$11B is actually not very much for what this is. Good deal!
We need a space industry that delivers on target and reward those contractors.
The growth in cost of Webb, directly detracts from other missions. It also has to be compared to actually building 4 actual $2.5B telescopes. There is lots of evidence that faster iteration, more missions give more overall science.
Continuously launching and continuously improving would be far better plan. Webb has lots of subsystems that have been done base on 10-20 year old engineering. But because of the approach one iteration cycle for some of these technologies takes 30 years.
The will of the people is weak.
In the '90's there was this huge Manhattan-like project, called "The Human Genome Project" [1]. The pricetag was about $3 BN. It took more than a decade. Then out of nowhere a startup appeared, and sequenced the human genome ten times faster and ten times cheaper (and fully with private funds). Nowadays, of course, we can sequence someone's genome for literally cents.
The JWT project started before SpaceX was a thing. Right now it looks quite likely that in less than one year we'll have a launch vehicle that will be able to put 100 tons in orbit in one shot, and for cheap. All the complexity of the folding involved with JWT would become unnecessary with Starship. If someone were to start right now a JWT project, there's a realistic chance they'll finish it in a tenth of the time and a tenth of the cost, just like Celera did. We would get the same scientific results, but maybe one or two years later.
So, now, am I allowed to ask again: why exactly was the $11 BN a good deal?
Now I think that hindsight being what it is, if we had known that Starship was in the pipeline and this would be launching right when Starship is getting into production (considering JWST started development in the mid 90s), I would have said that we should be designing a cheaper/simpler telescope that uses this larger launch package.
But that's all hindsight. For what the JWST actually accomplishes, it's an engineering marvel and given what we knew when it was being designed, I think NASA and the associated committees did an excellent job making it as cheap and large as it is.
Now if we were to take what was learned from the JWST (a lot of innovative work on beryllium mirror design and segmented telescope design was done on this project) and were to design a new telescope today using modern technology, modern materials knowledge, and a launch vehicle like the Starship, I'd suppose we could make an equivalent telescope for 25% or less of the JWST's cost. Unfortunately however by the time this would be feasible, the majority of that money had already long since been spent using existing technology and techniques. This hypothetical cheaper telescope would also likely not be ready for launch if started in say 2015 until 2025 or so when the Starship would be considered safe enough for such a high value mission.
TLDR: It was a good value for the era in which it was designed and built. It is limited by what NASA knew when they designed it. And if it was to be built today, it wouldn't launch for at least a decade after the design would start and you'd undoubtedly be able to make a similar statement about said design from "now-era" vs a hypothetical better value proposition from "future-era". Knowing what we knew at the time it was worth it and to wait indefinitely for the optimal time to start a design will always be a race of better vs perfect.
Sure, but so are the Event Horizon Telescope (which cost less than $100 MM) and LIGO (cost about $1 BN). And those were truly revolutionary, and they hold a lot of promise for more scientific results down the road. At any given moment the scientific world has lots of ideas, some are truly ingenious, and some are just bigger-is-better iterations of older ideas. The really ingenious ones tend to be cheaper, if for no other reason than they can't get huge amounts of funding given they are not proven yet. The bigger-is-better ideas get eye popping dollars, and the public opinion is always positive. Just like it happens with Hollywood sequels.
What is your basis for saying that 90% of the cost and time was due to folding mirrors? That sounds like the easy part - it's mechanical, and satellites have been unfolding in orbit for a long time.
Ok, that's still 6 orders of magnitude cheaper, isn't it? You could argue that $1000 now would not be possible without the initial investment of billions, but we'll never know. What's undeniable is that independent of the advances in biotech, the advances in computing between say, 1990 and 2010, were astounding. If the Human Genome Project had been postponed by 20 years, it could have easily been done for 1% of the pricetag, without any other breakthrough (by the way, Celera did what they did because some really cool algorithmic breakthroughs). And it's not like in 1990 people didn't know about Moore's law, and couldn't project where the computational power would be in 20 years.
The same question stands now: if you want to do Project X, and you consider the choice to do it now or do it in 20 years, is it likely that you could do it for much cheaper in 20 years, and can you afford to wait 20 years? If we are talking about CO2 scrubbing from the atmosphere, then maybe we can't really wait, but if we just want to better understand Big Bang, or the Muon gee minus 2, then maybe we can.
Essentially we allowed people $11 billion in human agency to occur for scientific reasons.
Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games, but your economy surely benefited from people doing the real economic exchange this required.
Personally I’d love to put it into designer drugs we can use to let me hallucinate a reality where miserly bean countering control freaks don’t exist, since we’re all going to die anyway and entropy will erode the universe.
Excepting rules against violence and careless end of the species, why all the rules?
But that's not the alternative here. Cars and video games are created via private investments, by for-profit corporations (and sometimes by volunteering developers). JWST was funded by NASA with public funding. The alternative to JWST was not cars, but rather the other projects that NASA could have funded, but didn't. When NASA made the initial decision to build the JWST, it excluded other projects on the premise that the JWST will cost about $0.5 BN. When later on NASA had to revise upward the cost, it had to either forgo other projects, or ask the Congress for additional funding. Well, the Congress did not provide additional funding [1]. Those with an internal view of NASA know what other projects were dismissed, or canceled because of the perpetual JWST cost revisions. We (the outsiders) will not be privy of these projects, but they certainly existed.
Make no mistake, I consider JWST to be a phenomenal scientific instrument. But when people applaud the launch of JWST, they don't see the non-launch of the multitude of projects that had to be canceled because of the JWST cost overruns.