I think like they said, it's people. The JWST has "17 different modes" (yeah, I wish I knew what that meant exactly), but it sounds complicated. For all our tech, the bottom line is it requires humans to calibrate this thing and keep it that way (or one of 17 different ways) depending on the science that needs done.

Because these are some of the most complicated and technically advanced pieces of technology that we have ever created.

To communicate with them we have a worldwide array of massive satellite dishes (Deep Space Network) which needs to be operated part of the cost is operating that. Then there is the scientist using the data. These are some of the greatest scientists in the world they are getting paid well enough. Then there is the engineers which make sure the spacecraft operates correctly which are expensive good engineers are expensive.and obviously all the other costs associated with it like facility, technology electricity etc.

We have multiple single humans with net worths over a thousand times their budget. The only thing that's staggering is what's getting priority over these monumental scientific achievements.

Lots of highly paid people are needed to run them.

It is incredible value for money. It's one of the few non-bullshit industries.

In March, 2024 the US Department of Defense fiscal year 2025 budget request was $849.8 billion. The 2024 JWST budget was 0.022% of that.

https://nasawatch.com/exploration/ernst-stuhlinger

You’re being downvoted for asking a reasonable question, sadly.

The numbers are staggering. The answer is mostly “Northrop Grumman”, “cost plus”, and “cover your ass”.

The sunk costs are >$10bn. Nobody wants to be the guy who cut the flight operations team from 200 people (!) and have the thing go offline and unrecoverable.

While the cuts are very much in the category of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted”, if there’s a silver lining it’s that perhaps it will lead to a more cost-conscious approach for future missions - ie “how can we automate station keeping”, or “do we really need six people to watch a thermal map”, or “perhaps we should look at alternatives to DSN”.

It’s an artefact of a system evolved to never take risks, to shelter congressional pork, and to externalise liability onto padded contracts, born out of Cold War thinking - when JWST was conceived (1992), the Berlin Wall had only just fallen. It was meant to launch in 2005.

A failure is highly costly to NASA in terms of public support, so everything is incredibly over-engineered. That's also why failures are rare.

I would pay for Hubble cam videos lmao

IIRC Carl Sagan saw a spacecraft which had a potentially long life had it not run out of fuel. If he knew it was a Mercedes-level of money in advance, he would have raised it out of pocket.

There's far less interest in this than you'd expect. The Arecibo Telescope [1] was as famous as they come and was the largest single aperture telescope (> 300m) until 2016 when China surpassed it with FAST, which is just real life having some artistic foreshadowing. Opened in 1963, it was iconic and show up in various major movies like James Bond Goldeneye, Species, and contact. Yet it was nonetheless left to rot for a lack of interest in paying the low millions of dollars it'd cost to maintain it, all the while we spend trillions of dollars on wars half-way around the world.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Telescope

Dumb, rich Americans don't know how government works and don't understand what anything is for, even if it's critical for their survival or for the survival of millions of others, or crucial for future economic investment and prosperity. They just want to Retire All Government Employees (RAGE) because this is a utopian libertarian belief that "government is bad" and "costs money for no benefit". That, somehow, everything would be "perfect without government". They feel they are entitled to change everything according to their (uninformed) ideas because they are special and important by being rich. It's way past neoliberal austerity by reckless leadership making massive changes without being careful.

They've never heard of the problems with utopias or throwing out babies with the bathwater.

Quite a lot of the US right-wing is of the opinion that, basically, science is bad and shouldn't happen, or at the very least that only ideologically correct science should happen (for instance see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doge-mischaracterizes-study-as-... - while part of the story there is that, unsurprisingly, a Musk thing is really incompetent, they were _trying_ to do an ideological purge).

NASA is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of NASA's science is related to climate and weather, and a large part of the US right is still doggedly pretending that global warming isn't happening.

There is no motivation, no plan; it's simple apathy that does this. This is an administration staffed, by design, by incompetent people overseeing public agencies they have no familiarity with. Their shared zeitgeist is "government is the Enemy and must be destroyed". In this sociology, it's an act of disloyalty to be seen to understand, to advocate for and side with, a government institution and its public service.

Loyalty to US science research (like any other US government work) is at odds with loyalty to MAGA: it's a zero-sum question, you're with us or against us. Isaacman failed this test—was too enthusiastic about space science.

Science benefits globally, not locally, and the current US government considers such positive externalities to have no importance. Arguments from prestige also get no traction.

Given the US fiscal situation, the benefit is perceived to be the reduction in cost.

There has been a presumption that science is locally important, but this presumption is being questioned, and needs to be better defended.

Other such globalist endeavors, like being world policeman, are also being questioned.

100% of our tax revenue goes to welfare. All other spending is deficit financed. Politicians are limited in what they can cut.