Thursday, February 13, 2014

Meet James Webb ST our future space telescope


A new kid is on the space block, or will be in about 4 years. His name is James Webb Space Telescope.

He is the fanciest, most expensive, and most complex piece of equipment ever built.


I'm sorry NASA, but that doesn't give me a great deal of confidence he's actually going to work. That just tells me he's got lots and lots of ways to break.


Originally he was supposed to launch in 2010 for the cost of $2 billion, but now at the estimated cost of $8.7 billion James will launch in 2018 maybe....


He's called the telescope that ate astronomy--given he's consuming over half of NASA's yearly budget. Thus, they REALLY need him to work, which increases the chances he won't. Stress is very hard on equipment.


Nor did they give him a proper name like Hubble, or Keplar. Nope, he's named James Webb. You could call him by his initials: JWST, but just looks like your cat pounced on your laptop.


So waayyyyyy over budget, way late, and poorly named, I give you James:



This isn't the real James, because they've still another 4 years to put him together, build the telescope and launch him into space. He's a very complex dude. But IF he works, maybe we can determine if space is really a hologram. Perhaps James will see a tag some where declaring copyright of Space Hologram.

But seriously, we can't rely on the ancient mariner Hubble and the near sighted Keplar for much anymore. We need a new toy. Hopefully there are many redundancies in the nearly 9 billion dollar price tag, so James will live a long life and give us lots of pretty pictures for us to oooh and awwww over. And maybe, just maybe, it can find us a new home. We really need one.  

2 comments:

  1. Have to say I don't share your confidence. No need to use a telescope (if it works) to find a new home, since a new home must be close enough that we won't need JWST to find it.
    But that's ok.
    Thanks for sharing, since if no one thinks about these things, that's another reason to worry.

    ReplyDelete

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