For those complaining about the spending: some countries spent TRILLIONS on war and and nation building. It's developments like these we should be focusing our energy and intelect.
So, roughly $11 billion over 25 years. Something that many nations could afford.
There is a reason recently NASA has started to focus on Fixed Price contracts.
We need a shift to more missions, building these things more often and more on price. Putting absurd amount of money into 1 mission compared to 20 missions for 500M$ likely doesn't make sense.
The Webb telescope has been so long in development that lots of subsystems could have evolved considerably since then.
This only very recently became financially reasonable with SpaceX. It would have been impossible for NASA to know at that time that private industry would manage to lower the cost of launch by magnitudes.
Cost didn't matter back then because you only got one shot to launch anyways. If the rocket blew up and took the satellite with it you're never getting approval to launch again. It would be better to let the project overrun than to worry about financials and contractual obligations when the risk of cancellation or failure is already so high. But now, with launches being relatively cheap, it is actually possible to envision a backup plan where a second satellite goes up with a second rocket. Again, this only very recently (maybe ~5 years ago?) became possible.
I agree with you now though - NASA ought to be reconsidering overhauling its procurement process now that Falcon 9 exists.
> If the rocket blew up and took the satellite with it you're never getting approval to launch again.
That's not accurate.
But there's always have uncertainty in the payloads. First, because there are lots of contractors involved. That's somewhat fixable.
Second, and most important, is that many of these payloads are cutting-edge. They've never been built before and some of them push physical and engineering limits. I've worked on missions where the only delay was the payload for many years, and they were simpler than JWST.
It's a problem of not knowing what we don't know. When working on those kinds of systems, the estimates lose a lot of meaning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
Just because DoD budget is $750b, doesn’t mean that we should have a free pass to waste money. I’d like to see DoD spending cut in half while holding vendors accountable. Same with space industry.
Another way to think about this if it helps is for $11b, we should have gotten more done. Imagine James Webb Telescope + 5 more projects for the same $11b. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
If someone were to point to specific ways in which the project wasted money, that'd be different. But I haven't seen such detailed criticisms.
Nobody is arguing that wasting money is a good thing.
Not to imply that ISRO isn't doing important work, but simply looking to cut costs for the sake of cutting costs is just as bad as the waste you're complaining about. It'd be like comparing whatever it cost TSMC to switch to 3nm to what it cost to setup 20nm fabs.
What we should be pushing for is more accurate cost estimates. It isn't a problem that the latest and greatest in space telescopes cost $11B, technological progress is often expensive, it's a problem that initially we were told it would cost $2B. If we have a better cost estimate from the start, we can better control our expectations.
I could have used paper-clip manufacturer instead of ISRO for that matter.
But, we want a large bureaucratic organization (by design), extremely risk-averse(by design), extremely slow(by design), having only one shots (by design) to do this for us