> I don't think anything else could better express just how bad the government is at deploying capital than the sentence above. Not really. This is a great ex

> I don't think anything else could better express just how bad the government is at deploying capital than the sentence above. Not really. This is a great expression of how hard it is to deploy capital in a one-off manner, to a strict budget. Contrast this space telescope with the series of Earth-observation satellites launched by the National Reconnaissance Office. By amortizing development costs over at least half a dozen launches, the NRO keeps putting up classified payloads. SpaceX's success isn't exactly organizational genius, it's that its plan from the outset has been to rapidly iterate with the expectation that the first half-dozen of anything will fail in interesting ways. Were JWT being built to a SpaceX standard, there wouldn't be one telescope -- there would be a dozen.