Category Archives: General Science

Business, General Science, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Space Science, Technology and Society

JWST

22 Comments

We expected this yesterday, but here it is:

Following an Independent Review Board report on the James Webb Space Telescope project, NASA has announced a further delay to the telescope’s anticipated launch. Coming just three months after a year-long delay to 2020, NASA now says the telescope will not be ready to launch until 2021 at the earliest and that the project will breach its $8.8 billion USD cost cap.

The cited mismanagement at NG and NASA is just staggering. The new overrun is about the amount that it was supposed to cost, in total, originally. What a programmatic disaster.

[Update after noon]

Here’s the story from Jeff Foust.

[Update a while later]

[Thursday-morning update]

Here‘s Marina Koren’s take:

A wiring error caused workers to apply too much voltage to the spacecraft’s pressure transducers, severely damaging them. And during an acoustics test, which examines whether hardware can survive the loud sounds of launch, the fasteners designed to hold the sun shield together came loose. The incident scattered 70 bolts, and engineers scrambled to find them. They’re still looking for a few. “We’re really close to finding every one of the pieces,” Zerbuchen said.

These three errors alone resulted in a schedule delay of about 1.5 years and $600 million, Young said.

I think that’s about Northrop Grumman’s annual net income. If I were NASA, I’d tell them that if they ever want another NASA contract, they’ll eat it themselves.

[Update a while later]

Alex Witze has more, over at Nature.

General Science, Mathematics, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

The Risk Of Spaceflight

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A new paper assessing spaceflight mortality. Not sure how useful it is, given the admitted paucity of data.

[Update a few minutes later]

When a Mars simulation goes wrong. Yes, we have a lot to learn before we go to other planets, and even then, people will die, often in terrible ways. Part of the answer is that we have to be more ambitious about how many we send. Six simply isn’t enough.

Business, Culinary, General Science, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

The History Of Sugar And Its Health Impacts

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An interesting interview with Gary Taubes:

In the science in which I was raised—physics and chemistry, the hard sciences—the last thing you want to do is get an assumption accepted into the theory of how things work without rigorously testing it, because then people will build on it and it will grow and infect the whole thought construction. You end up with, I’m going to beat this metaphor to death, but sort of a house of cards. And there will be no way to go back on it. In a field like nutrition and obesity research, you’ve now got these enormous institutional dogmas built in that I and others are arguing are simply wrong. How do you get the institutions to change their belief systems?

The British Medical Journal is running a series on nutrition policy, and their way of dealing with it is by assigning writers from these different belief systems. So I’m a co-author on an article on dietary fat, along with the former head of the Harvard nutrition department who thinks I’m the worst journalist he’s ever met and who does a form of science that I consider a pseudoscience.

It’s just nuts.