One of man's greatest achievements (2023 Update)

10x over budget and 20 years late. Imagine how many ground-based telescopes we could have built for that cost, or how many lives we could have saved.

Ground-based telescopes would not be able to see the things that Webb is looking for, so the answer is none. If not on Webb, do you really think that the money would have been spent on things that save lives?

John

Illogical. The answer is "many."

Could, not would.

None of which could see what Webb is supposed to see if things get right (still not there yet, some thumb pressing won't hurt). The Earth has an atmosphere, you know :).

As for time and budget - well, if this were the only sci project soaking a lot more than what it should/could have...

On Friday, 7 January 2022 at 10:25:48 UTC-8, John Larkin wrote: ...

... The US spent 70 times the total cost of the telescope on the military in a single year.

$753.5 billion vs $10 billion. It seems we would rather kill people than save them anyway.

kw

Huh? The goal is to collect more information, and redundant telescopes are just repeating the same info over and over. New bits of spectrum, and novel capabilities, don't result from 'many ground-based telescopes'.

Multiplicity of hardware bits isn't productive in reaching the goal; it's a bad economic decision.

So, what does '10x over budget' mean? There wasn't a budget in the original plan for the Webb. What does '20 years late' mean? Launch delay was a few months, the project only got a NAME 20 years ago. Did the universe do something vitally interesting that's over now?

Estimated to cost $1 billion.

Include how much is spent on the ISS, and what it has produced. Very poor ROI.

Right. Growing beans in microgravity.

Not a budget exactly comparable to the Webb, of course; it will also be over a couple of decades of work, but that's the CONSTRUCTION cost, doesn't include staffing and ongoing work after first light, nor does it include the ongoing support work internal to the dozen or so partners in the project planning. It won't do much for 10-28.5 um infrared, unlike the Webb.

Visible light spans only 0.4 to 0.7 um, quite a small range by comparison.

How so? Please provide citation to a credible source supporting your claims that documents the original projected budget and expected delivery/launch date.

Don't be a jerk. You can find out yourself. Google "jwst over budget and late"

There's about 654,000 results. Pick any of the recent (2021-2022) articles.

You will find John was accurate and being conservative.

It really strips my gears when a childish arrogant idiot cannot search for answers himself.

PLONK

That doesn't limit the search to the James Webb telescope. The media just love that particular phrase.

But you haven't posted a link to even one of them, probably because none of them refer to the James Webb telescope. If the telescope really was twenty years late, the interesting estimates would have been made back around 2001. The development of complicated projects takes time, because you spend that time looking in progressively finer detail into all the stuff you have to build, and it does tend to look more expensive as you find the problems that weren't initially obvious.

That would be a first.

The kind of childish arrogant idiot who claims to have found 654.000 results and hasn't post a link to one of them will throw all kinds of tantrums but isn't going to get taken seriously.

Childish tantrum ...

It is so ironic when someone complains about someone else being childish and then responds by plonking them. lol

"I'm taking my toys and going home."

Whatever. SED drama.

Wow. I know that it is over budget and launched later than anticipated, but I don't find support for "10x over budget and 20 years late."

Don't be a jerk.

Not dissimilar to any large scale cutting edge science project then.

Ground based telescopes can only do so much - the atmosphere really gets in the way and removing entirely it would kill a lot of people. Problem is that the Earth's atmosphere is opaque to the radiation that the Webb telescope detects.

Chances are that as with every new high resolution imaging system that comes online at a new wavelength it will find various interesting new phenomena that were completely unexpected in addition to looking for the oldest most distant luminous galaxies and quasars.

Serendipity has a habit of finding new things when a new waveband is opened up to scrutiny. 8 acre radio array got pulsars, HST did visual, Chandra did X-rays. Thermal band IR was always going to be next.

If we are really lucky it will be able to see deep enough to go beyond the edge of galaxy formation. IOW longer exposures don't find any more fainter galaxies just makes the ones you see there already brighter.

It was the huge number of active radio galaxies at high redshift that put the final nail in the Steady State universe theory of Fred Hoyle. (a man who should still have had a Nobel prize but never got one)

It's hard to separate big science from big money.

There are lies, damn lies and budget quotes!

From NPR web page, "Originally, the cost of the telescope was estimated to be only around $1 billion to $3.5 billion, and expected launch dates ranged from 2007 to 2011." So if the end cost is $10 billion, I suppose you could say it was 10x over budget if you use the minimum starting number.

The difference between government overruns and commercial overruns is that commercial overruns have the option of shutting down or continuing. Oh, wait, the government does that as well.

"I've got one word for you Benjamin. Nuclear!" Well, that wasn't the word, but in this case nuclear plants are exactly the commercial parallel to large military and space projects. The US had two nuclear plant underway on the eastern seaboard until the cost overruns on them caused one to be scrapped, the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Power Station and the other continues construction, the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant. The Vogtle plant is years behind and many billions of dollars over budget. The problems with nuclear power plant construction makes a space telescope look like a cake walk.

Both the government and industry will cancel projects when they are hopelessly out of control. Both the government and industry will continue on projects they should have canceled in the early stages in spite of the clear indications the projects are flawed.

The James Webb space telescope is not fundamentally flawed. It was a research project as much as development. This device was not possible to build at the time they started planning it. They planned for technological advancement in the design and construction and so had to be more fluid in the process. Yeah, it was over budget and schedule, but in the end we got an amazing piece of equipment. The only question is, is it what we need? That is open to debate, but there was no other way to build it other than to start working and only stopping when it was done, much as they did with the SR-71 blackbird. No one complained about the schedule delays and cost overruns on that because they didn't tell anyone publicly they were building it.

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Absolutely retarded. His answer was spot on, you stupid twerp. So, read it again, zero knowledge putz boy.

You are an abject idiot, John Larkin. You prove it fairly often in your decades long invasion of this group.