It costs a lot more to run a telescope in space! For the JWST, the annual cost is, $175.2M/yr. Calculated from the $861M that NASA budgeted for its first 5 year

It costs a lot more to run a telescope in space! For the JWST, the annual cost is, $175.2M/yr. Calculated from the $861M that NASA budgeted for its first 5 years of operations. As always, the most expensive costs aren't the hardware; it's the people! The second highest operational cost is probably Deep Space Network time. Each contact can be calculated using this formula, (1057 * 1 * (0.9+(7/10)) * (1 + 4) [note: this is in 2017 dollars, I've inflation adjusted the amount], each contact is for 4 hours/day and must be done every day, that's $9,286.5/day for DSN time, inflation adjusted. Or, $3,389,572.5/yr for network time alone. I am sure that there are additional costs that make it even higher. You can see the formula here, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/21005/what-makes-time-on-the-dsn-so-expensive https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/21005/what-makes-t...