> We need a shift to more missions, building these things more often and more on price

This only very recently became financially reasonable with SpaceX. It would have been impossible for NASA to know at that time that private industry would manage to lower the cost of launch by magnitudes.

Cost didn't matter back then because you only got one shot to launch anyways. If the rocket blew up and took the satellite with it you're never getting approval to launch again. It would be better to let the project overrun than to worry about financials and contractual obligations when the risk of cancellation or failure is already so high. But now, with launches being relatively cheap, it is actually possible to envision a backup plan where a second satellite goes up with a second rocket. Again, this only very recently (maybe ~5 years ago?) became possible.

I agree with you now though - NASA ought to be reconsidering overhauling its procurement process now that Falcon 9 exists.

These things are a consequence of unaccountable, unvompetitive contractors, not just a cause. We could have had routine volume space flight many decades ago, if the money we spent went to competitive free market purchases. Even the Space Shuttle was originally meant to have something like weekly launches, and then they didn't, mostly for bad political reasons.

Disagree. Even with Atlas 5 this was not totally unreasonable.

> If the rocket blew up and took the satellite with it you're never getting approval to launch again.

That's not accurate.

This is all hypotheticals of course, but is it really likely that if a major satellite was lost NASA would be willing to bankroll the construction of a second identical one? I think the whole project would be scrapped and something else down the line would be approved to replace it. It certainly wouldn't be a quick turnaround time.

There is considerable effort on this direction already. A lot of the bus (on board computers, power, etc.) is standardized for a lot of missions.

But there's always have uncertainty in the payloads. First, because there are lots of contractors involved. That's somewhat fixable.

Second, and most important, is that many of these payloads are cutting-edge. They've never been built before and some of them push physical and engineering limits. I've worked on missions where the only delay was the payload for many years, and they were simpler than JWST.

It's a problem of not knowing what we don't know. When working on those kinds of systems, the estimates lose a lot of meaning.

Agreed: there must be consequences. And this human management problem is not specific to science nor cosmology. The total dollars sunk into research is small compared to revenues spent elsewhere. Heck, in the US Government, it is still not yet using its check book leverage to reduce drug prices.