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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday June 11 2020, @09:08AM   Printer-friendly
from the Covid-19-strikes-again dept.

James Webb Space Telescope will "absolutely" not launch in March:

On Wednesday, the chief of NASA's science programs said the James Webb Space Telescope will not meet its current schedule of launching in March 2021.

"We will not launch in March," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the space agency's associate administrator for science. "Absolutely we will not launch in March. That is not in the cards right now. That's not because they did anything wrong. It's not anyone's fault or mismanagement."

Zurbuchen made these comments at a virtual meeting of the National Academies' Space Studies Board. He said the telescope was already cutting it close on its schedule before the COVID-19 pandemic struck the agency and that the virus had led to additional lost work time.

"This team has stayed on its toes and pushed this telescope forward at the maximum speed possible," he said. "But we've lost time. Instead of two shifts fully staffed, we could not do that for all the reasons that we talk about. Not everybody was available. There were positive cases here and there. And so, perhaps, we had only one shift."

NASA and the telescope's prime contractor, Northrop Grumman, are evaluating the schedule going forward. This will include an estimate of when operations can completely return to normal—Zurbuchen said telescope preparation and testing activities are nearing full staffing again—and set a new date for a launch. This schedule review should conclude in July.

"I'm very optimistic about this thing getting off the launch pad in 2021," Zurbuchen said. "Of course, there is still a lot of mountain to climb."


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:21PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 11 2020, @12:21PM (#1006246)

    COVID-19 restrictions have disingenuously become the "it's not my fault" excuse for a lot of things. Companies that were already planning bankruptcy before now claim it, etc. I'm sure their schedule was affected, but this is a long time in advance to be announcing a launch slip unless there is other competition for the launch pad and rocket in March.
     

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  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday June 11 2020, @02:01PM (2 children)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday June 11 2020, @02:01PM (#1006284)

    > this is a long time in advance to be announcing a launch slip

    Not really. This is why we pay project managers. It's pretty easy to see how much the project has slipped, and extrapolate to a reasonable time line for future slip (assuming some Covid recovery plan), and come up with predictions a couple of years in advance for completion date. NASA is generally quite good at project management (JWT notwithstanding).

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:58PM (1 child)

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 11 2020, @03:58PM (#1006349) Journal

      It is true that a project slip may be legitimately predicted based on schedule and interdependencies among scheduled items.

      At the same time, it is also true that COVID-19 has become the "go to" excuse for failures of all kinds.

      Don't blame me! COVID-19 made me do it!

      In the age of COVID-19, anyone might have unavoidably grossly negligently mismanaged resources and caused bankruptcy! It snot my fault!

      Don't blame me! It is because of COVID-19 that I thought GOTO and GOSUB did the same thing when building that avionics firmware.

      --
      A 'midden heap' is a reserved area of memory that the Java GC simply refuses to service.
      • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:07PM

        by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday June 11 2020, @04:07PM (#1006361)

        True. That doesn't mean COVID-19 is not to blame. All of the projects I know of are put back at least 3 months by COVID-19. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out why!