The Webb Telescope

What was supposed to cost one billion ended up costing ten billion.
It also cannot be repaired.
It will only last ten years because it requires thrusters to stay in its orbit.
I doubt it will last ten years before some space rocks slam into it or a malfunction happens.

Thus, poor design.

It is also named after a guy who wanted all gay people removed from government positions. 😄

@lipareeno said
What was supposed to cost one billion ended up costing ten billion.
It also cannot be repaired.
It will only last ten years because it requires thrusters to stay in its orbit.
I doubt it will last ten years before some space rocks slam into it or a malfunction happens.

Thus, poor design.

Given the estimates on what we can and will learn about our universe we should be launching a new one every year. Cost is a drop in the bucket of federal spending given the hundreds of billions wasted at the Pentagon every year (at least what they'll admit to wasting). There should be 15 of these in the air.

How have telescopes looking at outer space helped modern humans?
Looking out into space and seeing unreachable places is a waste of time and money.

The only thing I can think of is asteroid impact warnings but we don't have the tech to stop the impact anyway.
Is their anything else? An invention brought about by a picture from space and it changed human lives for the better?
I find outer space fascinating but wasting so much money on a fruitless endeavor is ridiculous.

@Lipareeno
But YOUR design would have been MUCH better, right?

@sonhouse

My design would have been to use that 10 billion for humans on earth that matter.
Not for a telescope that looks at places we will never be able to go to.

Why not land locked telescopes on the moon that can be repaired?

If the idea is to avoid earth's atmosphere to see better then the moon is a good place.
The days of the moon being bombarded by rocks are long over.
Repair missions could be training operations for astronauts.

I don't know enough about the moon to know if that is possible but apparently by your posts you do. (With respect of course)

Also, why the obsession with Mars? No livable atmosphere so why not colonize the Moon first to see if we can actually do it?

Going for Mars is like trying to run before you learn to crawl.

@sonhouse

I answered your question.
Now answer mine.
How have modern humans benefited by wasting billions of dollars looking at far off places we can never go to?

@Lipareeno
The thing about science is we never know what will become of research.
Sure, ten bil would go a long way for say schools and such but we have enough money for that stuff if the senate would allow such bills to be passed. Right now it looks near impossible to even get the age of gun sales to 21.

The idea of scopes on the moon is ongoing, radio telescopes could be made a mile across some mile wide crater for instance but the idea of an optical scope would run into the same problems on the moon as it is showing up on Webb, susceptibility to micrometeors, not that that would stop anyone from doing that but the costs of launching are coming down so maybe that will happen in a few decades.
One thing we know about the moon, there is water there in the form of ice in craters on the north and south pole where they are forever in shadow inside the crater so the heat of the sun cannot melt such ice and that bodes well for the idea of humans living there.
Ice in massive amounts have been sussed out already and that means water for drinking, growing crops and using electrolysis, hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen to breathe.

Sometimes we find stuff by accident in science, like the discovery of Teflon, and when silicon was discovered, that is to say the chemical makeup and such was figured out long ago, there was no way to know how much that one mineral could change our civilization when it was key to making computer chips.
IMHO no research is wasted. Who knows, we could figure out worm holes from a scope as powerful as Webb, we never know where research will lead.
That little retroreflector the Apollo guys left on the moon is allowing us to see just how far the moon is going away from Earth, no way to know that till that reflector was dropped on the surface of the moon, we can now measure the distance to the moon within a centimeter and can see the change in distance in real time.
Nobody knew the implications of extremely accurate clocks but now we have clocks so accurate we can detect the changes in time flow from one such clock one meter higher than the other which is direct proof of relativity but who could have predicted such a thing two hundred years ago when the biggest thing we knew about clocks was taught to us by Newton, an accurate clock can be used for navigation. Just reiterating we never know where any research leads.

@lipareeno said
@sonhouse

I answered your question.
Now answer mine.
How have modern humans benefited by wasting billions of dollars looking at far off places we can never go to?

Huge advancements have been made on Earth based on space exploration. Innovations in medicine, robotics, microscopy, nutrition, for example, might not have been done without inspiration from puzzles and problems related to outer space.

NASA actually has a website listing dozens of valuable discoveries made in outer space that impact every day lives. https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/about/everyday-benefits-of-space-exploration/default.asp

Projecting forward, part of the thrill of science is not knowing what you're going to find. Ask the next logical question and see what the answer is. There's so much we don't know about fundamental physics, for example, and space might give us the answer and if we know those things then we might solve Earth problems or not. We don't know (yet) but if we knew then answer then we wouldn't need to do the experiment.

@sonhouse said
@Lipareeno
The thing about science is we never know what will become of research.
Sure, ten bil would go a long way for say schools and such but we have enough money for that stuff if the senate would allow such bills to be passed. Right now it looks near impossible to even get the age of gun sales to 21.

The idea of scopes on the moon is ongoing, radio telescopes could ...[text shortened]... accurate clock can be used for navigation. Just reiterating we never know where any research leads.

Wasn't baby formula also an invention based on a NASA contract?

@lipareeno said
If the idea is to avoid earth's atmosphere to see better

It isn't.

It's easy to criticise when you don't know the basics.

@lipareeno said
@sonhouse

I answered your question.
Now answer mine.
How have modern humans benefited by wasting billions of dollars looking at far off places we can never go to?

You make it sound like the money disappears. It doesn't. It gets channelled into the economy giving income to engineers, mathematicians, physicists and other scientists.

People who already have money.
Are you suggesting new space projects only use new people fresh out of school for each endeavor?

Waste of time and money to look at places we can never go.
Focus on the Moon so we can have a two world system if you want to waste money.
No planet in our solar system can support life so if we have to create an artificial world then do it on the moon.

How cool would it be to look up at the moon and see artificial cities?

Definitely cool.

@lipareeno said
People who already have money.
Are you suggesting new space projects only use new people fresh out of school for each endeavor?

Waste of time and money to look at places we can never go.
Focus on the Moon so we can have a two world system if you want to waste money.
No planet in our solar system can support life so if we have to create an artificial world then do it o ...[text shortened]... moon.

How cool would it be to look up at the moon and see artificial cities?

Definitely cool.

If you want to tackle wasted money, look at the US health care and the military. Together they waste about 6 trillion dollars every year.

As for the moon colonization, I very much agree it would be a good thing.

@bunnyknight
Mars is a bit more benign, it actually has an atmosphere, pitiful thing but at least there is something to work with. And we could build stuff there easier than the moon, the gravity on both planets are fairly close, a lot less than Earth so everything would be easier to move around on either Mars or Luna.

Nice thing about Luna is you can put radio or optical scopes on the back side and have a pristine look at the universe in any wavelength, rf from Earth blocked by a couple thousand miles of rock and no atmosphere to stop optics.

Great place for astronomy for sure and the discovery of ice there on the south pole means you get water to drink, electrolyzing that for oxygen to breathe and hydrogen for fuel, run those through a fuel cell and you get energy and you get your water back again! And of course rocket fuel. But on the moon with no atmosphere, a ramp affair can get you to lunar escape velocity and from there to anywhere in the solar system so there will be cities there for sure.
It is a bit harder to establish colonies on Mars simply because of the travel time, not good for humans so you need to have some kind of 26/7 propulsion, ion rockets, whatever, but even 1/10th g accel gets you there in a few weeks as opposed to a few months and that makes all the difference in terms of susceptibility to solar flares.

It would be no good if you have a couple hundred Mars settlers and they have to wait 6 months to get there and they run head on into a solar flare, everyone dead when you get there is not a great idea.

At least on the moon and Mars for that matter, you can set up strong magnetic shields which will divert the bad stuff into a safe area.

My idea would be to put superconductors in loops all the way round the equator and make a planet sized mag field that would funnel the bad stuff to the north and south poles like on Earth but all o the above is probably more like 50 or 100 years in the future.