Our server costs ~$56 per month to run. Please consider donating or becoming a Patron to help keep the site running. Help us gain new members by following us on Twitter and liking our page on Facebook!
Current time: March 28, 2024, 12:32 pm

Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
James Webb space telescope axed
#21
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 12, 2011 at 4:39 pm)Welsh cake Wrote: I'm not surprised.The cost went from an initial estimate of $1.6bn (£996m) to more than $6.5bn (£4bn) .

How the hell you do spend a billion let alone four on anything? Those must be some really f***ing expensive paperclips Nasa needs.

NASA, being underfunded, undermanned and constantly under threat of being denied vital funding, has a history of underestimating the cost of such. Perhaps it is because Americans are too goddamn greedy to actually spend what it takes, so instead additional funds are wasted in the ensuing clusterfuck to rectify the former and make it workable.

As Min notes, the USS Ronald Reagan cost a shit ton, but we saw no threats to cancel such.

I am marveling at your apparent rage at the cost of the JWST, and suppose you really have no idea as to the true costs of many, many things, from battleships to space telescopes.

Something in common with many conservatives, I might add.

Furthermore, I would like to point out that the penny pinching nature of your statement is completely skew with respect to doing science. NASA is not, has not and will never be an organization for doing anything other than research. Even Apollo was research, research into a wholly unmapped area of space travel et al, but still research at the core. NASA is not here to be a cheap genie that pops up the results of RnD at a fraction of the cost -- NASA is a research organization.

And the sooner you get your head out of your money grubbing ass and recognize it, the sooner you can appreciate that charting new horizons in science and technology is expensive.

Anyone who says otherwise is selling something, to paraphrase The Princess Bride.
Reply
#22
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
Quote:but it seems the american rating agencies


Get your hands on a movie called Inside Job and you'll learn all you need to know about those fucking rating agencies. Those fuckers should be in jail right along with their cocksucking banker buddies.
Reply
#23
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 12, 2011 at 6:24 pm)Moros Synackaon Wrote: As Min notes, the USS Ronald Reagan cost a shit ton, but we saw no threats to cancel such.

$5 billion is the acquisition cost of the bare carrier. The airwing without which she would just be another waterfront eyesore costs $7 billion to buy. It's fleet of mendatory escort vessels to keep her from being blown up by Muslim suicide boats, to say nothing of Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles, cost another 5-6 billion to procure. Keeping just the carrier herself running cost about $0.5 billion a year, not counting the cost of the airwing and escort vessels. Over the life of a carrier, the total cost of all aspect of keeping her running is >$30 billion

In defence of the outgoing secretary of defence, he did broach the subject of reducing the US active carrier fleet from 10 ships to 9, noting the current budgeting environment, the need for collective belt tightening, and the fact that the USN would still outnumber the rest of thr world combined by 2 carriers. But the congress expressed unspeakable outage at the prospect of saving $30 billion over the life of that carrier. So he had to beat a hasty retreat.

Appearently having 3 more carriers than the rest of the world instead of 2 more carriers than the rest of the world is worth 5 times as much as knowing more about our universe, especially if such knowledge might sow the seed of "no need for god" in the minds of god fearing Americans.

Incidentally, the pathological need to give American such overwhelming numerical superiority seem to belie all the patriotic bullshit reflexively sprouted about how American fighting men is the best in the world. Either we are good and loved and can get by on numerical parity with our few enemies, or we suck so much and is so inept at diplomacy that we need to outnumber the rest of the world +2. Too bad our economy fall short of outnumbering the rest of the world by a factor of four. In 2009 out economy has done something it hasn't ever done before, that is it was out produced, out manufactured, by the Chinese. But we rest assured knowning the Chinese are collecting interest on each of the 9 carriers we will continue to outnumber them by.




Reply
#24
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
Since the Reagan ( I surely hope that its electronic brain does not have the same problem that Reagan had for the last 6 years of his presidency ) is the 9th Nimitz-class CVN built one would hope that the R & D costs would have been minimized.

The poor and the middle class have to be destroyed so the war-profiteers and the rest of the corporate whores can avoid paying taxes. Seems that Leona Helmsley was right....

We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.

Just a little ahead of her time!



Reply
#25
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
Doesn't matter a whole lot if Reagan is the first or last of her class, Basic design of US carriers haven't changed a great deal across 5 different classes since the 1950s, nor would it change a great deal for the next Gearld Ford class. If any first-of-class vessel were to cost a great deal more than the rest, that would be more attributable to opportunistic vendor gouging and dishonest DOD accounting than any massive R&D cost.
Reply
#26
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 12, 2011 at 6:53 pm)Chuck Wrote: $5 billion is the acquisition cost of the bare carrier.

Exactly my point. Large numbers mean little unless the one understands the requirements, of which I was criticizing Welsh Cake over.
Reply
#27
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 10, 2011 at 8:09 pm)Chuck Wrote: The hugely successful Hubble space telescope is scheduled to be deorbited and burn up in the atmosphere in 2012. It's role was to have been taken by the new and much more powerful James Webb Space telescope. But the Republicans, in the interest of protecting the wealthy from suffering the indignity of doing their part, have gloriously exterminated another nefarious tool of collective human progress.

James Webb space telescope have been Defunded by the house.

This, even from my political perspective, is incredibly stupid. They have already spent $6.5 Billion on the project and only need an extra $500 million to complete it, a sum that I strongly suspect is far less than the return on the investment from material applications of the knowledge gained. Even if the knowledge can't product the wealth equivalent to the project's costs, say it generated $4 billion and the total costs is $7 Billion, allowing the project to continue will be less wasteful than cancelling it outright.

It's a case where scrapping the project in the name of 'stopping wasteful spending' actually causes more money to be wasted...
.
Reply
#28
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 12, 2011 at 7:20 pm)Chuck Wrote: Doesn't matter a whole lot if Reagan is the first or last of her class, Basic design of US carriers haven't changed a great deal across 5 different classes since the 1950s, nor would it change a great deal for the next Gearld Ford class.

I thought Gerald Ford class might have been a joke, apparently not though.
I'm seeing a pattern, if the next class is George W it will be confirmed.

[Image: YgZ8E.png]
Reply
#29
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
(July 10, 2011 at 9:46 pm)reverendjeremiah Wrote: I hang my head low and shake it in shame. Every freeking politican is on the right side of the spectrum and it is getting worse.

Hang on a second, aren't "progressives" typically somewhat to the right of centre? As in, more to the right than "liberals"?

(July 12, 2011 at 5:27 pm)Minimalist Wrote:
Quote:The contract to build Reagan was awarded to Northrop Grumman Newport News and Dry Dock Company in Newport News, Virginia on 8 December 1994, and her keel was laid down on 12 February 1998. The budget for the ship had to be increased several times and ultimately $4.5 billion was spent on her construction

It's worse than that... While the James Webb telescope will, after it's construction and implementation is complete, start generating revenues via the knowledge gained and the material applications thereof, the RR facilitates other costs such as maintenance, staffing, and military operations while (aside from aiding in the stealing foreign oil for the US government's favourite companies) failing to generate any wealth for the people who have paid for it.
.
Reply
#30
RE: James Webb space telescope axed
President Gerald Ford might have distinguished himself at no other time during his life, but he did distinguish himself as a lieutenant in the USN during WWII, when his actions probably saved his carrier from a catastrophe during an infamous passage through the eye of a particularly vicious typhoon. During the same passage, another carrier had a big part of her flight deck ripped away by waves, one cruiser broke in two just forward of the forward turret, and three destroyers capsized and sank with all hands.
Reply



Possibly Related Threads...
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  James Webb Space Telescope pics pocaracas 18 2209 December 8, 2022 at 3:00 am
Last Post: Fake Messiah
  James Webb telescope is live (well, almost)! Jehanne 5 461 March 20, 2022 at 9:31 pm
Last Post: HappySkeptic
  James Webb vulcanlogician 51 2619 January 30, 2022 at 9:53 am
Last Post: Disagreeable
  Responses to James Tour Gwaithmir 1 626 January 1, 2021 at 2:38 pm
Last Post: HappySkeptic
  A Simple Demonstration of Space/Time Relativity Rhondazvous 14 2524 August 26, 2019 at 10:38 pm
Last Post: Vince
  Space Shuttle video site zebo-the-fat 0 504 October 6, 2018 at 1:07 pm
Last Post: zebo-the-fat
  No perfect circles in space... Jehanne 42 7085 July 23, 2018 at 7:30 pm
Last Post: Jehanne
  Trump space force: US to set up sixth military branch zebo-the-fat 47 6897 June 22, 2018 at 10:09 pm
Last Post: AFTT47
  How Do Scientists Know It's Space Expanding Not Galaxies Moving? Rhondazvous 43 9803 August 18, 2017 at 10:53 am
Last Post: Alex K
  Space-Time: The Bopdie Twins: If Space is Expanding Isn't Time Expandin Too? Rhondazvous 14 1716 August 2, 2017 at 8:06 am
Last Post: Rhondazvous



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)