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Comment by tectonic | Hacker News Reader

Such an exciting, and high stakes, and dramatically late and over-budget mission.

I am so amped for this telescope. I hope it exceeds my expectations.

It also looks like this location will be quite crowded in the future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

We really should have a big science lab up at L2

Agreed. What else would you put up there?

It blows my mind that humans can get together and build something like this.

I was just watching YT channel “Primitive Technology” and it really puts things into perspective. From sticks and stones to bootstrapping a James Webb Telescope that’s gonna sit at a langrange point between the Earth and the Sun. Woah.

Interesting angle and this telescope really is a time machine.

Still better than a failed jet fighter. At least we will have working telescope. Even if all we get out of it are some photos for a wallpaper for PC. Still better value as something is better then nothing in this case.

Government red tape and contracting at its finest

Edit: Downvotes with no comments as to why... This thing is 24 years in development and 20x over budget. If thats not a failure of government contracting, budgeting, etc then idk what is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Cos... - Obviously the platform will be cool once they get it launched, but until then its just a money pit.

Another way to put it is that it’s a jobs program.

Edit: what’s with the downvotes? I would like to understand what the disagreement is here. Any gov program can be split up into two parts. One, the actual cost as dictated by the market economy, and second, the additional costs for delays, bureaucracy, etc which usually tends to be multiples of the actual costs. This money goes into paying salaries without actually making any progress. Hence the jobs program. What’s there to disagree here? Is this argument somehow belonging to a particular political spectrum? Downvotes are fine but I’d like to gain some understanding of where my thoughts are not aligned with you. Please explain your position.

I would say "PR program" more than jobs program. NASA is the public face of the DoD/NRO spy satellite tech. Most of them are just looking back toward Earth at you and I instead of looking out into space. Compare to these programs which had over 4x the budget of JWST in 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Hole

e: For example, KH-11 shares parts with the Hubble Space Telescope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_Kennen

'KH-11s are believed to resemble the Hubble Space Telescope in size and shape, as the satellites were shipped in similar containers. Their length is believed to be 19.5 meters, with a diameter of up to 3 meters.[5][23] A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites.'

Notice how that says KH-11s, plural.

By that logic, so is the military, public schools and highway maintenance.

Any over budget and poorly run government program I see it as a jobs program. F-35, CalTrain, NASA SLS, etc.

This is in stark contrast with partnerships with private industries. For eg DARPA + Moderna or NASA + SpaceX.

I fail to see the difference. Private contracts often go over budget. The F-35 itself is full of privately contracted parts. Many public/private partnerships contracts are even no bid, meaning they are essentially uncompetitive. Whether the government hires people directly to do a job or whether they contract it out is equally distortionary. By allocating tax dollars to a public rocket lab or to a private rocket company you are increasing the demand for rocket engineers and thus creating a "rocket engineer" jobs program.

All those projects were built by private industry, including the latter two.

That’s true. I concede my point.

While I am as critical of government overspending as anyone, this comparison misses some important nuances.

Let's take the SpaceX example. SpaceX is great in terms of pushing innovation. But there would be no SpaceX without NASA or other government entities. They need those tax dollars (especially early on) to survive. And when they lose a government payload, the government takes something to the tune of 80% of the loss because they are self-insured. This has the effect of SpaceX farming out their risk to the government.

But this is one of the areas where the government excels. Namely, taking large risks in nascent fields where the risk is too big for private companies to balance against the benefit by themselves. But the complexities and unknowns that create that risk is also the very same thing that creates the budget and schedule risk as well.

I think you're getting downvoted because what you're saying doesn't match up with the wiki article you linked.

The original estimate was for $1.6 billion, in I'm guessing the 90s, and the estimate had been updated to $5 billion by the time it was formally confirmed for construction.

> The telescope was originally estimated to cost US$1.6 billion,[102] but the cost estimate grew throughout the early development and had reached about US$5 billion by the time the mission was formally confirmed for construction start in 2008.

So yes, it has been over budget, but by 2x-3x, not 20x, and that isn't adjusted for inflation.

Also, everything is just a money pit until it's launched/finished/etc.

According to the budget table, when the project started in 1997, the budget plan was 500 million. Today its close to 10 billion.

That was likely just a bare bones estimate and closer to the costs of initiating the project than the full cost of designing, building, and launching a satellite.

Based on this link, NASA hadn't even settled on a design/contractor in 1998.

https://esahubble.org/images/opo9820a/

Adjusted for inflation it'd be about $2.5 billion this year. So it's almost exactly 2x.

The original budget was a guess. They didn't know how much the telescope would cost because the required technology didn't actually exist at the start of the budgeting process 24 years ago.

Now that technology does exist, and it turns out it's quite expensive, which drove most of the cost increases. However, since then the budget increases have generally paced with inflation.

Source: your citation.

Further to your point, now that the pioneering work has been done, a similar piece of equipment could likely be built at a significantly reduced cost.

It's because this is a flippant, unhelpful attitude. If we were talking about building a mile of blacktop highway then such a casual observation about the overrun might be warranted.

But we're not talking about that. We're talking about building the first non-orbital space telescope in human history. To a certain extent, no one could know the actual cost ahead of time. It's one of those things you kind of have to do and it will cost what it will cost.

Was there waste I this project? Probably. But there's a good chance the overruns are dominated by true "found work" rather than waste.

In fact, this is exactly the kind of project you want handled by the government because the cost of failure is so high. In a project where you need to push the risk out as many decimal places as possible it is good to have an agency which can afford the overruns to do it.

"the first non-orbital space telescope"

There've been a few others, including Gaia (SEL-2 halo orbit -- same as JWST), and Kepler (heliocentric). [edit]: also Herschel (SEL-2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)#Launch_and_o...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_space_telescope#Orbit_a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herschel_Space_Observatory#Lau...

Interesting. I assumed these were in orbit like other satellites. I didn't realize they operated from the Lagrange points. Thanks.

Where are all of the privately funded space telescopes?

Pointed at earth.

What basis do you have for blaming government contracting? Lots of projects built by lots of organizations are very late and over-budget. One difference between government and private industry is that the government has the resources and motivation to persist - they aren't in it for profit. If this was a private company, it may have been canceled long ago as unprofitable. Is that a preferable outcome?

In fact, wasn't the JWST built by Northrop Grumman to a great extent? Why not blame them?

EDIT: It's hard to criticize government contracting in the same context as NASA, which has taken more risks and achieved new things far beyond any private organization in history. NASA has operations throughout the Solar System, and in interstellar space. They are the only organization to put humans on the moon - 50 years ago! Can anyone else say anything that? SpaceX?

The thing with this kind of project, we're not punching out the 10 millionth Honda Civic or something. There's a tremendous amount of stuff here that's never been done before. There's no good way to have an accurate estimate for how much it will cost. You pretty much have to just keep spending until you get it right. This works the same way whether it's Government or Private Industry. Just ask Intel how far over budget they've gone getting EUV working.

Your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation. But for anyone else that is actually interested: the cost of JWST is really not that extravagant considering how much more capability it provides compared to HST.

> Not even including its four space-shuttle servicing missions, Hubble cost $4 billion or $5 billion in today's dollars just to build and launch," Dressler notes. "Here we are, building a telescope that is almost seven times bigger, it is cryogenic, it is operating 1.5 million kilometres away, and it is costing the same amount as Hubble did, if not less. That is remarkable, and this is probably the biggest scale on which we will consider building such things in this country."

From this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/4671028a

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