How the Webb Space Telescope Got So Expensive 133
First time accepted submitter IICV writes "Ethan Siegel of Starts with a Bang has done some research on how and why the James Webb Space Telescope's price tag ballooned. Quoting: 'Something wasn't adding up. How could the telescope be more than three-quarters complete after $3.5 billion, but require more than double that amount to finish it? Also, how did the launch date get bumped by three years, to 2018? And how did 6.5 billion become a disastrous $8.7 billion so quickly? So I did a little digging around, and perhaps a little investigative reporting as well, and got ahold of a Webb Project Scientist who's also a member of the Webb Science Working Group.'" Whether or not you buy the argument that the money's well-spent (at $5 billion or $8 billion, or either side of these), even the work in progress is beautiful.
Re:it's a government project (Score:3, Interesting)
If you reward lying, you will get more lies. The original budget was intentionally low-balled (i.e. it was a lie), and now the truth is coming out. But no one will be fired, no one will be punished, there will be no negative consequences for the liars. There will also be no consequences for the people that accepted the lies. No incumbent will fail to be reelected over just a few billion in overruns. Expect more massive overruns on future projects. There is no reason to expect anything else.
Nobody has an incentive to finish it (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two commpeting forces at play here. Three if you include the people responsible for the budget.
The first and most obvious group is the scientists who first proposed the telescope and want to use it.
The second group are the people contracted to build it. These are the ones with all the power and the most to lose. Once the JWST is finished and launched they are (mostly) out of as job. As a consequence they have a selfish interest in making the design,development, testing and integration take as long as possible - simply to preserve their jobs and income. Now that's a fairly extreme description. I'm (almost) sure that nobody actually goes out of their way to sabotage it, or malinger. It's just that as with any project, there's always the possibility to improve things: tweak the spec. here, add another 0.05dB to a noise margin there ... and so it goes on; With no hard and fast deadline in the offing, there's nobody to say "it's absolutely got to be finished by <date>". Military projects in peacetime suffer exactly the same project creep and delays, for exactly the same reason.
The deadline is the key - that's why the moon landings happened on time. That's why wartime projects (when people are dying for lack of a solution) turbo-charge innovation. The JFDI attitude is paramount and without a launch date to work towards (or at least without a credible one, that absolutely MUST be met) the contractors are always going to be suggesting improvements, not overcoming delays and problems and finding more expensive options for problems.
Re:I know, I know... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wrong scenario. It's more like this one I actually was in where I was asked to estimate the cost of responding to an RFP and came up with 150K. Boss asked me whether it could be done for 100K, and I told him by cutting our profits to the bone and taking the narrowest possible interpretation of the RFP, it was possible, but the risk was unacceptably high. Two weeks later signed a contract to do it for 50K. When I asked him why, he said he could spread the cost by selling it to more customers. I told him that only diluted our focus on the project and that to productize it would cost us almost a quarter of a million.
The upshot is that we couldn't afford to undertake the project except with slack resources. By the time we were done we had functional software, but it cost us the equivalent of 200K (which we couldn't charge). It took us so long to finish that we never got even the 50K from the customer, because management had turned over twice in the meantime and had no idea what the project was about. Then the boss sold the "product" to a second customer (over my objections) for 50K and that cost us another 200K, and we never saw that money either.
Fiscal responsibility isn't just not spending money on things you don't need. It's also not committing yourself to projects you aren't willing to pay to do a proper job on. Spending less than what it would reasonably take to do a project is like flushing cash down the toilet.
Re:Nobody has an incentive to finish it (Score:5, Interesting)
At one time, it was common practice to underbid by a lot, then charge a lot to get stuff done right because the gov't contract selection process was abusive, and so contractors had to abuse the system back to level the playing field and turn a profit.
The gov't then started putting a stop to this by forcing contractors to deliver on the original budgets, or otherwise risk lose contracts in the future. Contractors responded to this by abusing employees and benefits to pick up the difference (for example, at one time it was an unspoken rule or so that one had to work up to the overtime kick-in of 46 hours per week (6 hours/week of free work), or otherwise be first on the chopping block when budget cuts came out). However, the gov't saw what was going on (contracts across the board weren't increasing in price as expected) and put a stop to that as well (forcing all hours to be billed to the gov't, regardless of whether the company pays for it in overtime).
Now contracts are more expensive, and budgets are more tightly and carefully managed, teams are run leaner (that is, fewer people have jobs), but fewer contracts are going way over budget at the same time. At the same time, any scope creep is now added to the project's budget, instead of being absorbed and then rebounded as a cost overrun.
It really has been quite a paradigm shift in the past 3 years or so.
A Monetary Black Hole (Score:2, Interesting)
I work at Goddard Space Flight Center and have direct contact with other engineers working on JWST. I doubt that it will fly or, if it does, that it will be successful. There are too many "defective by design" problems with its systems.
Consider, for example, the microshutters. In order to have a chance of resolving something like a planet orbiting a star, there is a design requirement to be able to block the optical path on a pixel by pixel basis. This is done in an LCD projector with an array of mirrors, each of which can be individually pivoted to deflect a small portion of the beam. Someone determined that this method would not provide adequate contrast ratio so a shutter system was proposed. The problem with shutters is that the individual elements must pivot farther. A mirror has only to move the beam off target; a shutter must open wide. Since the shutters are MEMS devices, the wide bending requires the use of very fragile material--stuff that breaks when subjected to shock and vibration testing at levels well below mission requirements. (Imagine the shock when the pryo charges go off and the mirrors start unfolding into place.) The project management solution thus far appears to be stop testing and ship the microshutter assembly on to the next level of integration. When it breaks there, it will be a handling issue and "not our problem."
This isn't the only problem subsystem.
JWST is the 800 lb gorilla at Goddard. The program routinely takes resources and personnel assigned to other projects. The suggestion that Congress might kill it was a real morale booster. We could fly about a dozen Explorer class mission for what would be saved by ending JWST at this point. The first such missions would provide real, useful science sooner than JWST, and the later missions could be designed based on the knowledge derived from the earlier.
JWST would be wonderful if it could work, but as the program has been and is being run, it will simply produce a big piece of space junk out at L2. And L2 is a place where we do not have the ability to send a servicing mission. It's time to stop throwing good money after bad!