not achieved.
A device for measuring the final grinding had been miscalibrated (by a known, constant amount). The result was a spherical aberration, of a kind that is familiar to a lot of users of cheaper lenses and mirrors but on a much smaller scale.
I wonder how often retired NASA engineers are consulted. Imagine as an Engineer having to troubleshoot something which launched into space before you were born.
Of course there must be perfect documentation, SOP along with replicas on land.
So I worked on a contract for STScI (the peeps who wrote all the Hubble software). The turnover there is insanely low. As of a few years ago, almost ALL the people I worked with had been there since the initial launch of the Hubble. Anyway, as you walk around the cubes in their offices, many had copies of the political cartoons from the time which mocked the Hubble as a total failure. They are all mission focused, took the initial failure very, very seriously.
I sometimes eat lunch with friends at the STScl. When they were in the middle of the fix, I'm told that some of the engineers stayed up all night at the office. Not because there was anything to do. Just because they wanted to see what would happen and the Internet wasn't so pervasive back then. They couldn't log in remotely and do much.
That's why you always have an independent backup system. One that uses different software, developed by a different team, using different languages, and different algorithms.
I thought one of the Viking landers was lost when a software update pointed the big antenna at Mars rather than at Earth... hard to send software updates after that.
They all really, really believe in the mission. Many are well into their 60s and are waiting for JWST to launch to finally retire. It was supposed to launch YEARS ago, so they are (as a group) getting antsy.
The project I worked one was migrating data from their in house ticket tracking system to Jira. I was importing tickets from 1985 into Jira which obviously didn't exist at that time.
I guess it IS very different to believe, for decades, in a mission that includes space telescopes than in the latest SaaS or productivity app or something more "mundane". Not that there's anything bad working on those kind of projects, but it sure has a different scope (no pun intended)
I just wanted to let you know that "mundane" is an excellent pun when talking about space projects, because it means "of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one". The original word is "mundus", meaning "world" - "monde" in French today.
Not everybody is looking for that resume padding type of job where they bounce from job to job trying not to look stale. In the past, it used to look bad having such short stints on a your resume as it meant you weren't the most stable employee. Now, it's the opposite and your resume has to look like it has ADHD with any stint lasting longer than 18 months being a negative. (maybe a bit hyperbolic).
On a less sarcastic vein, some people find a job that they really like and enjoy. The pay may not be as much as somewhere else, but a satisfying job that is stable and provides for ones needs seems to be a concept lost in the tech (silicon valley) world. It's all about rocketships to the moon type of salary wants. If I found a gig like that sending manmade thing to another planet/moon that ultimately advanced human understanding, I'd definitely be willing to retire in that role. In today's world, there are plenty of other side hustles to help offset income needs. I'm a survey of 1 though.
> Now, it's the opposite and your resume has to look like it has ADHD with any stint lasting longer than 18 months being a negative. (maybe a bit hyperbolic).
As someone who hires people, lots of 18 month stints would certainly turn me off the candidate.
I mean at the age of 60… it’s gonna be hard to top a career that had you writing code sent to space.
That being said, I imagine it would be very hard to be a junior employee in such an environment. Fresh and green behind the ears, full of ideas and surrounded by people almost ready to retire and pretty set in their ways.
Who knows. Maybe these folks make an effort to stay current with progress in development tools and whatnot. But it is easy to imagine them being very stuck in their ways. Some for good reason but some because “that’s how we’ve always done it”.
I’d love to be told I was wrong and all their shop did a good job staying on top of industry wide progress.
> That being said, I imagine it would be very hard to be a junior employee in such an environment.
My father was a senior admin in the vendor that made the mirror, so I had summer jobs working on Hubble-adjacent projects. One summer my cubicle was next to the cubicle of a new engineer who worked on it.
They ground the mirror in one facility and then trucked it to another one, many miles away, for silvering. This new engineer was tasked with drawing up the protocol for loading it on the truck (it was driven down in the early morning on a Sunday to reduce problems with traffic).
He finishes the document draft and calls down the senior engineer for a look-over. They are discussing the part where the cranes (kind-of like fork lifts) lift the mirror. There are three cranes, and three places built into the mirror where they hook on.
"How do you know the cranes will take the load?"
"Here are the manufacturer's specifications, saying that each will take more than half the total weight. There are three cranes, so there is sufficient capacity even if one crane fails."
"How do you know the crane will take the specified weight?"
"They were vendor certified last week; I was there."
"That's not enough. The night before, you and another engineer will personally go down there and personally load the specified weight on each crane. Then you will each sign a paper. The mirror will not move without that paper, containing both your personal names."
In space projects there's no space for human error.
Reminds me of that one SpaceX mission failure, with F9 exploding shortly after launch. IIRC, it was quickly determined that the cause was a strut from a third-party vendor that wasn't up to declared spec.
They are all considered to be in academia I think so you can put them in that bucket. My impression they all did OK in the compensation department however I'm sure they all could make much more in the private sector. EVERYONE I worked with on that project was a high performing / expert level.
Software vendors like Oracle and SAP do everything in their power to lock you into their services while doing the absolute minimum to fulfill any contract.
It took our IT over 4 years to migrate away from Siebel to Salesforce and it's going on 3 years since. I just learned the other day we still have a Siebel DB lingering around as a dirty little secret.
We move away from Lotus Notes over 10 years ago and we still have some Notes Apps used by our Legal Department.
With what's left of your budget, which is now very, very negative. Better to redefine abject failure as success to minimize the chances of it ending your career if you're involved in firm purchasing in any way. It's not like boards of directors have a clue. The big consulting firms will assist pulling the wool and priming the press so they can move onto the next mark. It's impossible to by cynical enough.
My dad was on an Air Force Base when the base commander delegated to his wife picking out all the furniture for the base housing. Naturally, every serviceman's wife hated it.
you'd be surprised. At a former job (in IT in academia)...
me: I think we can build something in-house here better than what the vendor will provide, I think the vendor's solution is likely to be a failure for us.
them: Yeah, but if do it in-house and it fails, it's our fault. If the vendor's solution fails, it's their fault -- plenty of very prestigious universities are using this vendor, nobody's going to blame us for choosing them. [Ie, "nobody got fired for picking IBM" basically].
Keep in mind its an orbiting Infrared Observatory so not an alternative to Hubble. Of course it will be an amazing scientific instrument and we should hope that nothing happens during launch.
If the rocket explodes on the launch pad, it will be a bad day.
At the same time, it shouldn't take twenty years to build a space telescope, especially since it's not like it's the first one ever. The first atomic bomb was built in 4 years.
It's not the first space-based observatory, but it's still a _wholly novel_ device, containing instrumentation designed by scientists and engineers in concert to leverage every piece of bleeding edge technology available at the time, and some throughout the process. Everyone of the flagship observatories is moon shot. It's not a mass-produced helicopter or missile. This project in particular is easily one of the wildest feats of science and engineering _ever_ just like Hubble, Cern, and LIGO.
Regarding the bomb, we were trying to end a global conflict, so the comparison couldn't be further off base.
The worst case considered at the time was an uncontrolled chain-reaction annihilating the planet. It was calculated to be impossible, but it still weighed on the minds of many scientists involved, even well into the hydrogen bomb era.
With the mindset at the time, the worst case scenario for the atomic bomb would have been it not going off in anyway way, and then they just handed their greatest enemy dud version if a top secret weapon.
Since it likely would have just blown up (fizzle) even if it didn’t fully detonate that is a pretty remote possibility.
Second worst would be it went off on a base somewhere and nuked a US base. Considering the location of these bases and the nature of the war at that point, it would have been a footnote causality wise, but embarrassing.
It is a completely novel design for a space telescope though. On top of that there's no capability [0] to go patch up a sloppy job like we did with Hubble.
[0] Currently at least. Starship could I guess but it was planned way ahead of Starship even being a glimmer in Musk's eye. Do they have any grapple points on it as insurance? I would at this point, just put one of the posts they use on the ISS for Canada Arm to grapple.
Yeah, there is a docking ring as a "maybe we can design something to use this in the future". Since JWST is going out to a Lagrange point it would definitely be robotic servicing at this point unless our human spaceflight capabilities expand very significantly.
The Nancy Grace Roman (formerly WFIRST) space telescope also has grappling points for robotic servicing so it is something that is being considered in designs for programs of record.
And that is the problem with 20 year (30 year?) product lifecycles. A lot can change in 20 years. For example the ability to service it might now be feasible. But since it’s almost entirely built, good luck making it serviceable!
That is not a good comparison. The SF Bay Bridge replacement project was conducted as a competition. The design that won was so much more complicated than all the other entries that at first it was not clear that it could be built and in fact the finished product is flawed with cracks and other failures. There is nothing particularly complex about the basic problem and the simple viaduct design that was advocated by the Governor at the time was expected to involve an order of magnitude less cost and time of construction but was rejected for being too simple and not beautiful enough. This management structure and these considerations have not been used for any space missions.
Well, there were the Egyptian Pyramids, Great Wall of China, Roman Aqueducts and a whole bunch of Great Projects in the past and I certainly hope there will be lots more in our future.
As far as I know, the pyramids were each constructed for a single pharaoh, and during their single lifetime. I don't know about all of them, but that's at least true of Great Pyramid of Giza.
If the Starship program succeeds in reaching the moon in the next few years then I think that is comparable to Apollo. Ofc it is easier to do things the second time than the first but safety standards are higher and this time it will have been done at an enormously reduced price.
One reason JWT has taken so long and is so expensive is that launch costs used to be "astronomical".
In the SpaceX era of reusable rockets, those costs become 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller, and I expect a flurry of simpler space telescopes in the nearish future.
That's the theory. Does anyone know if such things are being worked on?
Not to my knowledge. Actually, it was said that lack of smaller space projects was catalyst for creation of Starlink. They expected tons of launches once launch prices dropped but it never materialized so they decided to become their own biggest client.
> I think other actors can do similar things much cheaper and faster.
Think again. JWST was criticised for being too ambitious and rightly so. It uses technology that was (and in some areas still is) cutting edge.
It baffles me how people always seem to assume that some company can miraculously solve scientific and engineering challenges quicker and cheaper than the teams that are working on it.
JWST was designed with no serviceability in mind, that is, unlike HST it absolutely has to work. Every detail, from the folding mirror, to the sun shield, to the computer systems to the instrumentation. ZERO room for error and no "fail early, fail often"-option here.
Most of the delays have been caused by engineers and scientists wanting to make 100% sure they get it right, because there's no STS servicing for fixing imperfect mirrors or switching out hardware.
We live in an age where companies can and do almost miraculously solve technical problems that the government has failed to do, so it isn't surprising to me.
It wasn't "the government" that built JWST, though, it was companies (and universities).
edit: I'm also getting tired of the "but rockets!"-trope.
It's not a new invention, Saturn V was more powerful, and a rocket is not a space telescope.
Maybe you should look at what was actually done for JWST.
The ignorance is really getting on my nerves. The mirror required a primary mirror segment assembly capable of surviving a rocket launch and still being able to be deployed in space at precision. This technology didn't exist back when JWST was approved and had to be developed from scratch, which was (successfully!) done by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
The prime contractor for the telescope (that includes building flight hardware) is Northrop Grumman, which, last time I checked, is not government owned.
ESA's main contribution is the launch vehicle, built and operated by Arianespace - also a private company. The other contribution from ESA is MIRI, a scientific instrument designed, tested, and built by a consortium also including some private companies like RUAG and EADS.
CSA contributes the Fine Guidance Sensor and the NIRISS instrument, both built by Honeywell, which, again is a private company. [0]
So while a ton of research and design work was done in government run labs, universities and NASA facilities, most of the actual construction was done by private companies.
So I really don't understand what you are trying to imply here. JWST was overambitious and pioneered way too many ground-breaking technologies at once while requiring absolute precision and "getting things right" due to its non-serviceability.
That's why all the delays and cost overruns happened and there was very little (of course not none) management and bureaucracy errors/overhead at fault here. NASA had simply bitten off more than they could chew with this one and there's absolutely no indication that any one company could've done better.
So you seem to have absolutely no clue what the heck you're even on about and what actually went into making of JWST and why it took so long.
If you say so. All I see is something they said would cost $500m and due to government involvement it is now unbelievably expensive. Since this almost always happens with NASA I can only think that it is something about how these projects are funded. Maybe there is more to it than it just being hard.
> All I see is something they said would cost $500m and due to government involvement it is now unbelievably expensive.
Again with the ignorance: I just showed that it's not the government involvement that drove cost. It was because it turned out to be much harder than anticipated.
> Maybe there is more to it than it just being hard.
In this particular case, no there really isn't as annoying as that might be to the anarcho-capitalist/neo-liberal anti-government crowd.
The thing about NASA is that they're open and that includes their successes and failures alike. Delays are commonplace in private industry as well, but failure in particular more often than not results in bankruptcy and thus you never hear about it.
Just ask a venture capitalist how many high-risk tech investments actually turned a profit and within the anticipated timeframe. You only hear about the unicorns that made it or the ones that crashed and burned so brightly it could be seen from orbit. The majority dies like a drowning child - quietly and unnoticed.
I understand your sentiment – I’d expect NASA to have some overhead – but, as you asked, who else is building space telescopes? How do we determine if the cost of a telescope is “too high”? What kind of mission profiles should be targeted?
I am sure someone can build a cheaper space telescope, but for whom and to what end?
There were in fact 4 large observatories, of which Hubble was one. Hubble captures light in the visible wavelegnths, the others captured light in other wavelenghts. Their pictures aren't as pretty so they get less attention. There's also JWST, as mentioned elsewhere.
But again, even though it was "visible" it did not have many pretty pictures because the mission was looking at brightness variations in particular stars (planet transients).
In 2016, NASA began considering four different Flagship space telescopes, they are the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx), Large UV Optical Infrared Surveyor (LUVOIR), Origins Space Telescope (OST), and Lynx X-ray Observatory. (text from wikipedia)
I wonder if spacex will enable a spacex version of satellite makers. Some one really into astronomy wants a telescope on space, they put together a biz plan to sell time, pitch it to investors, and use starship to put in orbit affordably.
Commercial space launches existed before SpaceX. There's even been relatively inexpensive launch vehicles. Despite this you don't see commercial space telescopes. You don't really even see commercial ground based telescopes.
The reason is pretty simple, there's no money to be made. Your potential customers are researchers scraping together grant money. There's no way to make enough to cover the CapEx and OpEx of a space telescope let alone make a profit.
There's no magic SpaceX fairy dust you can sprinkle on a project to change that calculus. The launch cost is a small portion of the total CapEx of a space based instrument.
"The PLATO payload is based on a multi-telescope approach, involving 26 cameras in total: a set of 24 "normal" cameras organised in 4 groups, and a set of 2 "fast" cameras for bright stars. The 24 "normal" cameras work at a readout cadence of 25 seconds and monitor stars fainter than apparent magnitude 8. The two "fast" cameras work at a cadence of 2.5 seconds to observe stars between magnitude 4 to 8. The cameras are refracting telescopes using six lenses; each camera has an 1,100 deg2 field and a 120 mm lens diameter. Each camera is equipped with its own CCD staring array, consisting of four CCDs of 4510 x 4510 pixels.
The 24 "normal cameras" will be arranged in four groups of six cameras with their lines of sight offset by a 9.2° angle from the +ZPLM axis. This particular configuration allows surveying an instantaneous field of view of about 2,250 deg2 per pointing. The space observatory will rotate around the mean line of sight once per year, delivering a continuous survey of the same region of the sky."
One of the original reasons for Hubble was to have a telescope above the atmosphere. The atmosphere distorts the light as it passes through making stars "twinkle."
Now we we use a laser beam to energize sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere. We see how that is distorted by the atmosphere so that with software we can cancel it out.
Combined with lucky imaging where instead of taking a single long exposure we take thousands of images in the 100 millisecond range. We can toss out the images where the atmosphere was moving a lot and combine the other good images.
> Why don't we at least have 4 more Hubbles in orbit?
Kepler, Spitzer, Herschel, WISE and more. I agree that there ought to be more by now but its not like we did not see 'any progress'. Today we know hundreds of earth sized planets in the galaxy. If that's not progress, I feel the telescopes JamesWebb and NancyGraceRose will only disappoint you ;)
The James Web telescope was supposed to launch in 2007 (and should be launching in November), and began development in 1996.
Hubble was launch in 1990, and have 5 servicing missions for repairs and upgrades, with the last one being in 2009.
An exact clone of Hubble is not nearly as useful as the first one, so it is reasonable to put your resources into a novel telescope. Unfourtuantly that telescope hit some scheduling challanges.
> severe underfunding of any scientific institution
NASA is well funded, not underfunded. It receives over three times the funding of ESA by comparison.
Why aren't the Europeans funding their scientific institutions better? Because the combination of soaring entitlement costs and stagnant growth robs them of the necessary tax revenue for that. Which is exactly what's happening in the US, and it's going to get a lot worse yet. The US has a bit less of an excuse, seeing as it could safely cut $200b off of its military. However, that $200b spread around to every squeaky wheel still won't go very far (it's equal to a mere ~2.3% of total government spending), you might be able to fairly boost NASA's budget by $3b per year if you slashed the military. Back in reality, that $200b in cuts should probably be entirely allocated to healthcare, which brings us right back to the central issue of priorities; and the Europeans know that quite well, which is why ESA is poorly funded.
Explaining why the ESA is also underfunded doesn't justify under-funding NASA. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Across all industries the average R&D budget is around 4%. When you look at the US R&D budget it's about 3% of the annual budget with 2% going directly to Military R&D and 0.5% going to defense and other military adjacent R&D. That's not entirely accurate thought because the Military budget for R&D also encompasses Training and Exercises. So only a fraction of that 2% is used for actual R&D.
That missing 1% is 3x Nasa's budget and 1.5 the DOD's.
People underestimate the costs of these kinds of programs, but they also underestimate the benefits. In the end it kind of works out.
(I came across this idea in a Tom DeMarco book called "Why Does Software Cost So Much?": basically people complain about the high costs of developing new software, but then for some reason they keep paying to develop more software.
Even though the initial cost estimates may turn out to be fiction, it's still worth it because the benefits are so big.)
It’s always amusing to me that people carefully don’t mention the thousands of times large private companies “overspend for nothing”. The problem is not government. The problem is large organisations and the complexity of what they are trying to do. Things will go wrong.
People who question these things don't care about space pictures though. They care about return on investment. What does this do for actual working class Americans?
I worked in defense and had a coworker who thinks that NASA should be abolished and the US should cease all spending on space. Thinks it's all a waste of money.
The public doesn't really know. The shuttle did a handful of secret missions that could have involved satellite service.
There is also a sort of mini shuttle that has launched a number of times in the last decade called the X-37B which some have speculated might be used for servicing satellites.
It's definitely an interesting concept! The way you say the shuttle chased down satellites makes me laugh, as if the satellites were trying to escape and were zig zagging around! In reality, every mission to the ISS does the same thing as the shuttle rendezvousing with the Hubble.
It's amazing how much redundancy was built into those out-of-touch systems, 30 years ago.
However, the number of backup units is finite, so let's hope the now-operating system can last for several more decades.
The part that caught my eye was redundancy on memory.
>> Hubble’s operators initially thought a memory module was at fault but switching to one of three backup modules produced the same error.
Apparently Hubble has 4 memory modules which are switchable! I'd love to see how that works. Actually, I'd be fascinated to get a walkthrough of the overall architecture. It might give insights for how we keep business continuity by first accepting that hardware and software will fail.
Classic movie scenario. Hubble's down, and we need it now. No-one can solve the errors. Old guy walks in, worked on Hubble 30 years ago.
"There's a backup module, with an override command to activate it, but it won't work with the system down. You'll have to use the manual override switch - on the telescope."
…or as I try to occasionally discuss here… let’s simply develop the unmanned robotic capability to service Hubble, etc
I found one discussion from 7 years ago
“… I think we should start a more extensive national unmanned space program. For example, if the Hubble, or its replacement, needs to be fixed, we should have an unmanned answer, for instance.”
Huble was never meant for this, if you look at all the systems present on ISS for automated docking, none of that is on Hubble. Access to modules inside Hubble was never meant for robots with very limited dexterity either. Being able to do something like that would be a huge feat of engineering in my opinion (and extremely expensive).
I am fairly certain it would be faster and cheaper to just build a new one from scratch.
And even if you managed to make a robot to service Hubble, it then would only be able to service Hubble and nothing else. JWT for example is completely different.
On the long term you are right that this is a capability we need, but this needs to be taken into consideration while building the telescope/satellite/whatever: automated docking mechanism, standard ports and dimension of parts etc. etc.
I'm pretty sure the pitch here is "a robotic being with human perception, dexterity, and manipulation, but who doesn't breathe air and never gets tired."
So the idea is that you don't need to specialize it to the thing it's meant to work on, because it works on whatever a human works on. A similar idea drove a lot of the DARPA Robotics challenge, with its emphasis on being able to drive a normalish vehicle, open a door, climb a ladder, use a regular power tool, etc.
Anyway, I think the state of the art for all this is still pretty far away, which is why the instinct is to assume we're talking about something specialized.
> I think the state of the art for all this is still pretty far away, which is why the instinct is to assume we're talking about something specialized.
Yes, that's exactly what I thought. If we are talking about AGI + human level robotic dexterity, then the use of "simply" becomes even funnier.
> Access to modules inside Hubble was never meant for robots with very limited dexterity either.
It was also never meant for humans with less limited dexterity.
I recall one of the Hubble servicing missions I watched on NASA TV, in which they had to bolt a special adapter plate over a cover, unscrew over a hundred tiny non-captive screws (which the adapter plate was designed to catch, so they wouldn't float away), and only then could they open that cover. That part of the telescope clearly wasn't designed to be serviced in space.
To be fair, they wasn't expecting Hubble to last beyond the end of the service date. I recalled it was ~10~ 15 years? They have no way of knowing this beforehand.
Edit:saw the comment somewhere that it is 15 years.
I think 'simply' is precisely the wrong adjective.
Plus you'd still need spare parts. Why would I build a robot to swap parts, when I can simply put all of the spare parts into the telescope and swap over to them electronically?
The other thing to remember was that Hubble was designed in an era that the Space Shuttle was meant to make manned missions to repair / upgrade commonplace. My understanding is that this was actually done at least once to Hubble (maybe more? I forget); but unfortunately for Reasons, NASA turned out to be incapable of resisting cutting corners which put people's lives at risk (Challenger, Colombia). A system designed today would be designed assuming that it would be robots or nothing.
I was curious myself, and it turns out there were five missions, starting with the one to compensate for the incorrectly ground mirror. IIRC the final one was in doubt, as there was no possibility of a rescue mission in the event of irreparable damage on launch.
The final servicing mission (STS-125) ended up with a contingency plan for damage on launch, STS-400. Another shuttle was prepped and on the pad for a rescue mission if the primary shuttle was damaged.
But in reality, the ideal system is probably a combination of built-in redundancy / spares for parts that can work that way; and then robots for the kinds of things that are too complicated to have a built-in failover.
Robots don't need air, food, or sanitary facilities.
Launching to space is severely constrained by the mass you can bring up. You can send up multiple robots compared to the mass needed for all the food, life support ect, for a single person.
Or we could build a cheaper telescope that is less redundant more quickly, and launch a new one every 5 years. Launch prices are falling, so this could be more economical than building expensive long-lasting telescopes.
There's several problems with that approach. The first is there's going to be a minimum size for a telescope to be useful as a scientific instrument. For a telescope intending to be in any way a contender for Hubble's mission it would need a primary mirror a meter or more in diameter. Then it needs reaction wheels for precision aiming, RCS, instruments, electronics, and power.
At a minimum you're outside of "smallsat" size range. Even building a lot of them the precision manufacturing of the optics and steering systems require a lot of ground based testing, calibration, and qualification. Between the size and precision even your "cheap" Hubble's aren't all that cheap.
The second problem is terrestrial telescopes have gotten really good and are far cheaper for any given mirror size. Their instrumentation doesn't have nearly the same mass restrictions and can be swapped out routinely.
Space telescopes make sense when their mission requires them to be space based like observing wavelengths that don't reach the surface of Earth.
While we don't have a direct capability to do this now, some of the large programs of record are being built so that robotic servicing may be possible.
JWST has a docking port for a future robotic servicing mission.
Nancy Grace Roman (formerly WFIRST) space telescope has grappling points on the spacecraft for robotic servicing.
starship wouldn't really fit the mission profile of sending 2-3 astronauts to hubble orbit for EVA. The same starship could instead deliver a fleet of replica hubbles to lagrange points autonomously.
I agree in a more general sense: space is a natural domain for robots, not humans, and we should be designing out space flight capability with that in mind. We have some almost 50 year old robots advising us on the heliopause right now.
The general problem of repairing Hubble robotically is unlikely to be solvable within the lifetime of the telescope, but future devices could be designed with that in mind.
NASA doesn't know how to do anything cheaply. They have two space telescopes sitting in a warehouse since 2011 that were donated by the NRO. They're estimating $4 billion to launch and run just one of them, more than a decade after the donation. And you know it'll cost double the estimate and take an extra 5 years.
Why dont they just give others to do their work? Last I remember india sent a probe to Mars for less than amount it took for making the movie Mars featuring Matt Damon ?
agreed but what job creation is a project sitting dead for 5 years? are they giving people salary for not doing anything and then claiming too much costs or something else?
Just to clarify: Hubble was not an NRO donation, although it bears some similarity to the KH-11, an NRO satellite from the 70s. It is not confirmed whether the two actually share parts, as the KH-11 is still classified.
The NRO did donate two unlaunched telescopes to NASA in 2012 (with optics present but sans electronics), which still have not yet been retrofitted and launched.
I was 9 years old when Hubble was launched, today I am 40 years old, so it has been around for all of my adult life and then some.
Also, it has provided lots and lots and lots of beautiful pictures that are stunning to look at even for people who otherwise do not care about astronomy at all. I think it's fair to say that no other project/mission/device since the Moon landing had a bigger impact in making astronomy "cool". The Hubble Deep Field pictures alone are breath-taking, and they may very well have had as much of an impact on our current model of the universe as Hubble's original discovery of an expanding universe, at least from the perspective of a non-scientist.
As far as I can recall, Hubble was supposed to go down in flames quite a few years ago, but it just kept working, and no equivalent replacement was available. James Webb Space Telescope is not exactly a replacement, as it is an infrared telescope. It will be quite interesting to see how long they can keep Hubble working. It had a rough start, but the fact that after some initial corrections, it has lasted way longer than it was supposed to speaks of the quality of engineering that created it.
I don't recall the launch as such, but in my memory, it was pretty popular throughout the 1990s. I don't have any first hand memories of the broken optics and the mission to put "glasses" on it, so I think it must have taken a while to become a household name, at least in Europe.
Once the optics were corrected, though, it became very big. I once heard an astronomer say that there is pretty much no field in astronomy that did not benefit in some way from Hubble. And for lay people like me, lots of stunning pictures. :)
Hubble or the "Space Telescope" was one of the Space Shuttle's major proposed missions and a major project at NASA in the 80s. Any books or magazine articles about the Shuttle often mentioned the then unnamed Space Telescope. As mentioned in other replies it was originally lambasted after launch for its flawed optics. The first servicing mission which fixed those problems got a lot of press attention, far more than its launch.
Hubble "sees" different wavelengths than JWT, also, both are overbooked. So we really want Hubble as long as possible, no matter how the JWT launch goes.
Yes, it really matters. It might not matter from the perspective of just making cool looking images, because you can do that in any wavelength. But for science, the wavelengths matter a lot, and you can learn different things at different wavelengths.
Oh no no, i was just worried that JWT would actually not be able to do a deep field 2.0. im very curious on potentially higher details on this and mentioning that JWT and Hubble use different wavelength (or JWT might be able to do more?) would have meant that JWT wouldn't be able to do the same as Hubble in regards of a deep field.
There is great interest in using both instruments to observe the same target simultaneously, for example, a new supernova. It would be a real loss not to have Hubble available for such observations after JWST launches later this year.
“ NASA announced that they had identified the Power Control Unit (PCU), which is part of the SI C&DH, as the source of the problem”
So they had a spare PCU that they switched to. Hubble was launched in 1990. Is 30+ years normal for a continuously operating PCU? What is the expected lifespan of the “new” PCU that has been sitting this whole time?
The designed life expectancy of Hubble as a whole (and thus, by extension the minimal designed life expectancy of all components) was 15 years. It's now been operating for 30 years, doubling its design lifetime and intent to be replaced.
NASA's hardware is deployed in anything but normal circumstances, so normal for them vs normal for the consumer are vastly different things.
Given the longevity and how well engineered things are for their other projects, I'd have to say yeah it seems pretty "normal" to me.
It seems like they overengineer and quality control to the point of doubling planned mission length, if not longer. My cynical take on it is they do it this way because of the nature of their funding rather than any specific engineering goal.
Part of the source of the discrepancy is the planned mission is basically just what they get initial funding for not everything they would like to do and the entire mission length they'd like to use. Because launch costs are such a big part of the costs of ever replacing a Hubble or a Curiosity it makes sense for them to last longer than they're funded for because most likely they'll continue to get some funding a long as there's good science and the equipment is still usable. Also the cost of failure is pretty high, if you have something break early there's not another rover/satellite program there to replace it the science just doesn't get done until the next program in 10 years gets sent unless someone else was sending a similar device to that destination.
Anyone claiming to have a real answer to that would be torn to pieces by Richard Feynman. I think you'll need to be satisfied with best guesses and a metaphysical "as long as it lasts".
I find the constant use of the term "glitch" in the title and the lack of actual details of what happened extremely infuriating.
Here's some actual details:
The problem:
> NASA has identified the possible cause of the payload computer problem that suspended Hubble Space Telescope science operations on June 13. The telescope itself and science instruments remain healthy and in a safe configuration.
The payload computer resides in the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit. It controls, coordinates, and monitors Hubble’s science instruments. When the payload computer halted, Hubble’s science instruments were automatically placed into a safe configuration. A series of multi-day tests, which included attempts to restart and reconfigure the computer and the backup computer, were not successful, but the information gathered from those activities has led the Hubble team to determine that the possible cause of the problem is in the Power Control Unit (PCU).
The PCU also resides on the SI C&DH unit. It ensures a steady voltage supply to the payload computer’s hardware. The PCU contains a power regulator that provides a constant five volts of electricity to the payload computer and its memory. A secondary protection circuit senses the voltage levels leaving the power regulator. If the voltage falls below or exceeds allowable levels, this secondary circuit tells the payload computer that it should cease operations. The team’s analysis suggests that either the voltage level from the regulator is outside of acceptable levels (thereby tripping the secondary protection circuit), or the secondary protection circuit has degraded over time and is stuck in this inhibit state.
Because no ground commands were able to reset the PCU, the Hubble team will be switching over to the backup side of the SI C&DH unit that contains the backup PCU. All testing of procedures for the switch and associated reviews have been completed, and NASA management has given approval to proceed. The switch will begin Thursday, July 15, and, if successful, it will take several days to completely return the observatory to normal science operations.
The team performed a similar switch in 2008, which allowed Hubble to continue normal science operations after a Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) module, another part of the SI C&DH, failed. A servicing mission in 2009 then replaced the entire SI C&DH unit, including the faulty CU/SDF module, with the SI C&DH unit currently in use.
Launched in 1990, Hubble has been observing the universe for over 31 years. It has taken over 1.5 million observations of the universe, and over 18,000 scientific papers have been published with its data. It has contributed to some of the most significant discoveries of our cosmos, including the accelerating expansion of the universe, the evolution of galaxies over time, and the first atmospheric studies of planets beyond our solar system. Read more about some of Hubble’s greatest scientific discoveries.
And the fix:
> The switch included bringing online the backup Power Control Unit (PCU) and the backup Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) on the other side of the Science Instrument and Command & Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit. The PCU distributes power to the SI C&DH components, and the CU/SDF sends and formats commands and data. In addition, other pieces of hardware onboard Hubble were switched to their alternate interfaces to connect to this backup side of the SI C&DH. Once these steps were completed, the backup payload computer on this same unit was turned on and loaded with flight software and brought up to normal operations mode.
Thanks for the link! Didn't know about the background of it. I sort of suspect this though, it seemed to me that journalists who use a term like glitch are basically glancing over the details that they either can't or don't want to try to understand, which is a failure in both cases imo. I mean I somewhat accept it from a random TV presenter, but it's truly sad to see this from so called "technology" journalists, or even "Science’s senior correspondent in the United Kingdom, covering astronomy, physics, and energy stories as well as European policy."
As amazing as Hubble is, it's worth remembering that other agencies built several more devices of the same or better resolving capability, and the NRO donated two spares to NASA almost a decade ago [1][2]. Not sure what's happened with those devices since then.
"Why build one when you can have three, at thrice the price?"
Finally, for fans of Weird Al Yankovic's White & Nerdy, an excuse to reference Norm Sherman's Pimp My Satellite, which is all about the Hubble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMXk5Y7Gv6Y
> The PCU supplies a steady voltage supply to the payload computer and either it was supplying voltage outside the normal range or the sensor that detects the voltage was giving an erroneous reading.
It's too bad you couldn't just leave a space shuttle in orbit, and then fly to it to use its arm when needed. Or build something like a repair "truck" that once launched, never comes back. You just load it with fuel and whatever you need, and drive it to where it's needed.
Buran system had designs for that - one of the components was a nuclear-powered space tug that could shift satellites around, reducing launcher limitations. Design planned for endurance of 100 "LEO->GEO" satellite moves.
Hypothetical Hubble with support for such operation would have docking port for the space tug, which could bring it back to orbit that could be taken by service vessel, then bring it back to proper orbit.
The Space Shuttle was powered by fuel cells rather than solar panels. It could only operate in space as long as it had oxygen and hydrogen available. So there was never an option to "leave one in space" as it could only last a couple weeks at best.
There was a "space tug" concept out of MSFC in the 70s that was basically a capsule with some robot arms mounted on a service module. It would have acted as a repair truck as you say.
It would have also been limited by consumables. Refueling in orbit is a non-trivial problem to solve. As is maintaining an orbital fuel depot. A tug and depot would only be able to service satellites in compatible orbits. So you might need to maintain dozens in orbit to service different orbital planes and altitudes.
I hope that as we move more and more to commercial space development, we will continue to do the kinds of over-engineering and redundancy that make recovery efforts like this even possible, but fear that the mindset will shift: out of warranty, abandon it, we will sell you a new one.
It depends whether you're speaking British English or American English from my understanding. "New lease on life" is American English. I've never heard the "new lease of life" variant before but it's apparently used in the UK.
I wonder why they deploy the Webb telescope near the ISS until its working, then send it to L2. It will never be repairable like the Hubble. The Webb should be launched by November, but I am not holding my breath.
Ah! Another case of who police the police. The police police the police. Good news that the spare PCU took over and it was good. We all hope that the spare PCU was not part of an unlucky manufacturing batch. Great article.
Thats great news! I wonder though, if there will ever be a need for another repair mission, could ie. Crew Dragon support such a mission or has that possibility passed with the retirement of the shuttles?
In case it wasn't a rhetorical question, Crew Dragon does not have an airlock that would allow for a suited astronaut to leave the craft while maintaining atmosphere inside it. Plus, a big thing missing is a manipulator arm, such as Canadarm, which was used to capture the telescope, and essentially make the shuttle and telescope one body.
I always thought it would be interesting if Spacex developed a "dragon utility module". It would launch in Dragon's trunk and consist of a docking port on one end, an airlock on the other, a miniature manipulator arm and a bunch of cargo mounted around the outside. After separating from the second stage the Dragon would flip around and dock to this module, which would give it all the extra bits needed for a mission like servicing the Hubble.
I don't think it does. But what's to stop the whole (limited) crew from suiting up (without MMUs), slowly venting the interior air, doing the EVA, then returning and re-pressurizing the atmosphere from interior tanks? My guess is it's just uncertified for that procedure, not that it's impossible. And there's no recourse if one of the suits fail.
Scott Manley had a video on you tube about this recently, don't remember which one, but it may have been where he was talking about the computer problem itself.
As I understand it, there is no current vehicle that combines the Space Shuttle's ability to both dock with a satellite (via a docking arm) and allow astronauts to do EVA.
So I guess James Webb is possibly screwed if it has a problem in orbit like the Hubble's mirror issue. Too bad we won't bring back the Space Shuttle.
If Starship actually turns out like Musk has laid out it probably could just given it's size but yeah for now there's no extant vehicle that could service either. I bet we'll also start to see robotic servicing missions proven out which is another possible solution should JWST (or another telescope) need service.
