Hubble Space Telescope's successor goes into testing

AdamSmith · November 5, 2016

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In some small encouraging countermeasure to all my comment on how we have Broken The Planet, a sliver of human progress:

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb was one of the very effective generation of early NASA administrators) is entering the physical-testing stage of development. With a much bigger mirror surface than Hubble, it should reveal wonders untold.

For starry-eyed futurists such as your umble narrator, it is encouraging at the same time as a depressing reminder of all we lost when Nixon cancelled, in a failure of both imagination and nerve (which phrase Arthur C. Clarke used in his book Profiles of the Future to describe the twin demons that cause otherwise qualified scientists and technicians to fail to accurately forecast the future in their field of endeavor), phase two of Apollo, the "Apollo Applications Program."

Which could have led to permanently manned moon colonies for purposes such as constructing and operating telescopes which, given the low lunar gravity, could have mirror diameters measured not in meters but literally in acres. Not to mention the infinite improvement in resolving capacity from operating in vacuum instead of through atmosphere.

Ditto in spades for what could have been miles-across radiotelescopes, operating on the moon's far side to shield them from the radio racket emanating from earth.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/04/nasa-testing-james-webb-space-telescope-gold

AdamSmith · November 5, 2016

I condemn Nixon especially because he did not cancel the expenditures for the Apollo Applications Program out of ignorance, or out of insensitivity to all its potential benefits, scientific and body-politic emotional and spiritual. To his credit, he was very much alive to all those both concrete and ineffable paybacks of the Apollo investment. He spoke with Armstrong by phone during the moonwalk; he personally flew out to the recovery carrier in the Pacific to greet the Apollo 11 crew on their return; he was deeply and I'm convinced sincerely engaged throughout, and in his public remarks at the successful conclusion of, the Apollo 13 crisis. Not to discount the self-aggrandizing aspect of all that, but he was in no way unalive to all that Apollo meant to both the nation and humankind in that era.

So doubly my disappointment and disgust that he did not defend the program in the face of the general troubles wrought by the early 1970s recession, spiking energy prices, broad public disillusionment with most everything engendered by the Vietnam war, etc.

He could have. He had the capacity and energy and imagination to rise to meet the occasion, as he showed when he was at his best as a statesman.

Such a vast pity.