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The U.S. Government Acountability [sic] Office (GAO) has warned that the launch of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is likely to be delayed again, which could cause the budget cap set by the U.S. Congress to be exceeded:
The U.S. Government Acountability [sic] Office (GAO), a non-partisan group that investigates federal spending and performance, has issued a report on the James Webb Space Telescope that has astronomers worried. "It's likely the launch date will be delayed again," the report concludes — an ominous statement, given that any further delays could risk project cancellation.
Last year NASA announced a delay in the telescope's launch to sometime between March and June 2019. The 5- to 8-month delay came from problems integrating spacecraft components, especially its complex, five-layered sunshield, which must unfold perfectly when the telescope is deployed. Right after requesting the change in launch readiness date, the mission learned of further delays from its contractor, Northrum Grumman, due to "lessons learned from conducting deployment exercises of the spacecraft element and sunshield."
The mission now has 1.5 months of schedule reserve remaining, the GAO finds. Delays during integration and testing are common, "the phase in development where problems are most likely to be found and schedules tend to slip." The project has a total of five phases of integration and testing, and has made significant progress on phases three and four, with the fifth phase beginning in July.
GAO's 31-page report, February 2018: JWST: Integration and Test Challenges Have Delayed Launch and Threaten to Push Costs Over Cap.
Also at Science Magazine.
Previously: Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Delayed to Spring 2019
Launch of James Webb Space Telescope Could be Further Delayed
Related: James Webb Space Telescope Vibration Testing Completed
NASA Considering Flagship Space Telescope Options for the 2030s
WFIRST Space Observatory Could be Scaled Back Due to Costs
JWST: Too Big to Fail?
Trump Administration Budget Proposal Would Cancel WFIRST
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:23PM (1 child)
The budget for JWST [wikipedia.org] was at $500 million in 1997, $1.8 billion in 2000, $3 billion in 2005, and roughly $8.8 billion today (possibly more if GAO is right).
With less tedious testing, maybe the budget would have been half, with a slightly higher chance of failure but an earlier launch date (by years).
JWST is too big to fail now, but it could teach us a few lessons about future telescopes. We want them big and cheap, and that could be done with something like BFR. Make the telescope, test it a bit, launch it, repeat.
As for servicing the JWST, it could still be serviced even if it is not designed for it. Hire India's ISRO to create a robotic servicing craft. Send them a few technical advisors to cut down on dumb mistakes. Pay for a cheap BFR launch from SpaceX. Even if it cost $1 billion, it would be well worth the trouble. Such a servicing mission will likely be necessary around 2029:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Virindi on Sunday March 04 2018, @10:49PM
Yeah exactly, at this point it almost seems like they could have cut the cost in half and launched two instead. Or more!
At some point being able to launch a whole bunch of times for the same cost serves as much better testing than merely adding billions of dollars of bureaucracy. Testing without actual mission experience has diminishing returns.
All new-design endeavors are like this; software is the obvious example that is the same. As long as lives or huge fortunes aren't at risk (or maybe even if they are) there is a limit where you need a trial deployment to actually find the "hard bugs". Simply adding more "testing" because you are risk-averse is not going to help much because at some point, the problems that you are likely to encounter are precisely the ones your testing did not anticipate.