I doubt it'll be from spacewalks on Dragon, given they probably can't support something as big as an MMU (unless they pull a really cool hat trick), but maybe with Starship.

I get that at some point it's more worthwhile to launch a new telescope (maybe one of those donated KENNENs from NRO), but Hubble is a big symbol of space exploration, and SpaceX is all about big symbols...

Am I making a joke about deploying in production? Yes, yes I am. But I also know NASA really does the best they can and I am amazed at the insane work and effort that they do to make sure spacecraft they send actually work.

SLS is a $2-$3 billion per launch DISPOSABLE rocket. The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!). I think things like launch abort and service module with all the propulsion etc are also disposable.

The whole point of the space shuttle was to have it service the space station, but the station wasn't greenlit. Instead we got a much bigger shuttle that was useful as a military asset but was a money pit with terrible safety record. Luckily the Soviet Union collapsed and the ISS was funded as a job program for Soviet rocket scientists (out of fear they could be poached to work on ICBMs for other nations).

It's the first time that I heard this theory. Do you have any sources to read up on it?

NASA is wasteful, eh? Maybe that's because they have no incentive not to be wasteful..

I can't say NASA seems particularly wasteful outside ways in which they are mandated to be so.

This won't change no matter who you vote in. It's like hardwired into the system.

The incentive massively is instead in favor of that congressperson to have a space program that is meets some minimum bar of competence, and past that point do everything to benefit that congressperson's voting district such as mandate certain things be manufactured there, etc.

I was a member of the L5 Society [1] in the 80s where we would meet on the Intrepid aircraft carrier in Manhattan to discuss all things space and space colonization (L5 being the Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system to place space habitats 60-degrees behind or ahead of the Moon's orbit for stable gravitational equilibrium to minimize fuel or energy to maintain that position). L5 later merged with the National Space Institute under the National Space Society (NSI was Werner von Braun's baby).

I had read O'Neill's 1974 article, "The Colonization of Space" when I was 10, in Physics Today that got me hooked before L5. I bought a Commodore PET 2001 in 1977/78 and was writing a program to show the on orbital plane view of Jupiter's 4 major moons - Io, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa to better identify which was which when using my binoculars at night. I left L5 in 1988/89. Good times at the Galaxy Diner after the monthly meetings on the Intrepid.

I stopped devoting time to space around then and didn't pick up an avid interest again until SpaceX, even though I had done some machining work for some models of subassemblies for the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers in the early 2000s. I am now back at making machines and dreaming of space again!

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society

- Boeing won the crew launch contract. I think their per seat cost was around $90 million or 63% more than SpaceX per seat.

- The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded (she would have made a great NASA admin) got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations

- NASA got a new admin, and despite having folks who'd made GREAT and courageous calls on things like SpaceX went super old space / old white guy (Bill Nelson) who had made a name for himself fighting Commercial Crew. Guess what pork he pushed - SLS! That's right. He and Hutchison ("The two lawmakers have been pressuring NASA and the White House for months to commit to building the Space Launch System").

So money going through NASA on things like SLS are just a total waste. And despite all the happy talk from Biden about supporting women - they go with some anti-spaceX NASA administrator in the form of an old white guy!

So now, in a total irony, despite being told what a misogynist he is, we have Elon Musk who has a smart and capable women running SpaceX (Shotwell) and another smart and capable women running Starbase (Kathy)!

Meanwhile, NASA has a super old white guy who has made almost all the wrong calls.

"The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Development and got dumped into Space Operations"

LtCdr Joseph Rochefort, leading a team in Hawaii during the early months of WWII processing Japanese encrypted messages about an impending attack, got both the location (Midway Island) and the date (early June) right, while other cryptanalysts near Washington DC got both wrong. Rochefort was recommended for an award by Admiral Nimitz (CINCPAC, in Hawaii), but this was turned down by Admiral King in DC. Eventually Rochefort was re-assigned to command a floating drydock in San Francisco, about as much of a demotion as he could get. At the end of the war, Rochefort did get a medal, still over the objections of Admiral King. Some think this bad treatment was because Rochefort and his team in Hawaii embarrassed the crypt analysts in DC.

She then got promoted to lead Human Exploration and Operations - which is absolutely a promotion. In terms of putting US Astronauts in space, her crew dragon program as significantly outperformed SLS at an absolute fraction of the per seat cost. So yes, very embarrassing.

I'd have to look at timelines, but my instinct is Nelson likely came on and that pretty much marked the end of her career at NASA as a result.

She wasn't afraid to make the calls she thought were right, she was pushing towards fixed price awards even on things like HLS, and having her in Exploration Systems Development would just have ruffled too many feathers over time.

The whole lunar landing architecture was so comical. SLS launching Orion to lunar gateway? Lunar gateway in a nonsensical orbit that would have needed an an entire separate transfer vehicle to get to LEO where it should have been to start with?

“Why would you want to send a crew to an intermediate point in space, pick up a lander there and go down?” asked Buzz Aldrin, who called the Gateway concept “absurd.”

Kathy was involved in HLS selection I think - and when I saw they were going to maybe leave gateway out of architecture for first lending... you knew that common sense couldn't last!

The ihab module on gateway (currently getting maybe 800 million per year in funding) is going to have 53 cubic feet for FOUR PEOPLE!! The entire module has a diameter of maybe 4 feet BEFORE life support? And gateways orbit mean you can only get to it at a very specific time once a week basically .

That's the estimated cost for the first four launches only.

> The orion capsule is going to be something like $20 billion(!).

We developed it from scratch and it took 20 years and it's capable of sending a crew to Mars.

What do you think this _should_ have cost?

That's why SpaceX is supposed to fly an absolute gargantuan amount of mass both into lunar orbit, then down to the moon, then back off the moon! They are supposedly going to do 5,000 tons out to the moon, orbit, land and take off the entire 5,000 ton starship. Payload may be 100 tons +. It's a big if, but if they can anything close to this it'll be crazy.

Orion is weirdly heavy for the SM, and the SM is weirdly weak (I don't think it got redesigned when SLS came along).

They are trying to fix this at $600m - $1B / year with the Block 1B upper stage.

But SLS after $20B (+ another $20B for orion) definitely CANNOT get folks to moon and back. Orion payload is truly tiny.

I think SLS will be good for maybe some flyby missions to the moon? One way to keep it going would be to do a one rocket mars sample return option / dump Orion totally... That actually seems like a useful approach.

But its not clear to me that old space can do a fixed price contract, they are so used to cost+ they really need to be able to overrun budget. All these projects had initial budgets that are fractions of what they are now but with cost+ that actually is a positive for the contractor. And the headaches on a mars accent and return vehicle would be high.

NASA's own Inspector General says, "... NASA’s aspirational goal to achieve a cost savings of 50 percent is highly unrealistic" and "... a single SLS will cost more than $2 billion through the first 10 SLS rockets ... " [0]

[0]: https://oig.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/ig-24-001.pd...

There were a lot of assumptions that turned out to be wrong. The chief among them was launch cadence and satellite capture and return missions. When these assumptions changed the cost values changed significantly as well.

> Why should we trust that this time will be different?

Do you understand the details of this specific contract? It's limited to 10 launches. It's structured quite a bit differently than the shuttle program was.

> NASA's own Inspector General says

Yes and did you read the recommendations and follow up from that same report? Or is this just a "haha NASA is dumb" rant that's become common around here?

I also think there is almost no chance anyone of these folks is going to do fixed price for EUS or whatever. Contractors are getting something like $600 million / year on this thing and have been hoovering the gravy for 7-8 years.

Remember that these types of forever contracts that take 20-30 years are also liked by the NASA centers who work with the contractors - it's very stable career / funding (ignore the waste). So NASA at the centers level is not fighting against this stuff (ie, it's not just congress that pushes this stuff).

All these pork projects got a huge win with Biden picking Bill Nelson as NASA admin. Do wonder if a bit of SpaceX hate played a role there :)

They also needed to get Kathy L out who had started to push down manned mission cost (crew dragon etc) and I think they succeeded there - there was a push to get her off new projects and into just operations I think to keep her from disrupting the pork - even just by showing the contrasts to other approaches.

JFK, come back.

Around 50% of your taxes go to social security and medicare, and the other 50% are available for program revenue.

NASA’s budget comes from the the federal budget, managed by congress, not directly from the Treasury. I don’t necessarily think that matters, but I don’t know if the federal budget’s revenue differs from the Treasury’s for any reason, so it seems worth mentioning.

That said, I just looked and the Treasury’s own website matches the congressional budget office’s claim, and says that 52% of the 2024 revenue was individual income tax … so where did you get the 85% number?? https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover...

From your own link. What's 52% + 34%? 86%. That's where it comes from. The money you pay in income taxes is divided between these two categories. So, 60% of what you pay as an individual in taxes goes to programs.

They like to break this up so that it's harder for average people to apprehend that 86% of all government spending comes out of their pockets and very little from businesses.

In the 1950s it used to be 50% was from citizens, 25% from business and 25% from excise taxes. This is why I think about the problem this way, but these facts only tangentially intersect with your original point.

> comes from the the federal budget, managed by congress, not directly from the Treasury.

Yes, but where are those actual accounts held? At the Treasury. Which is why you pay your taxes to the Treasury or receive refunds from the same.

> but as income taxpayers we only pay around half of that, or around $36.40 per American

I'm saying using half is incorrect because the ratio isn't as simple as the OP assumed. The correct figure would be 60%, or $43.68 per _citizen_, this because a large chunk of your taxes go elsewhere, and because business pays so very little.

Anyways.. it's a parsimonious point about how taxes are intentionally obscure and widely misunderstood and miscalculated.

I agree that businesses pay too little, and yes taxes are a bit complicated. I’m not seeing intentional obscurity at this level, just that there are multiple different valid ways to frame NASA’s budget. The top comment was correct that the average per citizen cost to fund NASA in 2023 was slightly under $75. This is already very low, so that was the point from the top. Mine was simply that the actual amount we pay is even lower. Whether it’s 36% or 50% or 60% or even 85% doesn’t matter much, that ends up being about 1 or 2 cups of coffee either way.

I love the work they do. I wish they did more with what they have. And then I wish they had more to work with.

When they are constrained, like they are with spacecraft already in flight, their ability to problem solve with the tools and systems they have available is absolutely impressive.

NASA also looks quite efficient when you compare it to many tech companies. NASA has 18k employees and $25bn budget in 2023, let's compare it with some companies:

Spotify and Stripe are each equal to half of NASA both in terms of employees and budget.

Snapchat and Airbnb are both approx 1/3rd of NASA in both employees and budget.

Yahoo has 1/2 the employees and 1/3 the budget of NASA.

ByteDance is 6x larger than NASA on both metrics.

Meta is 6x larger in budget and 4x larger in head count.

These are just companies making social media apps and selling ads.

Is 1,000 employees each with an average burn rate per employee of a $1,000,000/y supposed to be more or less efficient than 2,000 employees with an average burn rate per employee of $500,000/y? If so, why is that a sign of an inherently more efficient company when we haven't even mentioned things like output yet? E.g. some of the companies in the list post a large loss, others post a large gain. If a company doubled it's employee count and posted a 10% change in profit due to staffing budgets why should that result in 100% or 50% change in this metric?

Is 1,000 companies with 1 employee each and a budget of $1,000,000/y inherently supposed to be the same efficiency as 1 company with 1,000 employees and a budget of $1,000,000,000/y even if the other company is posting a profit and the small company just spending it all each year?

I'm generally on the side of NASA but in this case I just don't understand how to apply this metric in a meaningful way. It seems almost everything else about the company is more relevant to overall efficiency the "amount of money spent in the last year for a given number of people working there". I.e., at the end of the day in terms of efficiency I don't really care if 1 person works at NASA or 100,000 people work at NASA I care how quickly they get meaningful missions completed at a given budget.

* For some definitions of useful

What I'm saying is, take what Spotify is actually producing, and compare that to half of what NASA is producing. Or compare Snap to a third of NASA, etc.

This is why they've been trying to move into all the other stuff like podcasts

There is no incentive to be efficient. If there is leftover money in the final fiscal quarter you are highly encouraged to use every penny, even if that means buying new furniture and office supplies that you don’t really need. Any leftover money will be given to someone else and you will receive a smaller budget the following year.

Trying to EVA and work on Hubble would be very risky right now with Dragon since you have to vent the entire capsule first, and this creates all sorts of optics contamination risks.

They're also balancing this against upcoming technologies, possible cost reductions and the much improved capabilities of ground based telescopes due to advanced adaptive optics.

It isn't that the problems can't be solved, just that NASA doesn't think it's worth working on just yet. Tbh I wouldn't be surprised if they're hoping to get government funding so that they can be the controlling party (vs a private mission, where, ultimately, they have to compromise with the specific things Isaacman would be willing to fund and within the timeline within which he's willing to keep funding).

https://llis.nasa.gov/lesson/394

> The Voyager 2 scan platform, on which are mounted the spacecraft cameras and several science instruments, is rotated in elevation and azimuth by actuators. Near the end of the Voyager 2 Saturn encounter, the scan platform azimuth actuator exhibited an anomaly. This anomaly was evidenced by the azimuth actuator seizing, causing a scan platform pointing error that resulted in a loss of some data. Through a series of ground commands, the problem was alleviated to the extent that the scan platform could perform its function. ...

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/us/camera-swivel-on-voyag...

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/28/us/swivel-on-voyager-stil...

Voyager engineering improvements for Uranus encounter - https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19860063178

> Finally, engineering improvements made in order to enhance scientific findings at the Uranus encounter are reviewed in detail. The two most important were the increased gyro drift turn rate capability to accommodate image motion compensation for the close fly-by of Miranda and the reduction in spacecraft rates to accommodate increased imaging exposure times without incurring excessive image smear.

Not to mention numerical accuracy in the implementation, but I'd assume that's mostly known patterns at this point.

I have no idea why I needed that level of automation, of course.

However, the first step of any gaming session was to reboot the machine with the boot floppy in, which had the right boot settings for gaming performance.

My actual goal was to setup QBasic for my son, which I did-- but he thought it was stupid and refused to even let me show him how to code a Hello World app on it. :(

It kind of reminds me of my dad when he built our first whitebox 486 PC in 1992. Getting to sit on his lap while we messed around in DOS and some games from the era really stuck with me forever. He also loved to mess around in a BBS and would show me how cool it was that we could communicate with other systems at a long distance via modem. :)

Let's not forget that initially it was considered a massive failure. There simply was no way for NASA to build another in the 90s. What's truly remarkable is how the ROI went from unknown, to negative, and then was a massive long-term success.

"October 2026 (contracted) – May 2027 (commitment)"

So more like, in the works to use one of them. It does appear that it is beyond the planning to use stage. I did not see the word Boeing once in that link, so maybe they have an actual shot of hitting those dates.

I know there are other space-based telescopes (James Webb being larger and superior, others being much smaller and more specialized than Hubble) and lots of ground-based telescopes. I don't dispute that keeping an eye on Soviet missile development and other spy satellite tasks was and is an important mission that has significant, immediate consequences for our species than the informative and gorgeous photos of space that the Hubble mission produces. I'm just disappointed that the combination of human nature and politics makes this a reasonable outcome.

[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/observatory/design/h...

Since its not very likely that you happen to have a scheduled science target lying close to Jupiter around the time of impact, you would have to do a long slew which now takes such a long time you likely have to cancel some other science. But I think this is a general issue that will discard most targets of opportunity that Hubble could otherwise have observed.

Sure, Hubble's way past its design lifetime, and it can probably limp along for another decade as is, and maybe something besides gyros will fail soon. But also there's no equivalent capability successor that's more than a study, and even if they manage to build HWO or something like it, it won't be operation for at least 20 years. A Hubble servicing mission would be a relatively cheap way to get a decade or two more time on a high-capability instrument.

This article states that the entire capsule would be depressurised and repressurised, as there's no integrated airlock. It also specifically mentions the prospect of servicing Hubble (though with no details).

<https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/spacex-unveils-eva-spa...> (May 6, 2024)

That strikes me as both the most basic approach and a capability which would be useful for other reasons as well. Another option might be to carry along an airlock, perhaps stowed in Dragon's trunk, and mounted during flight, though that itself might require an initial (full-capsule-depressurisation) EVA.

> To detect changes in direction JWST uses hemispherical resonator gyroscopes (HRG). HRGs are expected to be more reliable than the gas-bearing gyroscopes that were a reliability issue on Hubble Space Telescope. They cannot point as finely, however, which is overcome by the JWST fine guidance mirror.[18]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_bus_(James_Webb_Spa...

So Hubble uses gyroscopes that are more precise but less reliable than the HRGs used in JWST.

I think the confusion is a result of imprecise language talking about how they are used to slew the telescope. They are "used" but as feedback, in conjunction with other systems. Also, there have some prominent reaction wheels failures on other missions, and that contributes to the confusion.

Edit: Apparently, for smartphones, all these sensors are integrated into a single MEMS chip, one sensor for each degree of freedom, three accelerometers and three gyroscopes: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9X4frIQo7x0

SpaceX's Starship could house one huge telescope. If I had a say in NASA's appropriations, money would flow into building a Starship-sized telescope for every spectrum we could think of.

There are other scientific instruments that Starship can house.

It's not too late to start. Congress could appropriate money to build and many Starship-sized instruments as they can come up with. Follow KISS principles and use the same steel Starship is made of instead of carbon fiber where possible.

If on-orbit refueling works, Starship can place them on the far side of the moon or at Lagrange points.

In fact studying things which have no apparent economic relevance is one of the best uses of government dime and has been so, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, for centuries if not millennia

NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros, like just plaster the things with gyros and reaction wheels for 50x redundancy since that's always the mission critical thing that fails first. Or maybe a xenon powered ion reaction control system or something that would last longer then hydrazine.

It’s an interesting tradeoff. Missions are designed (and costed) for a nominal mission lifetime; adding more redundancy increases costs. But it’s true that the successful missions tend to stay in operations much longer than their normal lifetime.

There's a limit to how much redundancy you can put in a satellite, but with how consistently these parts fail it would make sense to put in a lot. If 1% of the Hubble's weight was extra gyroscopes it would have 30-40 of them.