Despite being named after a White guy who would have owned slaves if he had lived prior to 1861, and probably looked at a woman with impure thoughts, the James Webb telescope was successfully launched.
Of course, this is “success” by NASA’s standards which means, “spending gobs of other people’s money with nothing to show for it because all our products get put someplace where no one will ever see them again”.
Just going to prove one more time that there is no limit to what one may accomplish with $10 Billion dollars of other people’s money.
True, the JW Telescope is probably 100 times more powerful that the famous Hubble scope. But what is it really expected to see for all that investment? really clear pictures of things very far away, in the IR spectrum, that will then get digitized and sent back to earth where they will be reinterpreted by NASA graphic artists and published so people can go “OOOH”. This is much better than the old way back when the NASA graphic artists just made shit up and skipped the geeky stuff.
I wonder what could have been done with all that government loot instead of launching a spectacular telescope, that only a tiny handful of humans will ever use or get any benefit from. And by benefit, I mean drawing a paycheck to design and build it and then launching it into a space where no one will ever see it again. This is just like the novel 1984 where the world needed to be constantly at war to consume the excess supplies from the economy. NASA’s only mission is building pristinely expensive things and then launching them into space, never to see them again.
Even the most optimistic projections of success in this case includes only satisfying the curiosity of a few hundred space geeks. Dear space geeks: It’s nice that you have a hobby. Use your own money next time.
It is also funny in a bizarre way that all those anti-capitalist anti-corporatists people never complain about how when NASA builds something with tens of billions of sweet government cash. It’s as if they never heard of the fact that NASA doesn’t actually build anything. All of their rockets and space geek stuff are built by huge defense contractors.
For all that money invested in the space program, we haven’t learned anything that was beneficial to humans who were not getting fat paychecks for being in the World-Industrial-Space-University Complex (WiSuc).
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