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Hubble successor on target for 2018 launch

Hopefully this time some one checked to make sure that the lens are ground to the correct dimensions.

There is no Space Shuttle to fix it now.

In so many ways America is going in reverse.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Hopefully this time some one checked to make sure that the lens are ground to the correct dimensions.

There is no Space Shuttle to fix it now.

In so many ways America is going in reverse.
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yeah they better get it right the first time because there really
is no way to fix any mechanical issue that would occur.
 
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Hawkeye10 said:
In so many ways America is going in reverse.
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I respectfully disagree. I believe NASA has acheived a lot in the last decade. Just because they haven't ran any manned missions, and have given us a bigger bang for the buck doesn't mean we're going backwards.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
Hopefully this time some one checked to make sure that the lens are ground to the correct dimensions.

There is no Space Shuttle to fix it now.

In so many ways America is going in reverse.
Click to expand...

It is sad. Hopefully we will elect a strong leader that will focus on bringing us into the 21st century instead constantly attacking our rights and freedom.
 
EnigmaO01 said:
I respectfully disagree. I believe NASA has acheived a lot in the last decade. Just because they haven't ran any manned missions, and have given us a bigger bang for the buck doesn't mean we're going backwards.
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I was one of five boys on Kentucky Drive Rockford Il 1968 who was going to be an astronaut and live on Mars. We talked about it as we ate our space sticks and drank our Tang.

To say that I am disappointed in the US space mission is a massive understatement.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I was one of five boys on Kentucky Drive Rockford Il 1968 who was going to be an astronaut and live on Mars. We talked about it as we ate our space sticks and drank our Tang.

To say that I am disappointed in the US space mission is a massive understatement.
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I understand your disappointment and have felt it myself.
I watched the men land on the Moon in 1969, and dreamed - with Star Trek's help - we'd be beyond the Solar System by now, 47 years later.
Probably unrealistic, but yes, disappointing.
I have oft wondered in the last 20 years, if we could replicate the Moon Missions, even with our massively better tech in many areas.
 
mbig said:
I understand your disappointment and have felt it myself.
I watched the men land on the Moon in 1969, and dreamed - with Star Trek's help - we'd be beyond the Solar System by now, 47 years later.
Probably unrealistic, but yes, disappointing.
I have oft wondered in the last 20 years, if we could replicate the Moon Missions, even with our massively better tech in many areas.
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The space shuttle was 30 years of lost time, then we got into the mostly useless space station to give the space shuttle something to do.

Government incompetence/corruption is the root of 90% of what is wrong with America. It is not the people mostly.
 
Hawkeye10 said:
I was one of five boys on Kentucky Drive Rockford Il 1968 who was going to be an astronaut and live on Mars. We talked about it as we ate our space sticks and drank our Tang.

To say that I am disappointed in the US space mission is a massive understatement.
Click to expand...

If we ever stop wasting money on wars in middle east ****holes they're might be more left for a manned mission to mars.
 
PIPEWRENCH said:
It is sad. Hopefully we will elect a strong leader that will focus on bringing us into the 21st century instead constantly attacking our rights and freedom.
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:roll: Any chance to blame Bush
 
EnigmaO01 said:
James Webb: Hubble successor maintains course - BBC News

Fascinating pics and reading.
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This is an academic side point, but I will say:

Overall, I do not believe that this was worth cancelling the Super-Conducting Super-Collider (the US version of the LHC) over, particularly after spending billions of dollars on it, and especially given that additional funding went into further repairs on Hubble itself. But astrophysicists have had a very good set of decades for their experiments. For astronomy and astrophysics that is good, but the lack of serious commitment to fundamental physics (defunding SCSC, LISA, etc, the massive faculty/research funding shift to particle-astrophysics and cosmo) is a very poor long term strategy for the American commitment to basic science. Contrary to the wishful thinking of the 90's, getting any fundamental physics information from cosmology and astrophysics looks more and more like a pipe dream --or, at the very minimum, it'll be decades more before anything of fundamental can be inferred from astrophysical data. Measurement of neutrino masses are still quite far off, dark matter detection seems to just be excluding data (this is useful, not groundbreaking) and hopes of a direct detection are beginning to evaporate (I hope that I'm wrong, but I suspect that I'm not), primordial gravitational waves is not really working out (Just as Planck and BICEP), there was no non-trivial f_NL or inflationary smoking gun, detection of modified gravity through LSS surveys isn't looking good, and those were all of the major fundamental physics selling points that cosmologists used to grab a big slice of fundamental physics funding. Decades later, cosmologists are still struggling with understanding the astrophysics and galaxy physics --with good reason, it is a very hard problem-- but I'm not convinced that this or any other astrophysics experiments should be done at the expense of any more of HEP/GR experiments.
 
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EnigmaO01 said:
If we ever stop wasting money on wars in middle east ****holes they're might be more left for a manned mission to mars.
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Federal spending isn't as fungible as people like to think. It isn't a given that not spending $100 billion on X military expenditure means that $100 billion would be available for $100 billion Y scientific expenditure. It's just as, if not more, likely that the money wouldn't be spent at all. The reason why X military expenditure gets the funding is because people are broadly in agreement on the importance of national security and the necessity of a strong national defense. Ask the public if they think we should spend that same money on NASA and NIH and I think you'd be disappointed and would get massive pushback from Congress in the name of 'fiscal responsibility'.

Part of the reason many people laud the Military Industrial Complex is precisely because it allows massive amounts of cash to be funneled to scientific projects that would otherwise never have been funded via DARPA, the DoD, NASA, NIH, etc.
 
PIPEWRENCH said:
It will still be all his fault if a democrat gets elected.:lamo
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Oh sorry I assumed you were talking about Bush because he did expand the government, infringe on our rights, and his administration is the one that decided to phase out the shuttle.
 
Kal'Stang said:
Man I can't wait. The pictures taken with Hubble are fantastic by themselves. This new and improved version is no doubt going to take it to epic scale. :D
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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field capture is already the most awe-inspiring image in human history.
HubbleSite - Picture Album: Hubble Deep Field Image at Full Resolution

edit: even higher rez capture:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2004-07-a-full_jpg.jpg (WARNING: ~66mb image)

hold your thumb out at arms length. This image covers a piece of the sky much smaller than your thumbnail. (about a ten millionth of the sky) It was taken in a space that appears to be completely black to the human eye.

Most of the objects you see in this image aren't stars. They are galaxies. Each will have hundreds of billions, even trillions of stars. All of that, in such a tiny, tiny fraction of the sky. The mind reels, unable to fathom such scale.

I can't even imagine what the next generation will find. If humanity has a purpose, I'd say this is it.
 
Deuce said:
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field capture is already the most awe-inspiring image in human history.
HubbleSite - Picture Album: Hubble Deep Field Image at Full Resolution

edit: even higher rez capture:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2004-07-a-full_jpg.jpg (WARNING: ~66mb image)

hold your thumb out at arms length. This image covers a piece of the sky much smaller than your thumbnail. (about a ten millionth of the sky) It was taken in a space that appears to be completely black to the human eye.

Most of the objects you see in this image aren't stars. They are galaxies. Each will have hundreds of billions, even trillions of stars. All of that, in such a tiny, tiny fraction of the sky. The mind reels, unable to fathom such scale.

I can't even imagine what the next generation will find. If humanity has a purpose, I'd say this is it.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I know. Astronomy is one of my passions. ;)
 
Kal'Stang said:
Yeah, I know. Astronomy is one of my passions. ;)
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The glory of my posting is for all to share.

Also, this was happening as I posted

eAfGPvu.png
 
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Sherman123 said:
Federal spending isn't as fungible as people like to think. It isn't a given that not spending $100 billion on X military expenditure means that $100 billion would be available for $100 billion Y scientific expenditure. It's just as, if not more, likely that the money wouldn't be spent at all. The reason why X military expenditure gets the funding is because people are broadly in agreement on the importance of national security and the necessity of a strong national defense. Ask the public if they think we should spend that same money on NASA and NIH and I think you'd be disappointed and would get massive pushback from Congress in the name of 'fiscal responsibility'.

Part of the reason many people laud the Military Industrial Complex is precisely because it allows massive amounts of cash to be funneled to scientific projects that would otherwise never have been funded via DARPA, the DoD, NASA, NIH, etc.
Click to expand...

This is true, and it's one of the many reasons why America cannot remain the world superpower even by 2050. As a culture, we really, truly do not understand the concept of long-term investments and we have no commitment to American education or the cultural institutions that kept America strong. Those two things alone imply that America simply will not have economic power.

(The international corporations that currently control America --those will live on, however. They'll gobble up the infrastructure and resources of nation after nation until they're finally put down. But that's the subject of a different thread.)
 
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