
The DOD had two "better-than-Hubble" space telescopes just sitting around. - pavel_lishin
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/06/hey-brother-can-you-spare-a-hubble-dod-sure-have-two/258061/
======
jimhefferon
I worked on the Hubble (my dad was systems manager for Perkin-Elmer's bid), on
the ball bearings. They are literally the ones that were rejected from the spy
sats.

The spy sats bought a bunch of ball bearings (these might be a foot in
diameter and are speced to be extremely low noise at low turn rates). They
tested them all (using a phono needle resting on the outside of the bearing
while it was slowly turned). The ones that made the least noise went in the
sat while the others were sealed in a plastic bag and put on a shelf in the
clean room.

I was told that when Hubble came along, the US no longer had the capability to
make those (I'm not sure if that was true). In any event the ones that went in
Hubble were the least noisy of the ones that had sat on the shelf. My summer
job was (largely) testing to see which was the best. A cool job.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
In a product design class, the prof asked us to draw the distribution of
resistors in a bag of, say, 5-ohm resistors, bought from a local electronics
shop.

It turned out that a normal distribution centered at 5 ohms was not quite
right. It was a normal distribution, but with a deep notch taken out right at
5 ohms. All the resistors that tested to very close tolerance had been bagged
separately, and sold at a higher price.

(The context was why you might want to put, say, four 5-ohn resistors in
series, rather than just use one nominal 20-ohm resistor.)

~~~
juiceandjuice
I hope your product design class covered error propagation, because one 1% 20
ohm resistor would still be cheaper and more precise than 4 5% 5 ohm
resistors.

~~~
klodolph
But four 5%-tolerance 5-ohm resistors could be chosen to add up to almost
exactly 20 ohms, but a 20-ohm resistor would never be 20 ohms due to the
notch.

In the old days, it might have been cheaper than the more accurate resistors.
These days, high precision resistors are relatively inexpensive.

------
InclinedPlane
"Better-than-Hubble" is flat out wrong here, the only correct interpretation
is "with larger apertures than Hubble", but there is so much more to a
telescope, especially one in Hubble's class. A spysat is optimized for taking
only exposures lasting a fraction of a second, for example, whereas Hubble is
optimized for taking exposures that last many minutes at a time, with guidance
that keeps Hubble pointed in the same direction to sub-pixel precision.

Let's take a moment to walk down the aisle with the label "Current Hubble
Science Instruments". First, we come upon WFC 3, a 4k x 4k high quantum
efficiency CCD imager with a wide field of view, spectral coverage from the
near-UV through visible spectrum and with 63 different narrow and wide-band
filters. Oh, and with a set of grisms and prisms for taking spectra, and with
a separate 1k x 1k IR sensor with 17 of its own filters. Next up is NICMOS, an
IR imager and spectrometer with a spectral range of 0.8 to 2.4 microns, this
instrument alone places Hubble into the rankings as one of the top 3 or 4 most
productive and capable Infrared telescopes in history all on its lonesome.
Then there is STIS, a 3 CCD sensor with coverage from far-UV through near-IR
wavelengths which is capable of taking high resolution spectra for 500
separate points simultaneously while also taking a full frame image, this
instrument alone is responsible for much of all of the astronomical
observations in the UV-range throughout all of history. And there are several
other equally impressive instruments I have not mentioned.

The point is, none of these instruments or capabilities are going to be on a
spysat. And they make up the vast majority of the value of a space based
observatory. If a space telescope was nothing more than a big mirror, some
guidance, and an imager then we could save billions of dollars, but they are
so much more than that.

~~~
luke_s
I honestly don't know the answer to this, so perhaps somebody can provide some
info: Does it cost more to produce the mirror or to produce the various CCD
imagers and science instruments?

It would seem to me that the CCD's should be cheaper - we have a LOT more
experience producing CCD's than we have producing 3 meter mirrors capable of
being launched into orbit. Surely the huge amount of research being put into
producing low noise CCD's for cameras and phones would have the effect of
making it easier and cheaper to produce the science instruments for a space
telescope?

~~~
sp332
NASA reps said the satellite itself and the optics are the most expensive and
time-consuming parts of the project.

------
jcnnghm
NASA has a fully functional copy of Hubble "sitting around" at Goddard Space
Flight Center as well. If something goes wrong in space, fabrication of
replacement components and the training of the astronauts that will fix it
does not occur in space. It is invaluable to have an exact duplicate on the
ground for this reason.

Interestingly, the total 2010 US Space budget was $64.6B. The entire rest of
the world combined spent only $22.5B. NASA's 2010 budget was $18.7B. Many
programs that people think are NASA projects are actually defense projects.
For example, the GPS system is not included in NASA's budget, it's spearheaded
by the Air Force Space Command, and comes out of the Defense budget.

Chances are the main satellites that these are duplicates for have been
decommissioned, so these are no longer needed. I would guess they are actually
two distinct but similar designs, and not two copies of the same design. I
would assume NASA already determined that the risk of these satellites failing
and NASA being incapable of fixing them is outweighed by the desire to have
higher powered telescopes in space.

My mother has worked in the thermal blanket lab at Goddard for years. Several
years ago, she got one of the engineers working on the James Webb Space
Telescope to take her and I on a tour of the clean room where they are
fabricating one of the core components, the micro-shutter array. The micro-
shutter array is an array of 65,536 shutters on an area about the size of a
postage stamp. We got to go into the clean room and see the entire process. It
is very similar to the process used to fabricate semiconductors, and I think
they were operating at about the 60nm level. The idea of the micro-shutter
array is that each shutter can be independently operated to shut out
interfering light sources, so that the telescope can look much further back in
space and time for deep fields. These should be spectacular. Instead of
imaging the entire shutter area as the Hubble does, JWST will be able to close
all but one micro-shutter which should allow very long exposure times, and the
ability to see extremely distant objects. More on the array at
<http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/microshutters.html>.

Edit: Also, the Hubble is huge. It is a cylinder with a diameter of perhaps
15ft and a height of roughly 40ft. Pictures really don't do it justice, I had
no appreciation for the size until I saw it. I know my mother did some of the
thermal blanket fabrication (think the tin-foil looking stuff on the outside
of spacecraft) for Servicing Mission 4.

~~~
excuse-me
There isn't a fully functional flight spare of Hubble sitting in bubble wrap
waiting to fly. There is a mockup of the Hubble structure and there were
flight spares for SOME optical components and some parts of instruments. The
mockup is to train astronauts on instrument swap outs. Many of the instruments
and the current solar panels aren't even Nasa builds

The "better than hubble" telescopes are old keyhole era spy sats, this is the
design Hubble was originaly based on. It's also partly the reason for the
original Hubble screw-up.

The contracts for Hubble went to companies that had experience building 2.4m
mirror space telescopes (nod+wink). But security walls in the suppliers meant
that the people who had build these spy sats didn't work on Hubble or pass on
their knowledge - then oversight of the Hubble build process was hampered by
security concerns that meant NASA QC engineers never got to see the mirror
being built.

A few other points.

The cost of the Hubble 'airframe' was a small part of the space telescope
cost, compared to the launch and service missions, the building of the STSci
and the 1000 of professors, postdocs, researchers and students that it funded.
Just the cost of storing it in a clean room for 3years after Challenger was
estimated at more than raw commercial build cost.

The JWST isn't just a better Hubble it's a completely different concept -
actually designed as a scientific instrument rather than compromised by being
a spy sat design built to justify the Shuttle launch - as HST was.

~~~
nessus42
I have to second this. I worked on two NASA space telescopes (both X-ray
telescopes), and although we had on the ground something like the telescopes
that were flown, the equipment on the ground was not flyable, and if the
launch rocket had blown up, we would have been SOL.

In fact, some of the folks down the hall from me had a telescope they were
working on fail to deploy properly after launch due to the canister containing
the telescope not opening. There was no spare telescope--they had to start
over from scratch.

~~~
samstave
So there is an unopened space telescope sitting in a canister in orbit?

Wouldn't a device to open. The canister be cheaper than starting from scratch?

~~~
nessus42
As I understand it, the designated time arrived and the canister was supposed
to be open, but wasn't. A latch had failed. One or more of the payloads inside
the canister started deploying themselves anyway, wrecking themselves and
everything else inside the canister.

The telescope in question wasn't worth terribly much, at least compared to a
Shuttle launch, which at the time cost at least $500 million, not including
the cost of any payload, so even if the telescope hadn't been ruined, trying
to rescue it wouldn't have made any sense.

There were some other satellites in the canister, however, and IIRC, the total
value of all the satellites was nothing to sneeze at.

------
lifeisstillgood
I've just worked it out.

Years ago I went to one of my first programming conferences , sat in the same
room as GvR and Stroustrop and had one of those what am _I_ doing here
moments. But it was an amazing revelation - hundreds of people way smarter
than me all of whom chatting where the side conversations and corridor chats
are always more interesting and informed than the set talks

HN is just like the corridor outside the worlds biggest tech conference. The
door bangs open and someone is talking about space and suddenly you realise
there are actual rocket scie fists standing in ear shot.

I used to want to write scintillating blog posts and bump my karma score. But
that happens in the main hall. Not in the corridors and I think I am happier
here, like a young guy open mouthed that brilliant people actually like
explaining stuff and it's beginning to make some sense...

~~~
hexagonal
You're already wiser than Walter Bright.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061222>

------
bradleyland
From Contact:

> "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at
> twice the price?" - Hadden

For once, art has under-imitated the hyperbole that is our life.

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Building two is hardly twice the cost. The design and development work has
surely got to be more costly than fabrication, assembly and installation.

Not that this nit-pick changes the nature of the discussion.

~~~
bradleyland
1) My comment wasn't meant as a serious critique of the situation

2) Econ isn't my forte anyway

C) You have my permission to stop being pedantic and laugh

D) I switched from numbers to letters, lest anyone develop the impression I am
at all serious

:) When you make bullet lists like this, you can throw in a smiley emoticon
and it will confuse at least a handful of people

6) Hope this made your Monday a little brighter :)

~~~
olliesaunders
Pure class. I love this guy.

------
sakai

        Asked whether anyone at NASA was popping champagne, 
        the agency’s head of science, John Grunsfeld, answered, 
        “We never pop champagne here; our budgets are too tight.”
    

Austerity notwithstanding, that's really a sad sign of the times (and state of
science funding in the US).

~~~
jerf
There's no austerity. I don't even know where you'd get the idea there's some
sort of austerity in the US.

NASA's problems lie elsewhere, mostly in the form of having a boss (Congress)
who demands that they spend their money in mind-bogglingly inefficient ways,
and then adds further inefficiencies by continuously jerking them around.
Giving them more money won't solve this problem.

~~~
damoncali
You're half right. I worked for NASA on Hubble. I guarantee you we were not
living high on the hog. Holiday inn for 6 weeks at a time, cheapest flights
for travel, cheapest everything. They balked at a $12 meal once when It was
within an hour or so of a flight home once. We had trouble buying $300 hard
drives at times (to run $100k software on). My engineer's salary was modest at
best.

But yes, Congress makes all that "sacrifice" irrelevant due to the absurdity
of their whims.

Another project I workded on: Al Gore literally had a dream one night,
resulting in a colossal clusterfuck called Triana -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triana_(satellite)>. That's $100 million, wasted
on a politician's fantasy of being able to see the whole sunlit side of the
Earth. What would Musk have done with that money?

~~~
3am
Even sadder, Triana costed only 1/3 of what is spent on the war in Afganistan
each day. I would prefer to see people in NASA enjoying wide arrays of 15K
drives, competitive salaries, and business class seats...

~~~
MiguelHudnandez
Perhaps we can even splurge on SSDs with that kind of money. Spinning disks
are so obsolete when we're talking that much cash.

~~~
ars
Not when you are talking about storing Petabytes, which NASA does routinely.

------
codezero
Before we get all excited about this, I want to point out that part of the
costs of any space mission, which are included in the budget figures you
usually see are both the launch and the maintenance and post-launch operations
for commanding the satellite and analyzing the data.

Just having two satellites sitting about isn't really that shocking, nor is
the fact that the DOD has technology that is more advanced than Hubble, Hubble
was originally funded in the 70s, slated for a launch in 1983, and finally
launched in 1990.

------
gouranga
That's what you now know about. They are probably quite primitive devices if
they let you find out about them.

From real experience, the commercial and public space programmes are
positively infantile compared to the black project space programmes.

~~~
jpxxx
Sadly, I'd imagine all those super toys are designed to point at Earth -
different design requirements than for looking outwards.

~~~
nobleach
That's what has me curious. The Hubble isn't designed to point at earth and
would be of little use if we tried. Why does the US Military have telescopes
that are on par with Hubble? Are they looking out into space as well? Why
would they do that?

~~~
excuse-me
As far as the telescope optics is concerned looking up or looking down is
irrelevant- 500km or 500 million light years is the same focus setting!

Looking up has more stringent pointing and tracking requirements just because
we want to sit on the same object for hours at a time, but we also have lots
of bright stars in the field to track. Although our downward looking
colleagues also use small star tracking telescopes on their toys.

The big difference was generally in the cameras. Astronomers use a 2D CCD
(like your digital camera) to take a long (hours) exposure which is read out
at the end. Spy satelites (used to) use a 1D sensor like a scanner or fax
machine which was constantly read out as the earth passed underneath -
producing a long continuous strip image across a target.

------
pavel_lishin
Can someone explain how two telescopes meant to focus on relatively close
targets, without any cameras inside, are "better" than a Hubble? What metric
are they using?

~~~
sp332
The lenses are just as big but they have a moveable secondary, which gives
them better focus and 100x field-of-view compared to Hubble.
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-
science/nasa-g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nasa-
gets-two-military-spy-telescopes-for-
astronomy/2012/06/04/gJQAsT6UDV_print.html)

~~~
beambot
I assume the NRO telescopes had their instrumentation _removed_ before gifting
the optics to NASA, yes? Or were they really just "blank casings"? Either way,
it's kinda freaky to think that there are such powerful monitoring devices in
space...

~~~
sp332
Since they were never launched, and (according to NASA) the satellite itself
is the part that takes the longest to build, it's plausible that the
instrumentation was never installed before the mission was scrapped for
whatever reason.

------
pvarangot
Not too long ago there was this diplomatic incident in my country where the US
military forgot to mention they where bringing (or tried to smuggle in) a
briefcase with some GPS equipment and other stuff. They where discovered when
their plane was inspected and the briefcase was not in their customs
declaration.

They where forced to open the briefcase, which was less than 1 meter (3 feet)
wide. They agreed only if the briefcase was opened under a roof, alluding it
was standard procedure because of spy satellites looking at its content.

That was when I realised that spy satellites currently have ridiculous amounts
of optical resolution I had never though equipment could achieve in orbit.

~~~
excuse-me
They can't. The diffraction limit of a 2.4m (HST/KH) mirror from their orbit
is around 6cm, the practical limit with an atmosphere is around 10cm.

However the photo-recon interpreter guys are amazing. They can look at a 1m
resolution image of a vehicle made up of half-a-dozen blurred pixels and say
"that's the new mkII whatever - you can see the extended wheelbase from the
length of the shadow"

~~~
pvarangot
Can't they be using bigger telescopes? The James Webb Space Telescope is
declassified technology and has a self-assembling 6.5m mirror.

I'm not sure how atmosphere is optically taken into the equation, but maybe
having a mathematical model of it can be used to increase the 10cm practical
limit... sort of like with heat shimmer binoculars.

~~~
excuse-me
You could use a bigger mirror, although a 6.5m mirror in low earth orbit is
going to have a very short lifetime due to drag. The atmosphere has much less
optical effect looking down, simply because all the phase tilts are close to
the target and so don't have much angular effect. It's like laying frosted
glass on top of a document and looking at - compared to putting the frosted
glass upto your eye and looking at a distant object.

Really there is a limited return from higher and higher resolution imaging.
Once you have vehicles, roads, missile batteries etc spotted there isn't much
point being able to see which of the operators are bald.

With modern wars photo-recon is even more limited, you could have mm accurate
imaging from a drone of an Afghan tribesman but it wouldn't tell you what he
thinks of your politics.

------
ams6110
_Are drones replacing space telescopes?_

This sounds like a reasonable speculation to me. Drones would be orders of
magnitude cheaper, more manuverable, expendable, not as subject to being
obscured by cloudcover, able to survey many places at once or swarm over a
wide area, etc.

~~~
jackpirate
But we can't fly drones over China and Russia like we can Pakistan

~~~
excuse-me
And satellite surveillance is less useful these days.

1960s - we have photographed Soviet SAM sites around Moscow. We know where to
avoid to send bombers in.

2010 - we have photographed a semiconductor fab in china. We don't know what
they are making but we can tell where the fab is to an inch.

~~~
jackpirate
You can tell a lot about what they're making based on its proximity to other
resources, the shape of the buildings, the schedule of supply deliveries, etc.
Intelligence analysts are a crafty bunch.

~~~
uptown
How'd that work out for the US with Iraq?

[http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/us/powell.iraq_1_official...](http://articles.cnn.com/2004-04-03/us/powell.iraq_1_official-
iraqi-organization-biological-weapons-labs-state-colin-powell?_s=PM:US)

~~~
waterlesscloud
Has anyone written a definitive account of the intelligence failure here? A
step-by-step kind of thing, not a pointless "BuSh LiEd!!!" kind of thing?

~~~
uptown
Yes. A commission appointed by Bush took a look at the nation's intelligence
community after the Iraq failure and found it to be severely lacking.

[http://articles.cnn.com/2005-03-31/politics/intel.report_1_m...](http://articles.cnn.com/2005-03-31/politics/intel.report_1_major-
intelligence-failure-iraq-survey-group-national-intelligence-
estimate?_s=PM:POLITICS)

~~~
waterlesscloud
Thank you, that lead me to the actual report here-
<http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/wmd/report/index.html>

------
sp332
I think SpaceX should take one. Throw maybe $10k of off-the-shelf parts in
there, add some comms, and you have the best proof-of-concept and advertising
ever.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I think Facebook should buy one. I'm tired of hearing about nebulous data-
mining aggregate privacy concerns; I want to be afraid of Facebook literally
watching me, damnit!

~~~
gonzo
Google owns a satellite service, (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole,_Inc>)
why shouldn't Facebook and Apple?

~~~
dasmoth
Keyhole wrote the predecessor to the Google Earth software, but while it's a
great name for an imagery company, they don't run satellites themselves.

Google did pay for a half share in GeoEye-1
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoEye-1>) and have exclusive commercial
access.

------
jakejake
It would be interesting to see the two telescopes (or whatever device) that
replaced these two.

There's probably a very limited number of groups that would be able to use
this technology in a way that was agreeable to the military.

------
johngalt
More proof that defense gets a lake of cash for every bucket that NASA gets.

Optically I'd think looking down at a relatively bright earth would be a much
different task than looking up at a _very_ dark universe. Also field of view
is much less important.

------
mladenkovacevic
It's interesting to think about how far advanced their equipment is now if
this is their equivalent of "spare change" to throw at NASA

------
mironathetin
Define "better".

If these telescopes have to be equipped with instruments, what is left? The
optical system? Thats nothing compared to the instruments.

Better in terms of optical system would mean an order of magnitude at least.
This is obsolete, more or less, because ground based instruments come closer
to a proper correction of atmospheric turbulences. They are cheaper to build
and cheaper to run. The next generation optical space telescope may be a very
long baseline interferometer. This cannot be build on earth.

Infrared is also a space domain. Thats why Herschel, ISO, Spitzer and James W.
Webb are space telescopes.

------
Fizzadar
If only the worlds combined military budgets could be directed towards a
global space (/science) program. Less investment in death and more in the
future of human kind.

~~~
DividesByZero
It's more difficult to profit from scientific exploration than it is from
weapons and the maintenance contracts that come with them. The military
industrial complex has a stranglehold due to simple market forces.

------
Natsu
I wouldn't complain too loudly. Otherwise, next time, they'll quietly dispose
of such things, rather than risk public backlash.

------
Kelliot
'Second, if the DOD didn't need these two birds, which are both better than
any civilian telescope, what _do_ they have?'

This line worries me the most, hubbles pictures of things thousands of light
years away are spectacular. Imagine what a better scope could so pointed at
earth 300 miles below!

------
DigitalSea
Now I see why the government is in so much debt. Building something they
already had two of, saving potentially billions in research & development
creating another telescope. This is ridiculous. What else have they got two of
just "sitting around"

~~~
gonzo
because the KH-12s didn't work as designed?

------
Jabbles
Would they be any use as ground-based telescopes?

~~~
geuis
Probably not. The design of telescopes face different environmental challenges
between Earth-based and space. On Earth, we have the benefits of accessibility
but the downside of peering through the atmosphere. In space, there's no
atmosphere but you have to deal with inaccessibility, extreme cold,
micrometeorites and space debris, and radiation.

Also take into consideration mirror size. On Earth, we have built (and are
building) _giant_ mirrors many meters across. In relation, the mirrors on
Hubble and other space telescopes are rather small in comparison. Its really
the lack of atmosphere that provides most of the advantage to space-based
installations.

~~~
gonzo
well that, and the CCDs love cold.

------
rsanchez1
Yes, in case you didn't know, the DoD operates a secret space program
completely independent of NASA and with an unknown budget.

------
petegrif
Good god.

