5 ms·

$11B is actually not very much for what this is. Good deal!

credit_guy 5y ago
Why is that? If the pricetag was, for example $25 BN, would you say that would have been too expensive? Where do you draw the line? Or no price is too high for this telescope?
- pradn 5y ago
  When US gov expenditures are like $4 trillion yearly, $11 billion for an era-defining, cutting-edge space telescope built over 10-15 years does not seem much at all.
  - smachiz 5y ago
    1996 cutting edge
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      Is there something better in production going into space right now? No, because this is literally cutting the edge right now.
  - podgaj 5y ago
    Yet we can't house the homeless.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      It’s astounding that for a $5 Trillion dollar neighborhood (Bay Area), we are incapable of having a first world infrastructure and solve homelessness. The will of the people is weak.
      - podgaj 5y ago
        Truth! And look at all the techno-sociopaths downvoting me! That is why the Bay Area cannot solve the homeless problem!
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    But then people complain about ITER costing 25 billion although its possible impact in the world is much bigger.
  - trasz 5y ago
    Never mind government expenditures as a whole; $11 billion is less than a single aircraft carrier.
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    My question still stands: would $25 BN be too much? $100 BN? Why is $11 BN a good deal? Would any price be a good deal for an "era-defining" project? 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
      From link 2: "However, a significant portion of the human genome had already been sequenced when Celera entered the field, and thus Celera did not incur any costs with obtaining the existing data, which was freely available to the public from GenBank". The reason Celera was able to finish the project cheap was because public funding had already done the first 90%.
    - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
      20-30B would have been about what I had estimated given the complexity involved for this project. I think 11B spread over 2 decades and some change was a pretty good deal comparatively. 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.
- whatroot8 5y ago
  Money is a completely abstract thing and at this point says nothing about the material economics. It’s used to manage agency. 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?
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    > Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
bumby 5y ago
I think the JWST is managed as part of NASA's Space Science Directorate. That directorate gets a little less than $8B of the agency's roughly $23B budget. You'd have to look at the breakdown by year, but 10-15% of the annual directorate budget is substantial but not absurd given the project.
panick21_ 5y ago
The problem is not the price as such but contractors promising something for $2.5B and then spending 4x time and 4x the amount of cost without suffering any negative consequences. For Northrop this has been nothing but nice, basically finance its space division for decades. 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.

Why is that? If the pricetag was, for example $25 BN, would you say that would have been too expensive? Where do you draw the line? Or no price is too high for this telescope?

pradn 5y ago
When US gov expenditures are like $4 trillion yearly, $11 billion for an era-defining, cutting-edge space telescope built over 10-15 years does not seem much at all.
- smachiz 5y ago
  1996 cutting edge
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    Is there something better in production going into space right now? No, because this is literally cutting the edge right now.
- podgaj 5y ago
  Yet we can't house the homeless.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    It’s astounding that for a $5 Trillion dollar neighborhood (Bay Area), we are incapable of having a first world infrastructure and solve homelessness. The will of the people is weak.
    - podgaj 5y ago
      Truth! And look at all the techno-sociopaths downvoting me! That is why the Bay Area cannot solve the homeless problem!
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  But then people complain about ITER costing 25 billion although its possible impact in the world is much bigger.
- trasz 5y ago
  Never mind government expenditures as a whole; $11 billion is less than a single aircraft carrier.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  My question still stands: would $25 BN be too much? $100 BN? Why is $11 BN a good deal? Would any price be a good deal for an "era-defining" project? 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? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celera_Corporation
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
    From link 2: "However, a significant portion of the human genome had already been sequenced when Celera entered the field, and thus Celera did not incur any costs with obtaining the existing data, which was freely available to the public from GenBank". The reason Celera was able to finish the project cheap was because public funding had already done the first 90%.
  - CuriousCosmic 5y ago
    20-30B would have been about what I had estimated given the complexity involved for this project. I think 11B spread over 2 decades and some change was a pretty good deal comparatively. 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.
whatroot8 5y ago
Money is a completely abstract thing and at this point says nothing about the material economics. It’s used to manage agency. 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?
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > Sorry we didn’t put more of it into cars and video games 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

bumby 5y ago

I think the JWST is managed as part of NASA's Space Science Directorate. That directorate gets a little less than $8B of the agency's roughly $23B budget. You'd have to look at the breakdown by year, but 10-15% of the annual directorate budget is substantial but not absurd given the project.

panick21_ 5y ago

The problem is not the price as such but contractors promising something for $2.5B and then spending 4x time and 4x the amount of cost without suffering any negative consequences. For Northrop this has been nothing but nice, basically finance its space division for decades. 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.