They're collecting observational data, not science. I wouldn't normally be bitter about it, but the Trust The Science™ religion already has a terrible struggle with the basics so we shouldn't make it any harder for them.
It is amazing the blatant nonsense people will believe if you dress a pig in a lab coat and call it science. There's been instances of politicians unironically calling to ban the dangerous drug 'dihydrogen monoxide' for example, the general public's understanding of the scientific method is probably far worse than most on HN think it is.
There really needs to be a term for this widespread inability to differentiate between 'the science' as in the correct application of the scientific method to arrive at empirical conclusions about the world around us and 'The Science' as in the socio-political institution of various experts and technocrats. One is a powerful tool in humanity's toolbox for getting shit done, the other is subject to all the fallibility of human social institutions - perhaps even moreso because people will blindly trust it meaning there's fewer checks on it than other social institutions. Usually people going up against 'The Science' are cranks which means there's a tendency for people to believe anyone who goes up against the status quo is a crank.
You see this in commentary about climate change, people blindly trust 'The Science' to fix everything in a glorious deus ex machina without the tiniest scrap of evidence 'The Science' even has the power do to such a thing in one fell swoop. That's not saying we shouldn't pursue efforts like geo-engineering etc but we should at least keep things in the realm of what the current scientific evidence is saying which is we need to heavily cut our emissions no matter what rather than relying entirely on speculative mega-projects.
Ultimately you should never trust anyone who claims to have a monopoly on truth or that $group or $profession has a monopoly on truth.
Making 'science' a fungible unit allows scientists in one domain to leach off the reputation earned by scientists in another domain. Accomplishments in physics lend credibility to accomplishments in social science, due to the commonality of both using the scientific method, even though the scientific method is not uniformly effective across all domains of inquiry.
It's a "term of art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_of_art) specifying that the data collected is passed through the scientific pipelines and being served out to researchers, rather than being used for testing/calibrations/commissioning. Similar phrasing include "science operations" and "science frames". There are lots of odd jargon in astronomy, but no weirder than say "firewall" (as given in the wikipedia article).
"They're collecting observational data, not science."
I suspect that pretty much everybody who does experimental physics, a whole lot of astronomers, and a multitude of other observational scientists might like to have a word with you regarding the scientific method.
It only takes 300 units of science to research Nuclear Propulsion and 10,000 kerbucks to unlock the LV-N "Nerv" Atomic Rocket Motor. I say go for it. :)
After all, we all know scientific progress can literally be distilled down into various colored liquid and poured into an erlenmeyer flask for easy consumption.
Factorio science packs kind of make sense though. E.g. military science packs are made of bullets, grenades and walls, and you spend them to get better bullets and grenades and such. It's like an abstraction of spending some capacity to experiment on improving designs.
But research labs would consume raw materials like wood, metal, Vespene gas, etc., and produce science units that could then be spent to climb the tech tree, no?
It also makes me think of Portal: "And the science gets done, and we built a neat gu--er, telescope..."
Hubble has been accomplished completely without SpaceX, as is James Webb and almost all other amazing advances in space. What do you think about the organizations and people that actually accomplished these things?
Not the OP but are you talking about Lockheed, Rockwell, etc.? I think they're criminal arms traffickers and war profiteers who did achieve some amazing things, but only as a means to extract vast amounts of the nation's wealth. In other words, they did as little constructive work as they could with each tax dollar given to them.
SpaceX at least doesn't appear to be building a business model based on being a barrel for pork with a board that functions as a pension fund for military generals.
I think what GP is mostly referring to is that since the shuttle retired, we have no way to return payloads to the ground without "lithobraking". Starship may potentially have enough return capacity to place the Hubble telescope inside a payload bay and safely land it. No other vehicle being developed right now has that capability (that I'm aware of); it has nothing to do with the politics of NASA and Spacex.
I can only speak for myself, but as someone who worked at NASA, my question is, how does working together with SpaceX in any way detract from the amazing things humanity has accomplished by working together? NASA doesn't have exclusive bragging rights on accomplishing things in space, and I for one am happy to celebrate and cooperate with others. In fact, one of the most inspiring things about NASA's accomplishments is how people from all over the world have come together and cooperated for the betterment of humanity.
Don't want to speak for OP but I think you have misinterpreted the meaning of his comment. I'm pretty sure he meant it has too much meaning and one day bringing Hubble back instead of abandoning an old friend to the abyss.
>What do you think about the organizations and people that actually accomplished these things?
Presumably the OP thinks of them what they wrote about them in the comment - that they explore and inspire.
To address your later comments as well, there was no specific promotion of SpaceX in the OPs comment, no implied criticism of any other space tech company or reason to believe the OP thinks anything but good things about them. Just a space enthusiast enthusing about space. But no, you have to turn it into an argument.
Why are you mentioning the (still not through launch and subsequent zillion step unfolding sequence btw) catastrophically late and utterly pork-barrelled JSWT?
I read his point to be something along the lines of 'Hubble is great, I'd love to see it one day.' I guess some people are offended because he suggested spacex might be used to retrieve Hubble instead of letting it become derelict in orbit.
I assume anything remotely still classified would be ripped out, so probably only the big (outer) shell would end up in a museum, maybe some of the outdated computer boards.
It's still inspiring, but would it be more fair to go to Florida? Texas? Some state where it was built (if it weren't those)? The Smithsonian?
Of course it would go to the Smithsonian. They sometimes loan stuff out temporarily, so it could be displayed in all those places (with difficulty).
Nothing on it is modern enough to be classified, if it ever was classified. It is really old. DoD had better optics flying in space… by the time Hubble launched, maybe?
Not sure there's anything left in Hubble that would be classified. Maybe the control software but the spy sat it was based off of is decades out of use by now.
If they could carry a larger payload, we could have a Hubble with a larger primary mirror. Some of the risks/costs of the JWST is all the folding mechanisms to fit the Ariane 5 payload enclosure.
That's a fun idea! I don't see how you would execute that unfortunately though. Hubble wasn't meant to be re-mounted after deployment. Starship wouldn't be able to just gobble Hubble up and have it rattle around in its fairing during re-entry
Even longer for it to actually power up and start "working." Really excited for it, but feel like something akin to this hubble issue happening with the JW would be disastrous.
One of NASA's biggest mistakes wrt the demise of the STS/Shuttle program was not leaving some way lined up to service Hubble in orbit. The current crop of launch vehicles isn't suited to this task, despite us being ten years out from STS-135.
It's proven itself an absolutely invaluable tool for research, but I think the even more impressive mission Hubble has shown itself as irreplaceable for is stimulating the public's mind for science and exploration. There's nothing like seeing photos of the universe in visual-light spectrum and thinking, "what if we went there?"
JWST is amazing and I'm so glad it's finally launching but for that second use case, it trails Hubble.
I wouldn't lay the blame on NASA. Congress ultimately decides what NASA does and does not do.
Constellation was the system that was supposed to succeed the Shuttle. It had one successful first-stage launch in October 2009. In 2010, Constellation was cancelled by Congress (at the behest of then-president Obama). In its stead, Congress essentially designed a new rocket called the Space Launch System, and tasked NASA with building it. Constellation's crewed capsule, Orion, survived as the SLS's crewed capsule. Unfortunately, the SLS is now 5 years overdue for its first launch. (It currently seems reasonably likely to launch for the first time in 2022.)
The Orion capsule could conceivably service Hubble [1], especially after lots of launches and general experience with the vehicle. If Constellation had not been cancelled, or if Congress had tasked NASA with a less-ambitious rocket to build, (or if the contractors that NASA was obliged to use to build the SLS had been able to keep to the original schedule,) we might have had a spacecraft to service Hubble right now.
I think JWST will be an amazing replacement as most space photos are doctored with visible light "interpretations" of other wavelengths already and nobody seems to notice/care as they have their minds blown. The process almost even adds to the beauty of them.
>nobody seems to notice/care as they have their minds blown
Some people do, and erroneously conclude that "space is fake". This would be laughable, if not for the part where they then persuade their friends and family to feel deceived. Artificially coloring images without disclosing it clearly upfront in a highly visible manner, ideally with some sort of watermark on the image, is the sort of white lie that contributes to the public's growing distrust of authority.
Yes, I know the caption below the image usually disclaims it. But as you say, most people don't notice or know it until somebody points it out to them, and too often the somebody who points it out is somebody who's peddling nonsense of their own.
Calling it "doctored" is perhaps a stretch. Hubble (and many earth-bound astronomers) take images of emission nebulae with narrowband filters covering some of the emission lines that are important and particularly strong. The typical ones are hydrogen-alpha, oxygen-III, and sulphur-II. These are particular colours of light that are emitted by these chemical elements, and so detecting these emissions are the best way to detect these chemical elements, for science.
Then these detections are put together into a false-colour image so we can visualise it. We have three narrowband filters, so it makes obvious sense to map them to the three primary colours in the image.
It's not about using weird filters on the telescope to make "doctored" images that look impressive. It's about using weird filters on the telescope to collect the best science possible, and then using that data to make an image.
That's a good point. Regardless of how it shakes out, I'm really excited to see the first images from Webb. The implications this spacecraft could have for understanding the question of where we came from are immense.
I thought the experience they had servicing Hubble actually meant that they generally didn’t want to have satellites that they would have to service due to costs involved.
Maybe with the new options it becomes cheaper/ more viable.
Having worked at Lockheed on the engineering side of Hubble for four summers as an intern during undergrad, the idea of the telescope reaching its end of life makes me deeply sad.
That warms my heart somehow, but I thought I had read that that was it for Hubble, like a year ago? Why the change of heart? Anyone got the full story, or did I cross my wires?
There was some equipment failure last year. I think it was later diagnosed as a power control unit that failed. Fortunately there was a backup set they could switch to. Little by little parts are failing with time but they are nursing it along.
I think one of the primary payload computers failed but they were able to flip to auxiliary/backup. That was in July though
It’s pretty much on borrowed time. I think they spent most of that outage trying to bring the main up and gave up.
Must be fun troubleshooting something at like 400 km orbit. Heck I had to tell a lady she couldn’t wfh today because her cell data tethering wasn’t up to snuff to hold a connection to our vpn or do much of anything. She was seeing spurts of 10% loss on downstream and 200+ ms latency.
Remembering what you did and what you wanted to do next takes a lot of notes! It's really amazing controlling the drones on Mars, with all the traffic routed through a constellation of satellites, where the rotation even affects the latency.
Readit News
Reminds me of strategy games where feeding enough “science units” into opaque “research labs” unlocks branches of the technology tree.
My back yard rain gauge is not sciencing either.
There really needs to be a term for this widespread inability to differentiate between 'the science' as in the correct application of the scientific method to arrive at empirical conclusions about the world around us and 'The Science' as in the socio-political institution of various experts and technocrats. One is a powerful tool in humanity's toolbox for getting shit done, the other is subject to all the fallibility of human social institutions - perhaps even moreso because people will blindly trust it meaning there's fewer checks on it than other social institutions. Usually people going up against 'The Science' are cranks which means there's a tendency for people to believe anyone who goes up against the status quo is a crank.
You see this in commentary about climate change, people blindly trust 'The Science' to fix everything in a glorious deus ex machina without the tiniest scrap of evidence 'The Science' even has the power do to such a thing in one fell swoop. That's not saying we shouldn't pursue efforts like geo-engineering etc but we should at least keep things in the realm of what the current scientific evidence is saying which is we need to heavily cut our emissions no matter what rather than relying entirely on speculative mega-projects.
Ultimately you should never trust anyone who claims to have a monopoly on truth or that $group or $profession has a monopoly on truth.
I suspect that pretty much everybody who does experimental physics, a whole lot of astronomers, and a multitude of other observational scientists might like to have a word with you regarding the scientific method.
But that could just be me.
Independent people have and can discover the same truth while in religion everyone who invented one, believe in something different.
Science is universal. Religion is stupid.
Dead Comment
What's the proper unit of measurement to quantify how much "science" they've collected, anyway? Bits?
It also makes me think of Portal: "And the science gets done, and we built a neat gu--er, telescope..."
Or Scully babbling on about "the science", referring to some MacGuffin or other during the later seasons of the X-Files.
NASA had an outage 350 miles above the surface of the Earth and managed to fix it.
There's a difference in software reliability priorities and operations here.
[0] https://softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/sscl/moglen-software...
Dead Comment
SpaceX at least doesn't appear to be building a business model based on being a barrel for pork with a board that functions as a pension fund for military generals.
Presumably the OP thinks of them what they wrote about them in the comment - that they explore and inspire.
To address your later comments as well, there was no specific promotion of SpaceX in the OPs comment, no implied criticism of any other space tech company or reason to believe the OP thinks anything but good things about them. Just a space enthusiast enthusing about space. But no, you have to turn it into an argument.
Deleted Comment
I assume anything remotely still classified would be ripped out, so probably only the big (outer) shell would end up in a museum, maybe some of the outdated computer boards.
It's still inspiring, but would it be more fair to go to Florida? Texas? Some state where it was built (if it weren't those)? The Smithsonian?
Nothing on it is modern enough to be classified, if it ever was classified. It is really old. DoD had better optics flying in space… by the time Hubble launched, maybe?
https://parade.com/249407/carlsagan/the-gift-of-apollo/
Maybe we should inspire people by doing useful science instead.
Deleted Comment
I'm excited for Dec 22nd when the James Webb launches. Crossing fingers big time.
This launch is going to be so scary as it represents the scientific promise and investments of a generation.
It's proven itself an absolutely invaluable tool for research, but I think the even more impressive mission Hubble has shown itself as irreplaceable for is stimulating the public's mind for science and exploration. There's nothing like seeing photos of the universe in visual-light spectrum and thinking, "what if we went there?"
JWST is amazing and I'm so glad it's finally launching but for that second use case, it trails Hubble.
Constellation was the system that was supposed to succeed the Shuttle. It had one successful first-stage launch in October 2009. In 2010, Constellation was cancelled by Congress (at the behest of then-president Obama). In its stead, Congress essentially designed a new rocket called the Space Launch System, and tasked NASA with building it. Constellation's crewed capsule, Orion, survived as the SLS's crewed capsule. Unfortunately, the SLS is now 5 years overdue for its first launch. (It currently seems reasonably likely to launch for the first time in 2022.)
The Orion capsule could conceivably service Hubble [1], especially after lots of launches and general experience with the vehicle. If Constellation had not been cancelled, or if Congress had tasked NASA with a less-ambitious rocket to build, (or if the contractors that NASA was obliged to use to build the SLS had been able to keep to the original schedule,) we might have had a spacecraft to service Hubble right now.
[1] https://www.thespacereview.com/article/3965/1
Some people do, and erroneously conclude that "space is fake". This would be laughable, if not for the part where they then persuade their friends and family to feel deceived. Artificially coloring images without disclosing it clearly upfront in a highly visible manner, ideally with some sort of watermark on the image, is the sort of white lie that contributes to the public's growing distrust of authority.
Yes, I know the caption below the image usually disclaims it. But as you say, most people don't notice or know it until somebody points it out to them, and too often the somebody who points it out is somebody who's peddling nonsense of their own.
Then these detections are put together into a false-colour image so we can visualise it. We have three narrowband filters, so it makes obvious sense to map them to the three primary colours in the image.
It's not about using weird filters on the telescope to make "doctored" images that look impressive. It's about using weird filters on the telescope to collect the best science possible, and then using that data to make an image.
Maybe with the new options it becomes cheaper/ more viable.
For the near term it's always going to be cheaper to launch replacement satellites instead of servicing broken ones in orbit.
It’s pretty much on borrowed time. I think they spent most of that outage trying to bring the main up and gave up.
Must be fun troubleshooting something at like 400 km orbit. Heck I had to tell a lady she couldn’t wfh today because her cell data tethering wasn’t up to snuff to hold a connection to our vpn or do much of anything. She was seeing spurts of 10% loss on downstream and 200+ ms latency.
https://jwst-docs.stsci.edu/jwst-opportunities-and-policies/...