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Question -- Is the cost of projects such as Webb so high because of high launch costs, which in turn has a cascade effect on limiting the the projects that get

Question -- Is the cost of projects such as Webb so high because of high launch costs, which in turn has a cascade effect on limiting the the projects that get launched to space, and therefore requiring that they be built to higher specifications because you only get one shot at it? If so, then will the lower cost of space access from future vehicle development (such as Star Ship, and others that may follow) make projects such as future James Webb scopes and deep space probes much cheaper, if they know they can easily launch replacements and iterate the designs? Or is this just fantasy at this moment? I haven't really found much other than speculation comments (such as mine), but would like to see a professional's opinion.

uoaei 4y ago
Have you done any research into the budgeting process? Edit: I googled it. Here's the first paragraph of the first link from DDG: > The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to cost NASA $9.7 billion over 24 years. Of that amount, $8.8 billion was spent on spacecraft development between 2003 and 2021; $861 million is planned to support five years of operations. Adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars, the lifetime cost to NASA will be approximately $10.8 billion. So "spacecraft development" comprised about 90% of the total budget. Of the remainder, 96% is allocated to "five years of operations". So we have about $39 million left over, which I assume covers the launch and everything around it. If you want to try optimizing that, go ahead, but it is nearly a rounding error (0.4% of budget) in the grand scheme of things. There is an argument to be made that a few million dollars saved is valuable. I would propose a counterargument, that the amount of friction induced by working with private contractors (especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who run SpaceX) would add to some of the development costs, so the savings may not be as big as you think from a naive comparison.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Basically, it's the cost of designing and building a complete one-off that's going to be launched off into space, deployed, no opportunity to repair, etc. There are a million things that can go wrong. And you have one shot. I know someone who was one of the test engineers on SDO (solar dynamics observatory) and there were all manner of concerns about this, that, and the other thing that were really hard to say were almost absolutely certainly "just fine."
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > Basically, it's the cost of designing and building a complete one-off […] As a simple analogy: there's a difference between going to 3-for-1 Suite Warehouse and going to Saville Row and getting something bespoke. It's just there are no COTS satellites that do what JWST do, so if you want to do cutting edge science you're paying for Saville Row.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Probably even worse than that. They're effectively often designing special fabrics, threads, and tools to do the sewing. Not that I have a need any longer, but custom suits in lower cost of labor areas aren't a big deal and even off-the-rack suits pretty much have to be tailored for many of us to look good.
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  Is it possible that cheaper and more frequent launches will keep and up dropping the development prices as maybe more regular launches will enable the development process to be less strict and leave more room for error?
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    That is essentially what's driving the popularity of smallsats and megaconstellations. Since launch costs are dropping and flights are becoming more regular (eg SpaceX's transporter flights, where the rocket flies regardless of payload readiness and anyone who wasn't ready just moves to another flight, eliminating the main issue from other rideshare arrangements), it's potentially cheaper to make more replaceable satellites. So far this mainly applies to Earth observation and internet constellations. This doesn't really carry-over to large projects like JWST yet though.
- raisin_churn 4y ago
  Part of the huge cost to develop it was getting a mechanism that could deploy the mirror segments into a large enough array with sufficient accuracy, a task that would be dramatically simplified by a a launch platform with a wider fairing and greater mass to the L2 Lagrange point. So yes, if SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton of money on JWST, albeit mostly by relaxing the design parameters of the telescope rather than through cheaper launch costs.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > if SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton of money on JWST How much? How much did it cost for the actual JWST? Do you have any evidence of this great cost? The glorification of Musk's ego is endless. Can JWST see the farthest reaches of it? Is it expanding or contracting?
    - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
      I think OP is saying they would have had the space to simply built one large mirror instead of many different mirror segments that require complicated motors and moving parts to deploy into position. The mirror segment deployment technology is surely a significant percentage of the cost.
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        > surely Is there a more common or obvious trap of reasoning? If 'surely' worked, we wouldn't have needed the Enlightenment, science, or the JWST to learn about the universe. IIRC (much stronger evidence than 'surely', but still lacking), it's in fact not significant to the cost.
        JacobThreeThree 4y ago
        >IIRC Is there a more common or obvious trap of reasoning? If 'IIRC' worked, we wouldn't have needed the Enlightenment, science, or the JWST to learn about the universe.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  > especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who run SpaceX I don't think you know anything about the space industry. SpaceX is famous for being wildly easier to work with than any other launch provider (including semi-national providers like Arianespace).
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Famous among who? Are you in the space launch industry?
jmyeet 4y ago
The cost of launch is relatively low, meaning several hundred million out of a a $15-20B budget. But a given launch system is deeply intertwined with designing the mission. The size, the weight and the mass distribution. Moving parts are a nightmare for reliability. Every moving part is something that can cease up and go wrong. It's a motor that can fail and gears that can get jammed. JWST has two key components that involve a lot of moving parts: 1. The mirror. Hubble was smaller enough to be deployed fully constructed in the Space Shuttle so didn't have to deploy in space. JWST's mirror is 3-4x larger an there's no current launch vehicle that could launch it fully assembled. That's why you have all the beryllium hex mirrors that had to deploy the mirror once in orbit. These motors, actuators, assemblies, etc need to be incredibly precise and reliable; and 2. The heat shield. JWST has to be incredibly cold to operate (5K IIRC). The only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away. The heat shield separates JWST from the Sun, the Earth and Moon (each of which reflect enough light to interfere with operations). The shield is several layers and it's large, like tennis-court sized. Obviously this too had to be deployed in space. There were like 10 technologies for JWST that had to be invented to make the mission possible. That's less than ideal. It adds to the cost, the complexity and the timelines. In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a stepping stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of these technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably with a smaller mirror. But here we are.
- capableweb 4y ago
  > In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a stepping stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of these technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably with a smaller mirror. But here we are. That doesn't really seem to be in NASAs DNA, to do smaller incremental improvements. Instead, they really upgrade big, in chunks with long time in-between. I don't know why they do it, but in their webcasts it been mentioned a couple of times related to James Webb.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    My (minimally educated) guess is the funding model: they need to give lots of congresspeople stuff for their districts. Big projects provide much more stuff and are easier to sell if everyone can get a piece at once rather than Alabama getting this one piece one year and Colorado getting this other piece the next year.
desmosxxx 4y ago
Some of the design choices that went into JWST will be fixed with larger diameter payloads. When we get into the government allocating funds it gets tricky. Cheaper launch costs could just mean that the savings go into the telescope rather than risk management. It's hard to get funds for a backup telescope, even if it's cheaper overall.
wolverine876 4y ago
Musk has nothing to do with it. The cost is not due to lack of Musk.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
supernova87a 4y ago
Here is my take on the confluence of factors at play: ** 1. The telescope and instruments are designed for a one-time special use, shared by no one else (pretty much). That means many if not all the requirements are being discovered as they go, and it is not a very predictable process in terms of the risks and unknowns. Many delays happen/happened because people believed the requirements were set, and started building things, only to have them change later, leading to wasted time and resources. But that's how something in research phase goes. 2. The size, materials, instruments, etc were pretty much unprecedented, aside from some very low level legacy components. Everything had to be designed for the first time. This often leads to many unexpected cost overruns. 3. It was a huge project, which is always in tension with something that is R&D / being discovered as you go. It takes a long time for many different and scattered teams to be able to communicate their requirements and capabilities and schedules to each other when they are so distributed. There really is something to the idea that 6 people in one room can do things that 100 people in multiple rooms cannot, but by the sheer size required, and the fragmentation of expertise to do the job, it had accompanying schedule and risk problems. 4. Because the telescope is a one-off and so valuable as a project, it had to be risk-free or risk-minimal. When something costs so much, it has to cost even more to protect it against mistakes. That means that you can't cheap out and risk certain things, leading to it taking more time and resources to get it right. It is the opposite of the Mars program "fast and cheap and fail quickly". It has advantages and disadvantages. 5. Also a sort of less tangible factor is that these projects, even when delayed, have to keep a certain group of people employed to maintain continuity of knowledge and technical expertise. If you get delayed, you cannot just cut people from the program, you will lose them to other projects and further delay progress. So every year of delay incurs you a very high cost. ** The costs were not the cost of launch. That was a relatively small part of the project. Ariane, etc. are known factors at this point. It was the fact that everything about the telescope was new, will never be reproduced again, and had to be gotten right the first time. I am probably oversimplifying some things that happened during the process, and other related factors, but that's my opinion.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  "Many delays happen/happened because people believed the requirements were set, and started building things, only to have them change later." The second part, 'changing requirements' has been the reality of many NASA and DoD projects for decades. The "delays" happen because the vendors make gobs of money working this way.
efsavage 4y ago
One question I love to know the answer to is why we only built one, or how hard would it be for us to build more now? Would a second one have cost 5%, 10%, 20% more? Surely it wouldn't be near 100% as all of the research and testing scales.
causality0 4y ago
The cost of projects like Webb is so high because there's zero incentive for the contractors not to make them high. When the Webb program was approved the estimated cost was 500 million dollars. The final cost was ten billion dollars. What's a reasonable punishment for a cost overrun equal to sinking a Nimitz-class supercarrier?
Laremere 4y ago
Yes and no, with factors pushing both ways: There was a tremendous amount of r&d expense for James Webb. However I think that sibling comments are underestimating how much can be reduced by just expecting that the first few attempts would fail. Take the sunshield, where Smarter Every Day did a video showing the extent to which everyone worked to ensure the exact shape was perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu97IiO_yDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu97IiO_yDI A lot of this difficulty was because you couldn't just put it up there and see if it works. If an extensive test costs $100 million, but a launch costs $177 million, you choose the extensive test every time. I think overall a program which made dozens of James Webbs, launching a couple times a year would likely have been cheaper with better results. On the other hand, there's a big problem: Failure, even within the expected threshold of failure, looks really bad in the realm of public opinion. There's just the practical problem of a NASA director having to stand in front of congress and justify why the telescope program that has launched 6 failed satellites over the last 3 years should still get funding. but this is still just an interested observer's speculation.
- uplifter 4y ago
  When the Hubble telescope was launched is had an improperly ground mirror resulting in fuzzy images. There was a test that would have caught the problem on the ground, I recall reading that it would have cost $10 million, but it was skipped to limit the project's budget. Instead it required a multi-hundred million dollar shuttle mission to give the Hubble corrective lenses.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
The components are immensely expensive. The mirrors alone required new manufacturing techniques to be invented and these components are largely invented by doctorate level research scientists. Not to mention the spacecraft and all the deployable systems must withstand intense G forces to achieve escape velocity. The design also requires complete verification. Each component must be created and a test bench then has to be engineered to ensure viability after launch. It is an immense undertaking to develop experimental equipment (ultra-high vacuum, pulsed powered laser physics background), to then add the additional expectations of space launch and zero opportunity for corrective intervention means the standards are exacting.
bigiain 4y ago
> Is the cost of projects such as Webb so high because of high launch costs In my head (and I totally have nothing to do with NASA/JWT), it’s the reliability requirements. I have this discussion with clients a lot, I had it just last week. They’ll come to us with a project with some vague requirements and I’ll ask “what are your reliability requirements here?” and very often they claim “this is business critical, it needs to be 100% reliable”. So I go into my spiel about how 100% is not an achievable goal, and we need to be realistic about whether their actual requirement if 99.9999% or 99% or somewhere in between. For web/app-backend/*aaS type projects I’ll point out I can provide 99% SLA hosting for around $100/month, but that each extra “nine” costs ten times more. If you want guarantee less than an hour of downtime per month, it’ll cost you $1000/month to host, if you want less that 5 minutes a month of downtime I’ll charge 10,000. If you need less than 30seconds a month of downtime we’re talking an on-call team of 5 engineers on 24x7 rosters and that’ll cost you $100,000 a month. If I were launching a one off custom built billion dollar telescope to an orbit a million miles away with practically zero chance of ever fixing anything that might need “hands on” or replacement, I’d be looking very carefully at the costs for 6, 7, or 8 nines of reliability. And I’d choose to spend a _lot_ more than most people would consider “reasonable”. There’s a difference between monthly web hosting costs and the JWT reliability, but instead of 10 or 100 million a month over the life of the project, they need to spend a similarly astronomical budget on the architecture, design, manufacturing, and testing all up front. Can you imagine designing a web hosting platform where the requirement was to run for 5+ years with zero downtime and zero human intervention? U can’t “more hardware” your way out of reality there, and you can’t ignore the risk of your cloud hosting going down (or under). So you now need to think along the lines of 8 nines of HA platform with exception handling and self healing for every possible scenario, in a multi cloud configuration in case Amazon goes into liquidation, that is resilient to _everything_ from as yet undiscovered OS and hardware vulnerabilities to DNS and SSL cert outages and BGP hijacks. (That’s turning into a fascinating thought experiment for me now. I wonder how I’d plan things if someone said “I’ll pay to 1 billion dollars if you build me a (non trivial) backend hosted platform/application, that has less than 1 second of downtime in 5 years, and the _only_ maintenance you can do is reboots or software updates over a 300 baud dialup modem, no platform/hardware configuration changes allowed..)

uoaei 4y ago

Have you done any research into the budgeting process? Edit: I googled it. Here's the first paragraph of the first link from DDG: > The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to cost NASA $9.7 billion over 24 years. Of that amount, $8.8 billion was spent on spacecraft development between 2003 and 2021; $861 million is planned to support five years of operations. Adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars, the lifetime cost to NASA will be approximately $10.8 billion. So "spacecraft development" comprised about 90% of the total budget. Of the remainder, 96% is allocated to "five years of operations". So we have about $39 million left over, which I assume covers the launch and everything around it. If you want to try optimizing that, go ahead, but it is nearly a rounding error (0.4% of budget) in the grand scheme of things. There is an argument to be made that a few million dollars saved is valuable. I would propose a counterargument, that the amount of friction induced by working with private contractors (especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who run SpaceX) would add to some of the development costs, so the savings may not be as big as you think from a naive comparison.

ghaff 4y ago
Basically, it's the cost of designing and building a complete one-off that's going to be launched off into space, deployed, no opportunity to repair, etc. There are a million things that can go wrong. And you have one shot. I know someone who was one of the test engineers on SDO (solar dynamics observatory) and there were all manner of concerns about this, that, and the other thing that were really hard to say were almost absolutely certainly "just fine."
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Basically, it's the cost of designing and building a complete one-off […] As a simple analogy: there's a difference between going to 3-for-1 Suite Warehouse and going to Saville Row and getting something bespoke. It's just there are no COTS satellites that do what JWST do, so if you want to do cutting edge science you're paying for Saville Row.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Probably even worse than that. They're effectively often designing special fabrics, threads, and tools to do the sewing. Not that I have a need any longer, but custom suits in lower cost of labor areas aren't a big deal and even off-the-rack suits pretty much have to be tailored for many of us to look good.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
throwaway6734 4y ago
Is it possible that cheaper and more frequent launches will keep and up dropping the development prices as maybe more regular launches will enable the development process to be less strict and leave more room for error?
- dotnet00 4y ago
  That is essentially what's driving the popularity of smallsats and megaconstellations. Since launch costs are dropping and flights are becoming more regular (eg SpaceX's transporter flights, where the rocket flies regardless of payload readiness and anyone who wasn't ready just moves to another flight, eliminating the main issue from other rideshare arrangements), it's potentially cheaper to make more replaceable satellites. So far this mainly applies to Earth observation and internet constellations. This doesn't really carry-over to large projects like JWST yet though.
raisin_churn 4y ago
Part of the huge cost to develop it was getting a mechanism that could deploy the mirror segments into a large enough array with sufficient accuracy, a task that would be dramatically simplified by a a launch platform with a wider fairing and greater mass to the L2 Lagrange point. So yes, if SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton of money on JWST, albeit mostly by relaxing the design parameters of the telescope rather than through cheaper launch costs.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > if SpaceX Starship was available, it would've saved a ton of money on JWST How much? How much did it cost for the actual JWST? Do you have any evidence of this great cost? The glorification of Musk's ego is endless. Can JWST see the farthest reaches of it? Is it expanding or contracting?
  - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
    I think OP is saying they would have had the space to simply built one large mirror instead of many different mirror segments that require complicated motors and moving parts to deploy into position. The mirror segment deployment technology is surely a significant percentage of the cost.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > surely Is there a more common or obvious trap of reasoning? If 'surely' worked, we wouldn't have needed the Enlightenment, science, or the JWST to learn about the universe. IIRC (much stronger evidence than 'surely', but still lacking), it's in fact not significant to the cost.
      - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
        >IIRC Is there a more common or obvious trap of reasoning? If 'IIRC' worked, we wouldn't have needed the Enlightenment, science, or the JWST to learn about the universe.
bpodgursky 4y ago
> especially contentious and manipulative ones like those who run SpaceX I don't think you know anything about the space industry. SpaceX is famous for being wildly easier to work with than any other launch provider (including semi-national providers like Arianespace).
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Famous among who? Are you in the space launch industry?

jmyeet 4y ago

The cost of launch is relatively low, meaning several hundred million out of a a $15-20B budget. But a given launch system is deeply intertwined with designing the mission. The size, the weight and the mass distribution. Moving parts are a nightmare for reliability. Every moving part is something that can cease up and go wrong. It's a motor that can fail and gears that can get jammed. JWST has two key components that involve a lot of moving parts: 1. The mirror. Hubble was smaller enough to be deployed fully constructed in the Space Shuttle so didn't have to deploy in space. JWST's mirror is 3-4x larger an there's no current launch vehicle that could launch it fully assembled. That's why you have all the beryllium hex mirrors that had to deploy the mirror once in orbit. These motors, actuators, assemblies, etc need to be incredibly precise and reliable; and 2. The heat shield. JWST has to be incredibly cold to operate (5K IIRC). The only way to get rid of heat in space is to radiate it away. The heat shield separates JWST from the Sun, the Earth and Moon (each of which reflect enough light to interfere with operations). The shield is several layers and it's large, like tennis-court sized. Obviously this too had to be deployed in space. There were like 10 technologies for JWST that had to be invented to make the mission possible. That's less than ideal. It adds to the cost, the complexity and the timelines. In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a stepping stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of these technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably with a smaller mirror. But here we are.

capableweb 4y ago
> In hindsight it probably would've been worth having a stepping stone between Hubble and JWST that proved some of these technologies in a cheaper and less risky way, probably with a smaller mirror. But here we are. That doesn't really seem to be in NASAs DNA, to do smaller incremental improvements. Instead, they really upgrade big, in chunks with long time in-between. I don't know why they do it, but in their webcasts it been mentioned a couple of times related to James Webb.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  My (minimally educated) guess is the funding model: they need to give lots of congresspeople stuff for their districts. Big projects provide much more stuff and are easier to sell if everyone can get a piece at once rather than Alabama getting this one piece one year and Colorado getting this other piece the next year.

desmosxxx 4y ago

Some of the design choices that went into JWST will be fixed with larger diameter payloads. When we get into the government allocating funds it gets tricky. Cheaper launch costs could just mean that the savings go into the telescope rather than risk management. It's hard to get funds for a backup telescope, even if it's cheaper overall.

wolverine876 4y ago

Musk has nothing to do with it. The cost is not due to lack of Musk.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

supernova87a 4y ago

Here is my take on the confluence of factors at play: ** 1. The telescope and instruments are designed for a one-time special use, shared by no one else (pretty much). That means many if not all the requirements are being discovered as they go, and it is not a very predictable process in terms of the risks and unknowns. Many delays happen/happened because people believed the requirements were set, and started building things, only to have them change later, leading to wasted time and resources. But that's how something in research phase goes. 2. The size, materials, instruments, etc were pretty much unprecedented, aside from some very low level legacy components. Everything had to be designed for the first time. This often leads to many unexpected cost overruns. 3. It was a huge project, which is always in tension with something that is R&D / being discovered as you go. It takes a long time for many different and scattered teams to be able to communicate their requirements and capabilities and schedules to each other when they are so distributed. There really is something to the idea that 6 people in one room can do things that 100 people in multiple rooms cannot, but by the sheer size required, and the fragmentation of expertise to do the job, it had accompanying schedule and risk problems. 4. Because the telescope is a one-off and so valuable as a project, it had to be risk-free or risk-minimal. When something costs so much, it has to cost even more to protect it against mistakes. That means that you can't cheap out and risk certain things, leading to it taking more time and resources to get it right. It is the opposite of the Mars program "fast and cheap and fail quickly". It has advantages and disadvantages. 5. Also a sort of less tangible factor is that these projects, even when delayed, have to keep a certain group of people employed to maintain continuity of knowledge and technical expertise. If you get delayed, you cannot just cut people from the program, you will lose them to other projects and further delay progress. So every year of delay incurs you a very high cost. ** The costs were not the cost of launch. That was a relatively small part of the project. Ariane, etc. are known factors at this point. It was the fact that everything about the telescope was new, will never be reproduced again, and had to be gotten right the first time. I am probably oversimplifying some things that happened during the process, and other related factors, but that's my opinion.

readthenotes1 4y ago
"Many delays happen/happened because people believed the requirements were set, and started building things, only to have them change later." The second part, 'changing requirements' has been the reality of many NASA and DoD projects for decades. The "delays" happen because the vendors make gobs of money working this way.

efsavage 4y ago

One question I love to know the answer to is why we only built one, or how hard would it be for us to build more now? Would a second one have cost 5%, 10%, 20% more? Surely it wouldn't be near 100% as all of the research and testing scales.

causality0 4y ago

The cost of projects like Webb is so high because there's zero incentive for the contractors not to make them high. When the Webb program was approved the estimated cost was 500 million dollars. The final cost was ten billion dollars. What's a reasonable punishment for a cost overrun equal to sinking a Nimitz-class supercarrier?

Laremere 4y ago

Yes and no, with factors pushing both ways: There was a tremendous amount of r&d expense for James Webb. However I think that sibling comments are underestimating how much can be reduced by just expecting that the first few attempts would fail. Take the sunshield, where Smarter Every Day did a video showing the extent to which everyone worked to ensure the exact shape was perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu97IiO_yDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu97IiO_yDI A lot of this difficulty was because you couldn't just put it up there and see if it works. If an extensive test costs $100 million, but a launch costs $177 million, you choose the extensive test every time. I think overall a program which made dozens of James Webbs, launching a couple times a year would likely have been cheaper with better results. On the other hand, there's a big problem: Failure, even within the expected threshold of failure, looks really bad in the realm of public opinion. There's just the practical problem of a NASA director having to stand in front of congress and justify why the telescope program that has launched 6 failed satellites over the last 3 years should still get funding. but this is still just an interested observer's speculation.

uplifter 4y ago
When the Hubble telescope was launched is had an improperly ground mirror resulting in fuzzy images. There was a test that would have caught the problem on the ground, I recall reading that it would have cost $10 million, but it was skipped to limit the project's budget. Instead it required a multi-hundred million dollar shuttle mission to give the Hubble corrective lenses.

upsidesinclude 4y ago

The components are immensely expensive. The mirrors alone required new manufacturing techniques to be invented and these components are largely invented by doctorate level research scientists. Not to mention the spacecraft and all the deployable systems must withstand intense G forces to achieve escape velocity. The design also requires complete verification. Each component must be created and a test bench then has to be engineered to ensure viability after launch. It is an immense undertaking to develop experimental equipment (ultra-high vacuum, pulsed powered laser physics background), to then add the additional expectations of space launch and zero opportunity for corrective intervention means the standards are exacting.

bigiain 4y ago

> Is the cost of projects such as Webb so high because of high launch costs In my head (and I totally have nothing to do with NASA/JWT), it’s the reliability requirements. I have this discussion with clients a lot, I had it just last week. They’ll come to us with a project with some vague requirements and I’ll ask “what are your reliability requirements here?” and very often they claim “this is business critical, it needs to be 100% reliable”. So I go into my spiel about how 100% is not an achievable goal, and we need to be realistic about whether their actual requirement if 99.9999% or 99% or somewhere in between. For web/app-backend/*aaS type projects I’ll point out I can provide 99% SLA hosting for around $100/month, but that each extra “nine” costs ten times more. If you want guarantee less than an hour of downtime per month, it’ll cost you $1000/month to host, if you want less that 5 minutes a month of downtime I’ll charge 10,000. If you need less than 30seconds a month of downtime we’re talking an on-call team of 5 engineers on 24x7 rosters and that’ll cost you $100,000 a month. If I were launching a one off custom built billion dollar telescope to an orbit a million miles away with practically zero chance of ever fixing anything that might need “hands on” or replacement, I’d be looking very carefully at the costs for 6, 7, or 8 nines of reliability. And I’d choose to spend a _lot_ more than most people would consider “reasonable”. There’s a difference between monthly web hosting costs and the JWT reliability, but instead of 10 or 100 million a month over the life of the project, they need to spend a similarly astronomical budget on the architecture, design, manufacturing, and testing all up front. Can you imagine designing a web hosting platform where the requirement was to run for 5+ years with zero downtime and zero human intervention? U can’t “more hardware” your way out of reality there, and you can’t ignore the risk of your cloud hosting going down (or under). So you now need to think along the lines of 8 nines of HA platform with exception handling and self healing for every possible scenario, in a multi cloud configuration in case Amazon goes into liquidation, that is resilient to _everything_ from as yet undiscovered OS and hardware vulnerabilities to DNS and SSL cert outages and BGP hijacks. (That’s turning into a fascinating thought experiment for me now. I wonder how I’d plan things if someone said “I’ll pay to 1 billion dollars if you build me a (non trivial) backend hosted platform/application, that has less than 1 second of downtime in 5 years, and the _only_ maintenance you can do is reboots or software updates over a 300 baud dialup modem, no platform/hardware configuration changes allowed..)