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Comment by mhandley | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know how much of the price tag for JWST is manufacturing, as opposed to research/design/development costs? I would expect the actual manufacturing is a very small fraction, so I don't understand why they haven't built two of them - would seem to be good insurance for just this sort of mishap. And if you do find a problem when the first one is commissioned at the inaccessible L2 point, you at least have some chance to correct it on the second one. Best case is you get two for nearly the price of one.

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First rule in government spending - why build one when you can have two twice the price?

-- S. R. Hadden, Contact (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4sMJP9FmM)

The root problem with JWST was not being able to get the money in the first place. That led to budgeting shenanigans responsible for much of the project delay. The single telescope came within a whisker of being scrapped by Congress.

If you gave projects like Webb the kind of budget that now gets eaten by human space flight, you could have telescopes filling half the sky. But NASA has to work within the really severe funding constraints imposed by the white elephant that is ISS.

I don't think there's a meaningful distinction between "manufacturing" and other development activities in this case. This sort of thing, an effort to build a single example of a device using a mountain of new technology, just can't follow the process of design the whole thing, then manufacture it, then we're done. Kind of like waterfall vs agile software development. They're probably constantly fabricating and testing subsystems in various ways, iterating on manufacturing technique to get quality good enough, making changes in other related subsystems as a result of things they found to be impractical with the first, making sure subsystems actually integrate with each other as expected, etc.

The Voyager 1 and 2 probes had this kind of strategy to cover for failure.

They may not have the labor to build two of them. It's exceptionally difficult to put together the team necessary to build one of them.

The US isn't a serious nation any longer. The US is increasingly becoming a clown show. The response you'd get if you suggested to consider building two of them - for the reasons you mention - is that people would freak out (two boondoggles, $20 billion in cost, decades of time; that would be the flailing, screeching response).

> is that people would freak out

And rightfully so.

What's the ROI? The hard limit for stuff which is not aimed at producing an improvement in quality of life of taxpayers should be in the dozens of millions , not billions.

Quality of life improvement can be delayed 40 or 50 years, but there should be at least a path.

James Webb Space Telescope has no path, nor does Hubble, nor does the ISS, nor do the Mars missions (private or public), and neither did the Apollo missions as the program was shut down for bankruptcy essentially.

Had the Soviet done the same we'd be laughing at their juvinile understanding of economics, ROI and ROE.

On the other hand NASA mission to collide with an asteroid has a path to save us all , ITER has a path (no pun intended) , mRNA research has a freaking highway at this point, biotech also has a path, even China's bridges to nowhere to pump GDP have a path sometime in the future.

Sounds like a good argument to severely cut millitary spending, not science spending. Also, pure science is the part of eventually getting useful qol improvements that absolutely cannot be done through simple short sighted private research, but proves time and time again to be invaluable.

> Also, pure science is the part of eventually getting useful qol improvements that absolutely cannot be done through simple short sighted private research, but proves time and time again to be invaluable

Seems like a good pitch to fund National Labs instead.

National Labs != space.

Unless you have a clear and defined QOL plan then space has proven to be a money sink for the longest time.

The Apollo mission didn't have any clear plan, the Voyager-1-2 missions didn't have any clear plan, Mars missions won't have any clear plan, the ISS didn't have any clear plan, the space shuttle didn't have any clear plan.

Matter of fact it's the opposite of what you claim, if you leave space in the hands of military maybe some QOL trickle down will happen (GPS, Sat communications, ICBMs keeping us safe).

If you leave it in the hands of wide eyed individuals who want to discover exoplanets and clusters which we'll never reach then you'll just throw money down the sink.

Earth is going to get very crowded in the next couple of centuries. The economic case for large-scale expansion into space isn't exactly clear at this point, but when things get tight I'd rather have state and corporate actors looking outwards for their next growth fix, and for that to be a possibility we need to be investing in space technology now even if there is no tangible short-term ROI.

Unless we can change our essential nature, I don't see any sustainable path where human civilization stays confined to Earth forever. Those doomsday weapons "keeping us safe" will inevitably be used, especially when it becomes clear that we're utterly trapped.

You probably make a valid comment about USA, but I would hazard to bet that it is, in fact, the zeitgeist/ cultural / societal climate of the world in general has been stripped of rationality in favour of clickbait, sensationalism and dare I say, value faking (I support X because it makes me a appear to be a better person, but in reality I don't authentically live.). [There is a term for this that I can't think of right now.]

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