Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Real Engineering" channel.

Ah, so you don't understand the climate problem, either, but you felt strongly that you needed to leave a nonsensical comment about it. Well, it is the internet, after all. :-)
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@farrier2708 Yes, responding with a lengthy logical argument to an average internet troll's bullshit would be far more nonsensical. :-)
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@farrier2708 Exactly. Pointing out that you are talking bullshit is all I am going to do. :-)
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Because JWST development began in 1996 and Elon Musk didn't start SpaceX until 2002. If they wanted to achieve the same science goals today, they would plan for launch on a Starship and the design would be completely different, have a much lower complexity and a much lower risk and cost. It would probably look a lot more like a supersized Hubble.
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@polymathpark “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future!”. Having said that, I would agree that the JWST is a typical product of the less healthy side of government/private industry relations. It is congress spending money for spending's sake rather than as a result of careful deliberations. It has taken a lot of money away from other science programs that would probably have been just as, if not more important. That's just my two cents.
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They just gave Musk a close to $1 billion contract to de-orbit the ISS. How much do you think will it cost SpaceX to do that? $100 million, if that much. So what is the remainder of the money for? Well... SpaceX is building some very massive launch hardware for which there is absolutely no civilian use at the moment. If you really, really think that Starship is only there to make it possible for Elon Musk to die on Mars but not on impact, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale. Just for you because you will believe any nonsense.
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@lazarus2691 The ultra heavy national security launch system for the US government is Starship. So why a low cadence launcher like SLS as the front? Why would the US government want to signal to its adversaries that it plans to launch thousands of tons of military hardware, most likely including nuclear weapons, into space in the next decade? What purpose would that serve? Isn't it much better to pretend to be as smart as a dancing bear while the "crazy billionaire" is running loops around the US government... only to come "to the rescue" when the US government will "suddenly and miraculously" have enormous national security payloads ready to launch... which it pretended not to develop and for which it pretended not to have a launcher all this time. :-)
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Look, Ma! I found an armchair coach.
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What if somebody suggested to you that they spent $3 billion on the SLS program while laundering $20 billion into dark government programs? Would you believe that? Would the world suddenly make a lot more sense to you? I mean, it's not like the US government isn't good at paying $50,000 for nuclear bomber coffee machines that look like $29.99 Sears Catalog models, right? Did you ever believe that they really paid that much for a coffee maker? OK, so if you are smart enough not to believe that, then can you imagine that something similar has been going on with the Apollo, Shuttle, ISS and now Artemis programs? You are simply looking at the real cost of a cold war that has never stopped and that currently is on the brink of becoming a hot nuclear war.
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@jacquesfrancois4275 Give it five minutes and he will block you because you are not agreeing with him. :-)
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 @farrier2708 Yeah, that's just one more thing that causes a lot of misunderstandings among the scientifically naive. Sigh. :-)
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Can you list the patent numbers that you think are the most important? ;-)
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And there is the person who has never heard about energy storage. :-)
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@polymathpark One could argue that in an alternate history in which the Saturn V program had been continued, much cheaper, much larger instruments could have been launched decades earlier... Skylab, for instance, had over ten times the mass of the JWST... just imagine how much telescope we could have lifted into orbit on a Saturn V...
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@h.dejong2531 So that's what now? 2% of the total system cost? I would call that a great deal for ESA. :-)
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It's probably mostly the latter. I, too was amazed at the inefficiency of NASA and its contractors in the past. I did work for other branches of government R&D and they are a lot of things, but not inefficient. All of that changed when I heard Rumsfeld's admission that they couldn't "track" trillions of dollars in Pentagon funds. At that point it became obvious what size the US shadow funds are and we can assume that a significant part of NASA's budget is part of that money. There is a lot of cold war stuff going on behind the fences that is not officially acknowledge to and funded by Congress. As it should be. We do not want to tell our adversaries what programs we are running by disclosing them line item by line item.
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That's not much of a riddle. The US government has been funding shadow programs for decades through the cost of the Space Shuttle program and then the ISS. I would assume that a significant part of the Apollo program was also a shadow funding program. It's not like the US government is particularly extreme with these measures. Take a peak at what Saudi Arabia is doing right now. If you actually believe that they are building a 100+ mile linear city in the desert, then I got a bridge in a large American city for sale. :-)
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@lazarus2691 Let me ask you this... given that we are in a cold war with China and in a hot war with Russia, do you really still believe that we are doing all this "just" to go back to the moon? Really? Does that make any sense to you?
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Dude, a 700MW cable in this scenario is like laying CAT5 to the power outlets in your home. Only an idiot would do that. If one were to power much of Europe by cable from North Africa, it would be done with multi-GW connections. $150 million is child's play, anyway. Even that 700MW cable transports $15,000 worth of electricity per hour, in other words, it would pay for itself in 1000 hours, which is less than six weeks. Your economics arguments are off in both directions.
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Boeing is one of the nation's military industrial contractors. They are doing a lot of things in the light and then they are doing some in the shadows. Those in the shadows are partially being paid for by NASA funding for what to us looks like outdated technology.
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