Floundering on Earth, Unbeaten in Space

The James Webb Telescope is out latest achievement and it once again proves that left the hell alone by politicians, we are at our absolute best when out of their reach.

Everyone who is still alive remembers the American  moon landing.

It was  the 20th of July in 1969 and my then-wife and I were at Jill Reinhold’s home in Highland Park, because they had a huge color television screen. It was great theater and, like Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile in track, the breaking of the space barrier went on to allow six more crewed landings between 1969 and 1972. Break an unbreakable barrier and then see how quickly others break it again.

It’s remarkable the things we can do if politicians stand aside. NASA is government at its best and the United Nations at its worst—the difference is politics.

But the Webb telescope moves the goal-posts by a million miles.

The Hubble telescope, from which we have been getting incredible photographs for decades, orbits the earth at a 340-mile distant track. The James Webb scope orbits at one million miles and it doesn’t orbit the Earth, it orbits the Sun, while in the Earth’s shadow. How cool is that?

The James Webb project was a joint-venture between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). Science, left to its own devices and given a target, can accomplish some amazing things.

A brief look under the hood.

(Wikipedia) It is designed to provide improved infrared resolution and sensitivity over Hubble, viewing objects up to 100 times fainter than the faintest objects detectable by Hubble. This will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observations of some of the oldest and most distant objects and events in the Universe (including the first stars and the formation of the first galaxies), and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.

Everyone seems attached to the hope of ‘habitable exoplanets,’ although we already occupy one that suits very well—or at least did, until we pretty much bumped into all the furniture and made the place a wreck. Considering the costs involved, wouldn’t it be a good bet to invest what’s needed in saving this one?

Continuing with Wikipedia, Webb's primary mirror, the Optical Telescope Element, consists of 18 hexagonal mirror segments made of gold-plated beryllium which combine to create a 21 foot diameter mirror. This gives Webb's telescope a light collecting area about five and a half times as large as Hubble’s. Unlike Hubble, which observes in the near ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared spectra, Webb will observe in a lower frequency range, from long-wavelength visible light (red) through mid-infrared. This will enable it to observe high-redshift objects that are too old, faint, and distant for Hubble. The telescope must be kept 370 degrees below zero to observe faint signals in the infrared without interference from any other sources of warmth, so it will be deployed in space near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, a point in space about 930,000 miles from Earth, where its 5 layer kite-shaped sunshield can protect it from warming by the Sun, Earth and Moon at the same time.

Meanwhile, here on Earth we tremble at the possibility of war with Russia over Ukraine and war with China over Taiwan.

We can unfold a gold-plated heat shield the size of a tennis court, communicating with an extremely complicated piece of machinery a million miles from Earth and yet have trouble negotiating with Vladimir Putin across a table. Oh, excuse me, that’s probably because the Webb telescope is inanimate and has no ego.

Aha, a truth unfolds: ego is bad and no ego gets things done—incredibly complicated things. Mmmm, I’ll have to think about that for a while, somewhere off in a dark and quiet room.

Which might be a useful talking-point with both Putin and Xi.

They each have considerable investments and expectations in space, as does the United States. Each of them must understand on some conscious level the advantages of the missing scientific ego. It’s an incredibly short-sighted strategy here on Earth to complicate the problems of Ukraine and Taiwan by ego-driven pissing contests. Saving face is a losers game if it comes at the expense of destroyed economies, countless lives lost and cities turned into smoldering ruins.

It’s one of President Harry Truman’s most memorable quotes that “It’s amazing what you can get done if you don’t care who gets the credit.”