The pace of innovation should slow, as innovations become increasingly more difficult. The low hanging fruit naturally is discovered/built first.
Fusion power harder than Fission, Webb harder than Hubble, bigger particle smashers harder than smaller. Sometimes earlier innovations allow you to accelerate the next innovation but eventually you get diminishing returns.
We older tech and science nerds need to be careful not to fall in the “kids these days” traps. The kids are allright, the innovations of the past were full of chaos irrationally and mistakes as well.
I am still surprised when people underestimate the absurd complexity of this project.
This is a novel masterpiece of science and engineering, not a jet fighter or rocket destined for mass production and deployment. There will only ever be one, so there's literally zero room for error. Better to measure twice and cut once, so to speak.
These projects are subject to incredibly rigorous post-mortem investigations, and each cost and time overrun is _already_ documented thoroughly and publicly. Congress doesn't give this money away lightly. We know exactly why, and when, things took longer than expected, and those lessons learned are already being applied to subsequent observatories like Roman.
It's a ridiculously complicated machine built to peer into the beginnings of the universe and sniff out indications of life across our galaxy. I think people could cut them a little slack. I'm sure they had amazingly complex issues and obstacles to overcome.
Apollo also cost $280B inflation adjusted, so like 25x. And Apollo was a mad dash, with many risks taken. JWST is slow and steady. Like I'm a space buff and even I was pretty surprised when I learned how cowboy the moon decent in particular was. They had one shot, and had to fly the lander by hand, without any actual experience (they had to rely on a super cool craft which offset the weight to act like 1/6g).
Like... Apollo was utterly bonkers, bordering on full-Kerbal, in so many ways. It cost lives (5 training flight accidents, 3 in Apollo 1 fire), almost lost another 3 in Apollo 13.
JWST is proving out tons of new science and technology, but at a much more pedestrian peace.
So what? Was the Apollo program more complicated than the instruments on JWST? They are two very, very different missions with different requirements. In many ways, each mission is unique in its own ways and I don’t see much value in comparing them on such basic metrics. Why is the time it takes important?
No, the rate of funding is slowing down, and unlike Apollo there's no political urgency to the JWST. With 5x the funding you could afford to have less stringent manufacturing and verification (resulting in less cost-per-telescope and build time) and just accept that even if one of the telescopes fails, you can just build and send up another (or another five).
Absolutely yes. The apollo's feat, of landing a lander in a different body, with people in it, and making sure that lander lifted off the moon, and got back home safe was astonishing accomplishment.
Especially with the rudimentary computers and calculations of the time. The James Web Telescope, is a great feat, but not in the same league as the moon landings.
Apollo was amazing and the feat in guidance and navigation computers was astonishing. No one will dispute that. But let's not glorify it and discount all present missions.
Building an observatory is VERY difficult. Nevermind the "avionics" for an L2 mission, the manufacturing of the sensors, mirrors, and all the other mechanical parts are one-of-a-kind.
Webb is without a doubt an amazing feat of engineering and the engineering teams had to confront problems that were not even thought of for Apollo. Massive respect to them.
once again, not a moral claim or even disputing that apollo was exceptional — but that does not change the fact that this reflects a slower rate of innovation
Yep, I agree. I was replying to my parent comment that said Apollo was more complicated than Webb. I think they are very different amazing missions that you can't compare.
Given that Apollo landed on the Moon during the Cold War and the space race with Russia, it's incredible what injecting a percentage of the US defense budget into NASA can accomplish.
Why not? It seems an amazingly complex bit of engineering. The Apollo missions are impressive in their own right, but are they really that much more complex from an engineering perspective? The tolerances and precision required for JWST to be functional must be incredibly tight.
Indeed, we must keep in mind that the tolerance for failure was higher even as the cost of failure was higher. Do not forget the astronauts taken by Soyuz and Apollo.
We are slow because we need to send stuff in orbit and so they need to survive launch and fit into the launcher. That adds 99% of the complexity.
If, instead, we would build stuff in orbit it would be much cheaper and faster as you don't need origami like folding, high Gs resistance, and a malfunctioning piece can be replaced easily.
>If, instead, we would build stuff in orbit it would be much cheaper and faster as you don't need origami like folding, high Gs resistance, and a malfunctioning piece can be replaced easily.
I am expecting still is much more cheaper to create bigger rockets then move the factories,the workers and everything they need in orbit.
Near term - yes, long term you want to use those rockets to put the people, factories and general infra in place to build the really massive telescopes, in the hundred meter to kilometer size categories.
Not to mention crazy long range VLBI radio setups or telescopes at the edge of the solar system using the gravity lensing of the Sun to observe things.
>long term you want to use those rockets to put the people,
Sure, maybe in very limited capacity, like why not build stuff in giant parts like giant lego blocks on the planet
and have some robots and a few people assemble it in orbit.
Rather then have 10K people work extremely inefficient and dangerous in zero gravity(I am assuming you mean we capture asteroids and we build stuff from bare minerals up). Imagine what extremely expensive factories you need that work in zero gravity(things fly everywhere at a small bump) , so maybe first we build a giant rotating space station using parts made on Earth.
In the long term we should have better rockets , maygbe we pt a space station in the important points in our solar system and send them this big lego parts so they can just assemble them.
Personally I see no way humans can live and work more efficient in space compared to live and build stuff on Earth and pay some guys to build big rockets and move the stuff into space, even in long term. What we are missing today is the ability to have guys present when the telescope unfolds to help with problems and manually do fine calibrations, if we could have that we could build a giant mirror made from small parts and have people just help connect the parts
> If, instead, we would build stuff in orbit it would be much cheaper and faster as you don't need origami like folding, high Gs resistance, and a malfunctioning piece can be replaced easily.
Are you sure it would be cheaper? Building orbital build facility would be so expensive. Housing staff to build in the orbit or investing in robotics isn't cheap (or possible) either. So it's cheaper to include hardening against high-G launches than build orbital facility for the amount of launches that need this kind of preparations.
There is building stuff in orbit and there is learning to build stuff in orbit. We’re still figuring out the later. Microgravity factories and construction have many benefits. We just haven’t figured out the how just yet.
A better lesson to take here is second system syndrome [1].
JWST took so long because it was so ambitious. Hubble has a 2.4m mirror. JWST has a 6.5m mirror. No rocket can launch that fully assembled so you've automatically added a bunch of complexity to unfurl and assemble that in space.
There's a whole bunch of other new things that simply have never been done before. Any one of these is a challenge. Doing them all at once with almost no margin for error and no possibility of intervention and repair drastically increases the complexity and cost.
Another example: the instruments are so sensitive that after fairing release it has to be rotated to keep them away from direct sunlight. That'll continue on the journey to its final orbit.
Also the sunshields are tennis court sized.
It is mind-bogglingly complex.
Arguably what they should've done is launch something slightly less ambitious sooner.
Important goals can take long efforts to achieve. For something as novel and complex as JWST, I don't find its quarter-century development time surprising or odious.
Cathedral Notre Dame was begun in 1163, took 182 years to complete. We moderns recognize it as a thing of beauty (pre-blaze), but I'm sure it was a tour de force for technology of the times, with many unexpected problems that delayed the project.
I'm glad each project's sponsors saw them through to completion. I hope humanity continues to sign up for hard goals that take time to reach.
> The pace of innovation appears to have slowed greatly in recent decades.
Nope. We as a society have just re-evaluated what is the innovation we want. In the old days it was moon programs and nuclear technology (for good and bad). Later we deemed circumventing financial regulation and getting people click ads more important.
The skillset required to do Difficult a Thing, Fast is independent to the skillset required for being a smart scientist.
Moving quickly requires very specific managerial skills & risk appetites.
Legacy scientific institutions (like NASA, or most universities) have basically succumbed to extreme Peter Principle: everyone has been promoted to their level of incompetence. Excellent thinkerw can make catastrophic managers.
This is a known issue in startup land, and mitigations have a been learned. Examples: independent, deep career paths for mangers and contributors. A funding model that is milestones based with minimal barriers to entry.
SpaceX of course being some sort of proof in this regard.
It's not just NASA of course. Look at ITER--a fusion project started in 2007 with an expected completion date of 2025. Or the Second Avenue Subway, or any number of infrastructure projects.
If you wrote a company manual designed to maximize the odds of failure, you'd end up with something pretty close to the way academic and govt projects are run.
The problem with this comparison is that most people don’t know enough to understand how much more difficult a project like ITER or the James Webb telescope is than what startups try to do.
It's quite amazing that a few hundred ksloc of Javascript gluing together a bunch of npm packages can be valued on the same order of magnitude (in the billions) as a multi-decade scientific/heavy engineering undertaking.
With an online business you're not placing the value on the software created, but on the potential to create lasting addiction.
The same way when you see news of large drug busts, the numbers floated around are based on how much the confiscated load could fetch on the street (iow. end of the chain, with addicts paying through the nose) - not on how much it cost to manufacture.
Doing things the first time is always more expensive then doing them the 10000th time even if the 10000th is slightly different than the 9999 before it.
Project like Webb and ITER are doing things that simply haven't been done before which makes it much more difficult. They are also beholden to politicians for funding.
Dude, we're talking building a space machine to observe objects light years away.
100 years ago, they would pick up trash on horse carriage.
500 years ago, they'd burn witches if the cows caught a virus in the village.
2000 years ago, Europe didn't write, in most countries...
It took 20 years to build this insane machine. Did we truly slow down :D Maybe americans have become biased, but as a French, just launching this thing in a machine that can launch 80 successive and productive payloads in space is a positive sign of progress compared to how far our country was 2000 years ago compared to its peers in Asia and Africa.
Targets get constantly closer to physical limits, that makes pace of innovation always decelerate. I can only see 2 situations where pace of innovation accelerates: a new discovery like was the transistor or a new area of research like was with the radio.
There are innovations which feed back on themselves, usually involving greater precision or density. Microprocessors are the cononical case, where reducing the size of transistors reduces distances, energy requirements, heat management, and increases (to the square) component density enabling more capacity in the same volume.
The picture becomes rapidly less impressive when we look at where that processing goes, in many cases much of it is consumed with processing that's not directly related to useful output, though one area that has benefitted greatly has been usability: a computer user used to be a very highly skilled and trained position, now infants and those with severe cognitive or other impairments can make productive use of computers --- a lot of processing power goes into simply expanding the potential user-base.
(This isn't a slight or dig at who computer users are at present, though I admit some frustrations with how this transforms mass-market platforms, devices, and software away from power-user capabilities and interests.)
Network-dynamics systems (which microprocessors arguably are) can also see similar types of dynamics, at least over a range of scale.
In many other domains though, the engineering possibility frontier is one of sharply diminishing returns, after even only a fairly trivially small amount of initial progress. Occasionally there are bursts of progress, often as two separte areas of technological develoopment are integrated together, but even that often provides only a brief period of high returns.
What I see lacking is even a rudimentary model of what domains within technology do and do not afford for accelerating returns to scale, or what the bounds and limits of the exceptions might be, or what the actual delivered net benefit of such accelerating returns might be.
Machining (specifically, lathing) is an even earlier example of improving precision feedback loops. See “Machine Thinking” on Youtube, very well produced and entertaining.
That's an excellent channel, I've watched a number of the videos and strongly second the recommendation.
Precision generally is an area of positive feedbacks just as you describe. I only know a small amount about the practices, but the ability to measure and control with high degrees of precision have brought forth a tremendous set of advances, microprocessors being amongst them, but hardly the only.
The pharmaceuticals industry relies on precise control over feedstocks, process, consistency, and logistics chain (especially where temperature-controlled distribution is required).
Metallurgy similary developed with control over the quality of feedstocks, temperatures, pressures, and overall processing, as well as the ability to directly assess outputs, crystal structures, and the like.
Microsurgery relies on tools, sensors, and measurement, as well as coordination amongst a surgical team.
Tunnelling and mining can now occur with phenomenal precision through solid rock.
That's just a handful of examples off the top of my head as someone outside the field. I'm missing numerous highly notable examples I'm sure.
“Development began in 1996 for a launch that was initially planned for 2007”
“Construction was completed in late 2016, after which an extensive testing phase began”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
While it’s great that it’s finally up, we should re-evaluate why it takes such a long time to develop these projects.
The pace of innovation appears to have slowed greatly in recent decades.