Slashdot Mirror
How the Webb Space Telescope Got So Expensive
First time accepted submitter IICV writes "Ethan Siegel of Starts with a Bang has done some research on how and why the James Webb Space Telescope's price tag ballooned. Quoting: 'Something wasn't adding up. How could the telescope be more than three-quarters complete after $3.5 billion, but require more than double that amount to finish it? Also, how did the launch date get bumped by three years, to 2018? And how did 6.5 billion become a disastrous $8.7 billion so quickly? So I did a little digging around, and perhaps a little investigative reporting as well, and got ahold of a Webb Project Scientist who's also a member of the Webb Science Working Group.'" Whether or not you buy the argument that the money's well-spent (at $5 billion or $8 billion, or either side of these), even the work in progress is beautiful.
How the Web space telescope became so expensive? Connectivity through Comcast, no doubt.
Hmmm. And First Post?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The whole project, with budget over-runs, is still cheaper than 1 month in Iraq...
How the Webb Space Telescope Got So Expensive?
Obviously it was the shipping and handling charges.
1st Corollary to Hofstadter's Law: It always costs more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Hofstadter's original law actually only applies to time (not money). Typical usage: A couple years ago the NYC MTA Canarsie line "next train" countdown signs, originally a two year project, were running a couple years behind, and projected to take 5 years to complete.
You're doing something nobody has done before, inventing it as you go, and people expect you to know in advance how much it's going to cost. There are always unforeseen things that crop up.
And then there is the whole complexity of getting it funded in the first place. And the smoke and mirrors that come with that. The most fun we had was getting funding for the hardware but not the software. The project is one year over schedule, the hardware is done, but the software...
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Thank you for a very nice piece of investigative journalism. I summarize my understanding of it as follows:
The JWST budget did not include provision for technical and other problems that are expected to happen on large speculative projects such as this.
Oversight failed to act on warnings that budgets were being exceeded and schedules were drifting.
When oversight finally pulled the plug, parts of the project were near completion (implying that a 2014 launch date may have been possible).
Attempts to salvage any of the billions invested will incur significant additional costs due to loss of staff and the dissipation of knowledge, pushing any possible launch date close to 2020 and a budget four times the size of the original estimate.
Congress is shifting the blame entirely to NASA; seemingly avoiding responsibility for its part in appropriating public money without either due diligence or proper oversight.
Sound like business as usual.
11+%, last time I looked at Shadowstats.
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
The dollar is being systematically debased.
If you reward lying, you will get more lies. The original budget was intentionally low-balled (i.e. it was a lie), and now the truth is coming out. But no one will be fired, no one will be punished, there will be no negative consequences for the liars. There will also be no consequences for the people that accepted the lies. No incumbent will fail to be reelected over just a few billion in overruns. Expect more massive overruns on future projects. There is no reason to expect anything else.
Just like the F-22, F-35, B1, B2, any naval contract in the last two decades and on and on.
I think the last military contract that came in on budget was for a bunch of shower stalls during the Korean war.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There are two commpeting forces at play here. Three if you include the people responsible for the budget.
The first and most obvious group is the scientists who first proposed the telescope and want to use it.
The second group are the people contracted to build it. These are the ones with all the power and the most to lose. Once the JWST is finished and launched they are (mostly) out of as job. As a consequence they have a selfish interest in making the design,development, testing and integration take as long as possible - simply to preserve their jobs and income. Now that's a fairly extreme description. I'm (almost) sure that nobody actually goes out of their way to sabotage it, or malinger. It's just that as with any project, there's always the possibility to improve things: tweak the spec. here, add another 0.05dB to a noise margin there ... and so it goes on; With no hard and fast deadline in the offing, there's nobody to say "it's absolutely got to be finished by <date>". Military projects in peacetime suffer exactly the same project creep and delays, for exactly the same reason.
The deadline is the key - that's why the moon landings happened on time. That's why wartime projects (when people are dying for lack of a solution) turbo-charge innovation. The JFDI attitude is paramount and without a launch date to work towards (or at least without a credible one, that absolutely MUST be met) the contractors are always going to be suggesting improvements, not overcoming delays and problems and finding more expensive options for problems.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"Does anyone know what protects the mirrors?"
It's not in earth orbit. It's roughtly a million miles from the earth, so space junk isn't really a factor.
http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/orbit.html
If you get something of any size hitting you out there, it's likely going so fast a shield wouldn't make much difference anyway. But, there isn't a big debris attracting mass like the earth out there either.
John P. (my first grad school adviser) is that you?
Sure sounds like him.
He was ecstatic when the SSC was cancelled in the 90s. I don't think he really let himself understand that none of the money would go to things he wanted funded.
The fallacy that if the money wasn't spent on JWST it would get spent on something more worthwhile is just that. A fallacy.
And before you get too bent out of shape at some astro type tossing cold water one you, my background is solid state too. (Curse you Murray Gell Mann and your Squalid State comments. :)
Since I submitted this story, I've actually RTFA'd and that's exactly what didn't happen.
Here's a timeline of events:
1. NASA says "we could make the JWST for $5.1 billion, and launch in 2014". Not "make and run for five years", the $5.1 billion only covers making the thing and putting it into space.
2. NASA's management fucks up, and an independent review panel finds that the actual price tag will be $6.5 billion, with a launch in 2015. This is NASA's fault.
3. However, the $6.5 billion number is contingent on NASA having $250 million to spend in 2011 and 2012 on important things like not laying off critical workers, and funding the fabrication of vital parts.
4. Congress does not provide that money, so the $6.5 billion number was never actually achievable anyway.
5. Now that NASA's fucked, climbing back out of the hole will cost an extra 1 - 1.5 billion dollars, because Congress didn't want to approve a total of 0.5 billion dollars over the next two years.
6. To add insult to injury, the number they're bandying about right now to show how much the project has gone over includes the cost of running it for five years, which the initial estimates did not. This adds nearly an extra billion on to the number.
At no point did NASA intentionally lowball the budget; if NASA's management hadn't fucked up, they could have made it. The initial cost overrun from $5.1 to $6.5 billion is NASA's fault, because NASA's been administrated by idiots for the last couple of decades.
Some budget creep can be expected, particularly on R&D projects. However an order of magnitude? That means you were either incompetent, or lying. I've certainly had projects at work that cost more than initially projected. Things go wrong or there are unexpected other needs. However 10 times the price? Hell no. If something hit double the price I'd have to think it would indicate a large fuckup on my part (or a massive change in scope).
So one way or another, something went massively wrong. Either a complete lack of competency or a criminal level of lying.
Insurance .. these things are insured .. besides the experience building the telescope probably generated a lot of useful knowledge so all is not lost .. all is never lost in science.
Hubble gave us a lot of very nice pictures, but let's be realistic: in terms of science per dollar we've got much more from combination of WMAP and SDSS I and II. JWST just killed a whole lot of more interesting projets in the same way LSST is now threathening to kill amazing and cheap projects like BigBOSS.
They should still fly JWST, after all this money spend it would be stupid to kill it and interesting things will come out of it. But let's be fair about science: pretty pictures that excite public are useful for PR, but for real science you need better than that.
I work at Goddard Space Flight Center and have direct contact with other engineers working on JWST. I doubt that it will fly or, if it does, that it will be successful. There are too many "defective by design" problems with its systems.
Consider, for example, the microshutters. In order to have a chance of resolving something like a planet orbiting a star, there is a design requirement to be able to block the optical path on a pixel by pixel basis. This is done in an LCD projector with an array of mirrors, each of which can be individually pivoted to deflect a small portion of the beam. Someone determined that this method would not provide adequate contrast ratio so a shutter system was proposed. The problem with shutters is that the individual elements must pivot farther. A mirror has only to move the beam off target; a shutter must open wide. Since the shutters are MEMS devices, the wide bending requires the use of very fragile material--stuff that breaks when subjected to shock and vibration testing at levels well below mission requirements. (Imagine the shock when the pryo charges go off and the mirrors start unfolding into place.) The project management solution thus far appears to be stop testing and ship the microshutter assembly on to the next level of integration. When it breaks there, it will be a handling issue and "not our problem."
This isn't the only problem subsystem.
JWST is the 800 lb gorilla at Goddard. The program routinely takes resources and personnel assigned to other projects. The suggestion that Congress might kill it was a real morale booster. We could fly about a dozen Explorer class mission for what would be saved by ending JWST at this point. The first such missions would provide real, useful science sooner than JWST, and the later missions could be designed based on the knowledge derived from the earlier.
JWST would be wonderful if it could work, but as the program has been and is being run, it will simply produce a big piece of space junk out at L2. And L2 is a place where we do not have the ability to send a servicing mission. It's time to stop throwing good money after bad!
The libertarian would argue that taxpayers shouldn't have been forced to pay for this telescope at all.
Depends on which Libertarians you're talking to. You should check out Penn and Tellers "Bullshit" - the episode where they talk about NASA. Their take would be far different than your typical Ayn Rand fanatic.
Of course, it also depends on what you mean by "forced to pay". If you buy into a type of libertarianism where paying taxes is voluntary, but getting to vote is dependent on paying taxes, then you can have a government sponsored space program without forcing anyone to pay for it.
Suffice it to say that it's a complex topic ....