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James Webb Space Telescope Cost Overruns Adding Up
digitaldc writes "The scale of the delay and cost overrun blighting NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been laid bare by a panel called in to review the project. The group believes the final budget for Hubble's successor is likely to climb to at least $6.5bn, for a launch that is possible in September 2015. But even this assessment is optimistic (PDF), say the panel members. Estimates for JWST's total cost to build, launch and operate have steadily increased over the years from $3.5bn to $5bn. Along with the cost growth, the schedule has also eroded. The most recent projected launch of 2014 has looked under pressure for some time. Charles Bolden has ordered a reorganization of the project and has changed the management at its top. Whereas Hubble sees the Universe mostly in visible light, JWST will observe the cosmos at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. It will see deeper into space and further back in time, to the very first population of stars."
is that this will be in an orbit we can't get to if there have to be repairs, much like the Hubble desperately needed. They better get it right the first time.
Yes we do. A lot more pictures. This thing is a bargain when compared with the things we'll find out about the universe.
It's still going to cost significantly less than a month in Iraq or Afghanistan....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I don't care if it costs 6.5 trillion. The amount of knowledge gained from peering that far back is invaluable.
They just underestimated the original bid to get the contract. That's just the way things work.. SNAFU
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I think sating our curiosity about the beginnings of the universe should take a back seat to our 13 trillion dollar deficit, our 9.6% unemployment rate, our sluggish exports market, our extended overseas military conflicts, our wide-open borders, and our faltering standing as the leader of the free world...but what do I know?
For that cost you can build many smaller satellites and many many more land-based observatories. It's not really worth the price NASA asks for.
Every big scientific project looks bad when projected onto the one-dimensional axis of cost. They're big, expensive, and the accounting for them is a discipline onto itself. None of this has anything to do with science. The scientific goals of the JWST are laudable and important, and as a society, we need to figure out how to get them done. The US has a substantial problem in this area. The nature of the US congress is that it cannot force any future congress to do anything, include paying for a project they proposed last year. So, every single year, every big scientific endeavor has to fight for its life. Every big project will run into problems and roadbumps along the way, but these are smart people and they can figure it out. The difficulty of the project makes it more important that it be completed, rather than less.
But what inevitably happens is that Big Science Project reaches some cost overrun or technical snag, or national economics takes a temporary downturn. Gloom-and-doom articles are written. Review panels are formed. Said project gets cancelled next year, after an investment of billions of dollars. You might call it Ares or the Superconducting Supercollider. Meanwhile, countries with more stable funding structures are able to achieve the same goals. You might call them China, India, the ESA or CERN.
I'm a theoretical physicist. Early in my career, the Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled. It was three times the energy of the LHC. Had the US had the balls to carry forward with that project, we would have discovered the Higgs boson and answered many important questions, as much as 10 years ago already. Yeah there were some political and funding problems but these could have been fixed. I spent several years at CERN. They have a funding structure in which member states pay into a common pot as a fraction of their GDP as an international treaty. When there are cost overruns or problems (recall the magnet explosion last year that shut down the LHC for a year?) the fixed budget means it just takes longer. The project does not risk cancellation. We still get the important science results. As a consequence, they can go for more speculative, long-term research. They are able to drive advancement. The next CERN collider, CLIC has been in the planning and develoment stages for years. It uses new experimental (and still not fully proved) kind of particle acceleration.
The US will lose in the global science race unless it can establish a more stable funding structure for big science projects, and use them to drive scientific advancement. These things are important. Through the JWST and LHC we gain invaluable knowledge about the structure of our universe. Don't let short-sighted penny pinching bureaucrats or alarmist journalism deprive us of scientific progress.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
That's an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a "Perfect example for the sad state of humanity"-mod option.
May I in turn suggest ending your overseas military conflicts, use the cash to repair your ruined infrastructure, thereby raising employment rates and getting the local economies going? Then you can start to worry about your exports and fix your immigration system. Oh, and fuck that "leader of the free world" thing. I am part of the free world, and I feel no desire whatsoever to have any leader at all, let alone the US.
Compared to the money you guys are pissing into the wind for no return whatsoever, this telescope is a drop in the bucket. And if you have any interest at all to get your exports going, developing your local high-tech talent with projects like this might be a first step...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I fail to recognize how a complete replacement of one of the world's most powerful telescopes to gain a semi-marginal improvement in its abilities counts as an investment in science. I don't know, maybe it would be, but the time to recoup our costs would be far in the future to say the least. Let's wait until the economy turns around and for now focus on things less abstractly beneficial...
Divide the 6.5 billion amongst all of the problems you list and you'll see how insignificant it is. That's like saying you should not buy that big screen TV because there are people in the world that are starving to death right now. Sure, it may be true that there are people starving to death, but not buying that big screen tv is not going to save them. It is a bigger issue.
-Xoltri
...it's full of stars!
and a lot of other stuff we've never seen before because we're missing out on everything beyond a certain limit of red-shift and absolute magnitude
But, at some point, we will be looking at the edge of the universe. If it's emitting electromagnetic radiation. Then you can complain.
You always bid on the best case scenario, then specify that changes will require additional funding. If you do the work you said you'd do, at the cost you said, it's not really true that you've underbid it. The problem is that there are things that are unknowable going in. You could try to account for them by adding 50% or 100% to your bid, but that will put you at a disadvantage to the other bidders, and you'd just be pulling numbers out of your ass anyway.
The bidding process is to select the cheapest/best contractor for the job, not to get a realistic idea of the overall project cost. The bean-counters in Washington know that, but they don't want to put a realistic cost in a bill because they know it won't get funded. Realistically, for this kind of project they should always add 100% or 150% to the bid price to allow for unforeseen problems. Even for a typical infrastructure project they should probably add at least 50% to accommodate change-orders. Then if it's to expensive, they should cancel the project from the start, rather than waiting till they've sunk most of the cost to decide to cancel it.
For a place that bills itself as "news for nerds" there certainly is a very large group here who seem to not be interested in any type of scientific research, are seem more interesting in whining about paying taxes.
A lot of us didn't want to invade Iraq, but our tax dollars were used any way. Don't want us to pay for a space telescope? Tough shit!