Part of the story is everyone being shocked at being under budget and ahead of schedule. I don't know everything, but I think this is reasonably attributable to the fact that this is a retrofit of an obsolete spy satellite. The leftovers of the security sector will be the most advanced scientific space surveyor. I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.
This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.
Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).
The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.
The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.
From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.
Isn't that also how Hubble started? I'd assume there's a lot of lessons learned to avoid costly research on conversion of the platform.
Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.
Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.
1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.
No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.
> I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.
Things aren't as simple as more money = more good.
Rapid progress requires adversity, the kind you'll find when nations compete for military power, for example.
Adversity forces a scientific budget and for jobs to be created in related research areas. For some reason we don’t find it important to maintain that level of funding when there’s no adversity.
People shouldn't be shocked that employees of the US government can deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget.
The problems are that anyone gave Musk/doge the time of day and that we're too used to the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors.
Musks company provides not only the most cost effective but also the most reliable access to space that is currently unparalleled by any other company.
We should thank the government for spending tax money efficiently.
You should blame the legacy aerospace companies whom purposely inflate contracts and take forever to do things for there being a lack of competition, not Musk.
As I see it Musk is lobbying the goverment to give him money to do useless stuff & expensive in space like land on the moon again - basically redirecting funds away from useful stuff like the James Webb Telescope for publicity stunts. Not any different from the legacy aerospace companies, who also lobbied like crazy, except on a bigger, dumber scale.
Starship is mostly funded by Starlink.
Yes, Musk is a crappy character, but that's not a reason to make things up. This isn't Reddit.
Starship isn't actually operational. I'll let you look at their plans for it and you can tell me if they involve doing things the goverment would pay for like landing on the moon and building space stations or not.
Then you see it wrong. Plans for returning humans to the surface of the moon have been being developed for longer than you've known Musk's name.
The Artemis program was developed out of the Constellation program, which was initiated sometime around 2005 or 6.
How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Of course there have long been plans to go back to the moon because its a cool fun thing to do and whoever happens to be president would likely be well remembered for taking credit for it. That doesn't give it credibility as a useful endeavor.
> How is landing on the moon not a publicity stunt? What can the humans do that massively cheaper robots couldn't - besides take some awesome photos and bring back some more moon rocks?
Humans have intuition and curiosity, they can spot something quickly in the distance that looks peculiar, go to it and quickly inspect it.
That's fine, we all have our personal heros and villains. But don't be so disingenuous with your arguments or your reasoning.
Even if it is a publicity stunt it was not lobbied by Elon Musk. Also Jeff Bezos Blue Origin got more money for the Artemis program.
I see. And how do you you know that elon, a notably close supporter of the president didn't have anything to do with the Artemis program? I notice that Chinese electric vehicles are essentially banned in the US, but probably that had nothing to do with Elon as well right? And what does it matter if Blue Origin also made money on the Artemis program?
No need to be so combative.
> the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors
Are you talking about SLS?
Oh maybe you'd say that is "Senate Launch System", it's complicated, job program, 50 states sharing, and so on?
At least it works unlike Starship. But yes both SLS and Starship are handouts to political donors.
Maybe other space companies would be under budget and on time if they weren't run by Nazi drug addicts. I'm not typing a name but everyone reading this knows who I am a talking about.