That's a bit cynical. There are many examples of NASA missions that had far exceeded the original expectations.

Plus, check out some of the engineering on this $10B masterpiece.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201800...

In my opinion, much better for Human advancement than the typical $10B infrastructure project

indeed, I would take a bunch of 10billion scientific instruments over trillion dollar fighter jets or mid east military incursions any day.

Yup. Hubble was no different; took forever and cost more than expected. These are novel scientific instruments, not helicopters.

Hubble's cost structure is complicated. It is essentially a modified spy satellite and so much of its development costs were shrouded. We don't know how much was saved, or how much of Hubble's public budget was used on other projects. JWST is different. It is a unique object with no equivalent. Its cost structure is therefore not comparable to Hubble.

(Or I am wrong. Maybe JWST is a modified version of a super-secret unannounced program and its budget is covering the development costs of that spying program. Given the testing scheduled I doubt this, but it remains a possibility.)

Part of the cost of Hubble was that the teams working on the keyhole satellites was not allowed to tell the Hubble designers about "lessons learned" and the Hubble team had to find them out the hard way.

Any links or references? Sounds like a fascinating backstory.

I think it's fair to say that JWST isn't just a tweaked KH like Hubble. The mirrors and sensors in JWST are completely optimized for infrared, which is a borderline-useless part of the spectrum for high-res terrestrial surveillance. Optical scopes also wouldn't need the extensive sunshield and cooling systems that JWST will. By the time that a theoretical secret optical JWST-KH were retrofitted with new mirror designs, new sensors, and new active and passive cooling systems for a public infrared science mission, you basically have a completely redesigned satellite.

> There are many examples of NASA missions that had far exceeded the original expectations.

many of those concocted by NASA announcing artificially low public expectations, while ensuring the contractors know what the real (much higher) expectations are.

Citation?

the whole point is that NASA isn't documenting this. go get a job in the industry and ask around after a couple of years.

Let's assume expectations scale with budget.

The original cost estimate was $0.5B [1]. Now it's roughly at $10B. So there was a 20x cost increase.

So if we assume original expectations it would need to exceed original expectations by 20x just to make up for the cost growth.

Of course we also need to consider all the other NASA telescopes that didn't get funded to feed this one. They all would likely have exceeded expectations too. It's hard to estimate those, but at least a factor of two addition seems reasonable. So it has to be 40x better just to not exceed

BTW nothing of this is cynical. It's just basic cost-benefit analysis.

It would have been better to cancel it early and spend a small part of the cost in technology development (and other more manageable telescopes) to make sure such an epic project disaster never happens again.

You're conflating expected value with investment cost.

Your argument has the same merit as "I need a car to get to a this new job which will cost $1000 and I'll make $100k more." If instead you purchase a car costing you $10k that doesn't mean it's no longer worth taking the job.

This project has advanced our ability to build complex devices, and refined various manufacturing processes that will all have meaningful impacts on our economy and that is before it has started it's mission. The data it will collect is potentially invaluable not to mention the personal inspiration that projects like these inspire in individuals.

Compare this to other ways that our government might have actually spent this $10B over the lifetime of this project and we're still getting a bargain.

Compared to other NASA projects we likely wouldn't have gotten the manufacturing processes or complex integration experience and even more likely we wouldn't have gotten the inspiration. Bigger and more expensive projects are expensive because they're hard. When we succeed in doing hard things and even make the same thing easier in the future we collectively absolutely get more value.