While it‘s awesome to finally see the JWST finally come to close to launch after all those years, now it‘s a close race between it and SpaceX Starship that could have taken the 6.5 meter mirror up to space in one whole piece in its 9m diameter belly rather than having to do all the miraculous origami that took two decades to develop in the first place…
While I'm rooting for SpaceX with Starship, lets be clear: they're still trying to get hovering grain silo versions working. Meanwhile JWT is ready to go. If it's a race one side has already won rather emphatically.
Actually, they're well beyond the "grain silos" by now. They've successfully demonstrated the "bellyflop" landing maneuver from a terminal velocity fall, and now they're (credibly) trying to launch a full prototype Starship stack to orbit within the next few months.
Wiki says JWST is planned to launch by this November, so I think there is a decent chance Starship beats it into space. That won't be a production-ready vehicle, and launching anything valuable on it (let alone something like the JWST) would be certifiable, but let's give credit where it's due.
I know where SpaceX is. Elon does have a clear history of being overly optimistic about timelines.
There's a zero percent chance they'll have a vehicle ready by the JWT launch date that could launch it instead, even if they get to orbit by then.
This is not a race. As I said I'm a SpaceX fan, but I am not a fan of every single space topic being derailed by "but what about SpaceX?" as if they're the only company doing things meaningful in the industry. They're the super cool new kid on the block, but there's still a lot more out there that doesn't deserve to constantly be lampooned for not being SpaceX.
I mean, Musk may be famous for his "optimistic" timelines, but you completely misrepresented their progress. "Still trying to get hovering grain silo versions working" is not remotely accurate.
That's the only point of my previous comment: give credit where it's due, as I said. I agree with most or all of the other things you've said in this subthread.
I am giving credit. I'll call it working when they've demonstrated repeated access to orbit. Until they, they are indeed playing with flying grain silo prototypes, even if they landed one belly flop maneuver.
In any case, this is the exact sort of argument I find entirely wasteful of energy, and a distraction from what we should be talking about in this thread, which is JWT.
No, you aren't. "Still trying to get hovering grain silo versions working" is not an accurate characterization of the current state of Starship development: they had hovering in the bag months ago, and have since demonstrated much more challenging and impressive capabilities.
> I'll call it working when they've demonstrated repeated access to orbit. Until they, they are indeed playing with flying grain silo prototypes, even if they landed one belly flop maneuver.
None of this is germane to the problems with your original statement. It's just empty snark--if you want to call rockets "grain silos", I'm not going to try to stop you, though I might caution you against erasing your ability to identify actual silos full of grain.
> In any case, this is the exact sort of argument I find entirely wasteful of energy, and a distraction from what we should be talking about in this thread, which is JWT.
I'm just here to correct the record, which I think is reasonable as there's a lot of weird SpaceX misinformation out there, both "for" and "against". Personally I don't understand why people can't just sit back and watch what happens, without putting their own spin on it.
> if you want to call rockets "grain silos", I'm not going to try to stop you, though I might caution you against erasing your ability to identify actual silos full of grain.
The Falcon 9 has had 126 missions so far and only 2 of those were failures. It's not a perfect record, but it's pretty decent. And presumably SpaceX has learned from those failures. Compare that to the Ariane 5 rockets (which will actually be launching the James Web Space Telescope) which has had 109 launches, and 5 of them ended in failure.
I'm just going to assume you're referring to Starship's various explosions. It's far too early in the Starship development cycle to draw any kind of conclusions about it's reliability.
Starship is a prototype. It's a completely new vehicle with completely new engines, and they're building it with the expectation that the early versions are going to blow up. It's like saying Falcon 9 is unreliable because their early "grasshopper" prototype (for testing landing) exploded and at times. Also probably a good idea to note that these explosions all happened during their landing attempt, so in theory any payload onboard would have already been deployed. It's just the vehicle that would be lost. Of course they're still so early in the development cycle that Starship hasn't even attempted an orbital flight yet.
I get that it's weird watching these very early prototypes blow up so spectacularly and publicly, but that's the development model SpaceX has chosen. And we're not used to watching rockets being built and tested so out in the open. Personally I think it's exciting watching the progress they're making.
That's how space travel development works. It doesn't take off; it crashes; it explodes; it fails to land; it works. From then on pretty much, it works.
What is that based on? How do you distinguish launch systems that just don't work well? Everything works in the end? That would make engineering much easier and less stressful!
I’m unaware of any launch system that gets many tries at failures - it either gets what needs to be done relatively quickly or it gets cancelled. The number of tries you get is usually single digits.
Falcon 9 (and Heavy) has not experienced any kind of mission failure since 2016, the latter period accounting for (if I'm counting right) 69% of its total launches including the Amos-6 pad failure (which did not actually launch). Its actual failure rate is 1.5%.
It's not a track record that deserves any more derision than its contemporaries. Doing so in such vague terms just makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about, which goes double if you're thinking not of F9, but rather of those big shiny rockets they've been blowing up in Boca Chica recently. That (Starship) is a development program.
