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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 '9

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.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > For what the JWST actually accomplishes, it's an engineering marvel 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.
wolverine876 5y ago
> 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 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.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
  With unfolding mirrors, the hard part isn't the unfolding, it's unfolding with micrometer accuracy since you care about the optical properties of the unfolded mirrors.
sa501428 5y ago
These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). For human genomes it's cheaper of course, but that's because we have a reference sequence to compare to. The Human Genome Project (and other efforts) had to build that reference and annotate it. So not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to compare sequencing of a modern-day patient sample to building a reference genome from scratch.
- credit_guy 5y ago
  > These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). 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.
  - TheBigSalad 5y ago
    That's a fair question. I've never heard it argued that the human genome project was anything other than a huge success, but I'm curious to look into it more. That being said it probably doesn't apply here. Considering we were sending people to the moon 50 years ago, I don't feel space travel has scaled similarly. In contrast to your human genome example think how far back the scientific community was set back by canceling the Super Conducting Supercollider. There's just no other way to get this information from Earth. You could argue that the knowledge could wait 100 years, but you could say that about a lot of things.

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.

credit_guy 5y ago
> For what the JWST actually accomplishes, it's an engineering marvel 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.

wolverine876 5y ago

> 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 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.

adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
With unfolding mirrors, the hard part isn't the unfolding, it's unfolding with micrometer accuracy since you care about the optical properties of the unfolded mirrors.

sa501428 5y ago

These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). For human genomes it's cheaper of course, but that's because we have a reference sequence to compare to. The Human Genome Project (and other efforts) had to build that reference and annotate it. So not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to compare sequencing of a modern-day patient sample to building a reference genome from scratch.

credit_guy 5y ago
> These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). 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.
- TheBigSalad 5y ago
  That's a fair question. I've never heard it argued that the human genome project was anything other than a huge success, but I'm curious to look into it more. That being said it probably doesn't apply here. Considering we were sending people to the moon 50 years ago, I don't feel space travel has scaled similarly. In contrast to your human genome example think how far back the scientific community was set back by canceling the Super Conducting Supercollider. There's just no other way to get this information from Earth. You could argue that the knowledge could wait 100 years, but you could say that about a lot of things.