What should have been done is to have many more missions where these technologies can iteratively been proven so that once you head into a larger project you have some idea of whats gone happen.

And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.

And the companies that did it made fine profit of course. Promise the moon, don't deliver, make profit. Not a good model.

And how much do those projects cost? And what value do we derive from lots of small iterative solutions?

> And you don't end up launching a telescope that already has 20 year old tech in it.

If you're launching iteratively, then either you're proving out the tech until it's decades old, or you're never making progress on your iterative approach because you're constantly replacing the thing you iterated on with the new hotness.

But what other reasons that people might care about X failing as a project when it succeeds as a product?