What I am saying is unfair is your insistence on trying to think of astronomy as a problem that can be resolved by scale. > that a vaccine would take 18 months

What I am saying is unfair is your insistence on trying to think of astronomy as a problem that can be resolved by scale. > that a vaccine would take 18 months to develop. I said it could be done in 6 Cool anecdote. I was also part of those who thought it would be done earlier, we agreed on this. This is not comparable at all. > so $10B was spent to ensure it would not fail. And it worked! But suppose for $1B one could build a less reliable JWST. That was the plan, JWST was supposed to cost 1B$, not 10B$. And then we were supposed to start building other telescope based on the lesson learned with that design such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infrared_Surveyor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr.... But it ended costing 10B$, not because that's what anyone wanted, but because that's what happens when you try to push the enveloppe. Just like the A380 program ended up costing 25B instead of 9 planed. > Instead, one makes redundant systems. It is far, far cheaper, and yet more reliable than going for perfection The JWST does not have 390 single point of failures like the media like to say, a lot of those are highly preferable but not make or break: If the mirror wings failed to deploy, JWST would still work at a lower res. If some of the sunshade layers didn't deploy correctly, it would still work. If the momentum flap didn't deploy, it would still work but require more fuel to keep orbit stable, lowering life expectancy of the missions, Latching mechanisms and release bolts where all designed with tolerance for some of them to fails etc. There are was actually just a handful of true single point of failures with no redundancy. > But I do know how airliners are designed and built Yes I think by now we are all aware since you keep mentioning it in every single one of your comment. And I don't doubt that you know what you are talking about when discussing airliners, but it also seems to me that your experience is a hammer and now everything you see looks like a nail to you. What I find irritating, is that the team that build the JWST is made of many, many highly intelligent individuals that thought about about how to best respond to the need of astronomy over 25 years, and you seem to think that they are complete idiots that didn't think about solutions and problem that you can think of in 5 minutes on hacker news. They have. A lot of those people come from the world of airplanes. One the biggest contractor for the JWST is Lockheed, which knows a thing or two about designing airplanes and asssembly line. Hubble, was actually built like that, as it's actually a repurposed KH-11 reconnaissance satellite. Lockheed built 18 of those. Only one of them was ever ordered for astronomy. So do not worry, JWST is built like it is, not because no one thought about your ideas before, but because they don't help solve what we actually care about.