Webb, Trig, and “We Have Somewhat Lost Our Competence.”

WLBOTT R & D recently viewed the Netflix documentary about (aboot) the James Webb Telescope called Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine.

Fascinating documentary. The JWST is probably the most complex and ambitious endeavor undertaken by any carbon-based life form within our local solar system.

Interestingly, the documentary focuses on project management – how do you make something this complicated actually work (and in the middle of a global pandemic)?

Even though we now know the project was an amazing success, there is a moment of tense drama as they push the “Go” button on Christmas Day, 2021 to launch the Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. Many folks had spent their entire professional careers waiting for this moment.

Among other challenges, the James Webb telescope wouldn’t fit into this massive rocket, so the engineers had to do a complex origami to pack, and then remotely unpack, all the cool optics, sun shields, and solar arrays.

---

So why French Guiana?

The WLBOTT R&D team recalled reading Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon as inchoate and amorphous pre-WLBOTTers. Going from memory, we seem to recall the characters talking about the real challenge – not going UP so much as going OUT. Any vanity project billionaire can go UP, but to go OUT, you need some serious speed.

[btw, we may be conflating From the Earth to the Moon any one of hundreds of SciFi books that corrupted our youth.]

So the closer to the equator the better (more below). For the launch site, the characters are trying to decide between Texas and Florida, and finally chose Florida, because Texans are just too much of a pain in the ass. Understandable.

So, this takes us back to linear and angular velocity.

So pick your favorite latitude, dust off your trig textbook, and dig out your slide rule:

---

Pretty cool science nerd discussion:

For reference…..

We’d like to congratulate our friends from the former Soviet Union on their recent landing on the moon. Well, I guess technically it was a landing. Their crap is spread out all over the south pole of the moon. Or as the officials for our friends from the former Soviet Union said, the craft “ceased to exist” {прекратить существование}.

Radio Free Europe has an interesting take on this lack of existence. To quote what passes for a Rocket Scientist in Russia, “We Have Somewhat Lost Our Competence.“