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 underestima

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.