"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We have that guideline because putting down your peers like this is reliably the marker of a bad comment, and leads to significantly poorer threads. We all love to feel superior to others, or (probably the same thing) to ward off feeling inferior, but this is a low-grade mechanism and never a source of interesting conversation. It also pretty much dominates the internet and we're trying for something different from those defaults here.

HN comments have been overwhelmingly positive about the JWT and it is currently one of the most popular topics that appears here.

agreed.

This was, and continues to be, a momentous accomplishment.

The fact that it happened at all is a herculean task in constraints management, not only on the engineering side, but also on the political and zeitgeist-management side (e.g., managing different adminstrations with often antithetical perspectives on the value of science, etc).

A lot of folks on HN only see this from their own perspective, of "how-can-I-disrupt-X", or "I would have done it so much better", without a real appreciation of the overwhelming complexities in pulling off a task with so many moving parts (literally and figuratively).

Sure, you could have done it better. Then do it. But don't diminish the value of a truly monumental accomplishment when it happens; they don't come often enough, and more often than not, projects with this level of ambition fail far before they ever get to the point they can be critiqued by arm-chair geniuses.

Leave it to HN engineers to hand wave away going 10x over budget and a decade late.

it's something that was never done before and one of the few things that will create all kind of new sciences.

Your comment is really frustrating. few people in this life can do something that was never done before, much much fewer on this scale, much much much fewer with such impact on science and humanity.

I find it interesting that planning overruns such as this seem to get pinned on implementation, rather than the planning and approval processes themselves.

The evidence is that the time and cost it took to produce JWST are what they are. That planners lowballed these estimates, or that administrators and legislators wouldn't have approved greenlighting based on accurate estimates, speak to failures in planning and administration, rather than engineering.

Much of the planning / large-project literature, which I've studied for some three decades, seems itself to be largely blind to this distinction.

As to many comments found on the Internet mirroring such viewpoints.

Maybe it’s by design. A 5 year project can be greenlit by Congress, and delays forgiven.

20 year project? Dies in committee.

Nothing to show the folks back home, risk of being either primaried or challenged by the other party.

Welcome to politics.

Hilarious criticism coming from software engineers which is never late or over budget. Even when there’s nothing actually novel in the product

I don't want to tell NASA/ESA/CSA how to operate, but I haven't heard of a single software product that launched 10 years late. Such a product would be immediately DOA because of how fast technology moves. Obviously a space telescope is literally rocket science, so it's nothing like the next popular JavaScript library, but I think NASA could adopt a little bit of the move-fast-break-things mentality. Apparently they're running Python 1.5 on the JWST ffs.

All I'm saying is there's room to improve. JWST would be a monumental success for humanity even if it launched 20 years late.

I can count so many I can't even decide where to begin. This being the classic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Duke_Nukem_Fore...

"The video game Duke Nukem Forever spent fifteen years in development, from 1996 to 2011."

I don't think you should be risking anything when there's $5bn at stake and a single failure can cause you to lose all of it

yeah most get cancelled before that time, so you don't hear about them.

For one of the most complicated pieces of engineering ever achieved sure

The initial estimate turned out to be wrong. I hand wave that sort of thing away every day.

I'm curious as to why and whether some of the delay had to do with the public and lawmakers getting impatient and trying to cut it short, then actually forcing it longer, then blaming the engineers.

Yeah, the limited lifespan would be much less concerning if we had any reason to believe we could iterate and crank out more / better telescopes in the future.

I guess I just assume they learned a lot in building this and that knowledge will transfer into new telescopes, launches, deployments, etc. Do you think they didn't learn enough by figuring this out?

I am not confident that whatever caused JWT to take so long will be solved for the next project. NASA by its nature does not really benefit from "scale". Every important thing they do / produce is novel.

I am sure they have learned alot from building JWT, as they certainly learned a lot from building Hubble or the space shuttle. I don't think that knowledge necessarily transfers forwards to make the next project easier.

Well, as you seem to have said, NASA doesn't seem too interested in scaling but rather in doing things that stretch the bounds. If their goal isn't to scale the previous project but to push past what people thought were possible with experiments, that seems OK to me.

IIRC the companies that made the beryllium main mirror went bankrupt because the material is much more tricky then anticipated.

So you would have to do that again basically or come up with another mirror design.

Ah I hadn't know. That being said, perhaps one thing they learned from this is which materials they may not want to use again in the future. I dunno, I just struggle to imagine that they didn't learn a lot from this and that most of us have really any idea whether the learnings are worth $10B, $1B, $100B, etc.

I have a few qualms with this telescope:

1. For an astronomer, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an large mirror, mounting it in space with a really big catapult, and then using origami to unfold everything. From earth, this telescope could be accessed through everyday ham radios.

2. It doesn't actually replace the Hubble. Most people I know still want to see things in the visible spectrum, and IR fake images just don't cut it. This does not solve the visible spectrum issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

This is all sarcasm, modified from this infamous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

You had me fired up before I hit the last sentence. Well done, I should have recognized the infamous dropbox comment :)

Haha! Glad you enjoyed it. I thought I was too over the top with the large catapult as a launch system and HAM radio for telephony, but I guess people oversimplify/handwave worse details

Well, considering the progress in space in reaching the moon and the arguably stagnant (except recent developments like reusable boosters) developments since then, I think it's very reasonable to be disappointed in the past years of space development.

> arguably stagnant (except recent developments like reusable boosters) developments since then

What about Voyager, ISS, Hubble, Mars rovers, Mars helicopter(!), and Cassini/Huygens missions? There's more to do in space than just going to the moon. I'd love to see us back there as well, but I think there's still a whole lot to be excited about.

agreed, all incredible stuff, I replied to another comment with a fuller reply, but despite these incredible recent achievements I think the years since apollo have been overshadowed by failures in rocket development and innovation (except spacex) and nasa under funding. I linked a story about SLS delays and funding levels and Nasa budget in my other reply

Human spaceflight has stagnated for sure. However, we have multiple rovers on Mars. We have satellites that tell us exactly where we are on Earth. We took pictures of Pluto. We exited the solar system. We landed on an asteroid. We slammed into a comet. I choose to be excited.

All undeniably incredible achievements. I look at Nasa's budget [1] and see the government achieve something incredible in the apollo project and take their foot off the gas on the most exciting (and potentially unifying) frontier. I also look at the corruption and stagnation in US rocket systems like SLS and the sinkhole of hours and dollars it has been [2].

I am very excited about space and the future, I just think that in the years since Apollo the story has been emblematic of wastefulness, contractor level benign corruption (cost plus contracting) more than it has been inspiring with the stories you mentioned. just my opinion.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

2 https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/nasas-sls-moon-rocket-is-2...

Seems like the real and hard truth is that, at anything resembling our current tech levels, human spaceflight just doesn't add much value compared to the massive, overwhelming difficulty.

We've sent hundreds of robots all over the place. To Mars, Jupiter, asteroids, comets, the outer planets, out of the Solar System entirely, as close to the Sun as can be managed, and everywhere else in between. For basically all of these missions, sending humans along would be 1000x more expensive, and the humans would be bored to tears for 99.9% of the time. For most of the rest of the time, they'd be relying on the same instruments as the robotic missions, as the environment is too harsh for anything else. So what's the point?

And who would we be sending? We could send super-smart scientific experts to maybe follow up on things a little faster, but it'd be a waste to have them sit around for years on the voyage back and forth. Or we could send more ordinary folks, who might not be all that much more capable than the robots we're sending now.

Sorry, it might burst some peoples bubbles of romance and sexy space adventures, but it mostly just doesn't make sense to send humans into space for the type of exploration missions we're doing. Maybe if we can send enough resources to actually have a colony on Mars or something, but we're not there yet.

From your first link:

> NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending....In 1973, NASA submitted congressional testimony reporting the total cost of Project Apollo as $25.4 billion (about $156 billion in 2019 dollars).

I wonder if there also wasn't that level of waste at that point but not too many people cared because the country was mostly terrified by the USSR and wanted to win.

Ironically, I think the more we think there's corruption and waste, the more that may lead to corruption and waste, as we distrust and defund and discourage. Again, I imagine some of the waste comes from the fickle attitude that some of the public and lawmakers have towards funding these orgs.

NASA was wasteful and full of contractor corruption during Apollo as well. They just had the political will to get funded and keep pushing forward so they did.

The stagnation in aerospace is mostly due to us running into fundamental limits of physics pretty quickly, not due to some kind of work ethic or creative failures. to keep pushing forward in space would have required another order of magnitude in funding, and funding during Apollo was already huge. That said, I wouldn't mind if all the worlds military $$$ had been dumped into mars colonization either.

I only get opportunities every few years to affect in a minuscule way NASA's budget and mission, the rest of the time I have to act as a passive observer. In that time I choose to be happy with what they've accomplished and excited for what comes next.

It has to be cost-plus or no one would do something that has not been done before. Fixed cost is fine for something you have a grasp on production costs.

I'm not a space scientist but it look sto me that human space travel is insanely hard and, if there's no infrastructure at the destination humans won't be able to do much... So, maybe it's too early to wish space travels ? Maybe it'd be safer to first colonize with robots, install infrastructure, make sure the travels are safe enough by sending animals or other life forms and then once ready, send humans ?

It's a perspective thing. We have incredible technology but at a loss of what to do with it. We had the cold war pushing us to achieve great things in competition but now we are stagnant. Our tools are too powerful and dangerous to wave around, we don't know how to balance investor and worker class wealth allocation, we can't seem to control anything about society that used to just fall in line.

As to what we can do in space: the value of reusable boosters is very understated. Why don't we have a manned mission to Mars? Because it takes a huge payload with lots of delta-V. Sending ten rockets up for orbital refueling was always a pipe dream in terms of cost. Suddenly it's attainable and the solar system is our oyster. It's still expensive, but we now have the tools.

Look - super impressive but it's not hard to find downsides. This thing took 20 years and near a billion dollars; at some point you should be asking, "Why couldn't we have had it sooner or cheaper or some combination of the two?"

Say it wildly over performs reliability.. it lasts not 20 years but 1,000 years - is that more of success? I'd argue against that - it's more of a failure because we don't need it to last that long.

What if - hypothetically - we had JWST 10 years ago for half the cost but it were just winking out right now? Would that be a failure? I think that's at least an arguable point.