The pig flies in two weeks

Porky the Telescope is coming.

The article considers in part how to raise, not just mass, but diameter beyond Earth-Luna escape, here STL2. Although I blogged that already. I am, further, tonight, holding off on the "Latinx" posturing of this half-brasileirão and highly privileged family; that is why we have Ace. So anyway -

Maybe Webb is launching Christmas Eve. More likely Holy Family Day - "Boxing Day", if you like. Launch windows to STL2 are allowed until 6 January; then the Moon gets in the way for another week. A large problem here, in terms of cost-overrun, was Inventory, a class of "waste" for the Agile method. We actually must keep this thing in liquid nitrogen like a superconductor - constantly. There's a (literally) cool $10M for every month it's not in space.

One hero(ine) here - if you are a hard Democrat voter like Peter Woit - was Senatrix Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. Some of us non-Acela types consider the Webb project as a excessive expenditure on par with... an aircraft-carrier.

Would we have been better off awaiting a Lunar colony and assembling it all in a lava-tube... maaaaybe. Would we have been better off awaiting the Starship to cut launch cost. I am unsure. I am more sure those would have been better priorities than this nice-to-have telescope.

But that's just it, isn't it? Once the costs are sunk, we have to keep spending to ensure it is not all wasted, like that Superconducting Supercollider in Waco was abandoned thus wasted. Money must be allocated for maintenance and for additional safety protocol. Elon can fail, up to a point, if his costs are in the mid-millions. Once in the hundred-millions, a project cannot fail and balloons to the billions. And then the porkers in the Senate come out and say, "if you can spend $x billion on this, why not a piddling $y million on MY district".