Finally. It's About F**king Time. (WEBB: 25 Dec 2021)

[MagicManICT]

Pretty sure that you can do better than that with good observatory near your home and the camera on your phone.

[Veliaf]

I like how I see stupid arguments about 'tax paying dollars going to this' and so on. First off, what NASA is funded with, is pretty small amount to what else government has funded, like the military and so on, and it's not like that has been used better either (Not to mention proportially it's smaller than it was back in the 1960s). Secondly, NASA also has international efforts contributed to it, we don't live in an isolated Space War era anymore, and to actually get something done, it's better to put all of the sticks in one basket rather than pile separate ones. Also alot of the funding going into science that's directly trying to research space and expand our understanding of it and it is what our core pillar of our understanding of space and the universe, comes from.

Real life is not a movie either, and there are alot of complications out of our atmosphere that can rise, and require alot of moderation, for let's say a human to be flown into space first off. It's why there are alot critics and general mockery towards Elon Musk with his plans of trying colonize space (mostly to the claim that the credit goes to him), which even then, he's relying on his relationship with NASA onto his projects and co-operating with them. Not to mention increasing the public interest into space, in the first place, because NASA relies on public funding and is actually underfunded to upkeep space shuttle program, which is just one part of NASA. It's why they're also co-operating with SpaceX, for their space shuttle program simply.

[Killshot47]

9.5 billion cost / 144.3 million American tax payers... you paid roughly $66 over the course of 14 years if you were a tax payer that whole time.. it's not that crazy guys . This thing's really cool

[vatas]

[MagicManICT]

A complete side note: new thoughts have been going into faster than light travel, and how it might actually be feasible, so this telescope becomes even more important if we don't want to blindly travel years to some other star and find no planets more habitable than Mars or the Moon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZset72bHLI

[Nightdawg]

I'mma ignore the big red square and focus on the important stuff:

There's a big $100.000.000.000 treasure burried somewhere on Mars.
Gather up the boys, we're going space piratin'

Where's my space Knarr key...

[shubla]

Money doesn't work like many think it works, I think.
You cannot send stuff to space with money. You cannot win wars with money.
You need scientists, engineers and natural resources to send stuff to space, you need weapons, soldiers and strategists to win a war.
If budget of nasa was multiplied by 10, you couldn't send 10 rovers to mars or whatever. There wouldn't be any scientists for that.
You would have to educate and train more of them, assuming that there even are enough motivated/gifted people, which there probably are not.
Most gifted engineers and scientists often aren't motivated by money at all.

How governments spend their currency also matters:

Average soldier is quite dumb likely. Paying him some salary allocates his labor to doing soldiering and probably flows back to the government very soon via tax etc.
So its quite harmless use of money, not much was lost, just some hours off some random not-well-educated guys life.

But now consider if the same amount of money is spent on buying minerals from Congo to manufacture new cool phones for example. Now the US citizens haven't yet lost anything, but they own debt (the money given) to Congo.
Now the Congolese can for example contract some top scientists from US to work on their mining projects, instead of building space telescopes for NASA.
So people of US got some nice phones now, but lost their top scientists to work on improving Congolese mining operations instead of space stuff.

A bit odd and simple example but I hope you get the point. In real world it works in similar way except its way more complicated, but the principle is still the same, money that government uses cannot reallly be measured by just the amount spent.

[Harthel]

Check out this fancy website to see the progress of the JWST.

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbL ... sWebb.html

Primary mirror will be deploying soon.

[mvgulik]

Primary Mirror Deployment Has Begun. The first part that is. (Deployed)

The second part will be covered by NASA Live.
> January 8, Saturday - No earlier than 9 a.m (UTC-5). - Live coverage of the unfolding of the second of the James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror wings, marking the end of the observatory deployments.

So far JWST deployments where as smooth as a babies bottom.

[mvgulik]

All major JWST deployments where successful.

>...the remaining five and a half months of commissioning, which consist of settling into stable operating temperature, aligning the mirrors, and calibrating the science instruments.