You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly. The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover yo

You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly. The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”. The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable. While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”. It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.