To be brutally honest, this project being fourteen years behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget damaged mine. Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
One can reasonably argue that an over time, over budget project should be considered a failure even if it ultimately meets its objectives is a defensible comment. Arguing that people should be put in prison for such, absent actual malfeasance, is an argument that no one should ever do anything risky that's exposed to personal risk. Go away.
> this project being fourteen years behind schedule and two thousand percent over budget damaged mine.
There is a cogent response to that, as a series of questions.
1 - Which requirements changed?
2 - Which hard science & engineering problems had to be solved, and how trivial, or monumental were they?
3 - Which components failed, or passed testing, requiring rework, or re-engineering?
> Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
Initial estimated costs were higher than 500 million. The 500 million number was an NGST estimate, right? I don't think lifecycle costs were ever estimated at 500M, it seems crazy to be that low. Are you sure you are correct on the type of costs you are providing?
14 years late, 2000% over budget even while getting a free ride from ESA -- and loudly exclaiming this thing has no redundancy whatsoever: anything at all might brick it. It may be a great telescope, but it's a miserable failure as a project.
What is a "budget" when it comes to this sort of stuff though? They were doing things nobody has ever done before. How could anybody have any idea what it was going to cost?
Well, the companies that promised that they could deliver the things they were advertising claimed to know.
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.
> 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 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.
Budget for big projects like these is not an easy concept. 14 years behind schedule means 14 more years developing the science and technology, 14 more years of research grants that probably funded project-specific but also tons of side research, new labs, new knowledge and experience that will be useful and be used way beyond the single project that funded its advancement.
Sometimes it's good to overspend if it's an excuse to fund research that would otherwise struggle to find money to stay alive.
If you’re worried about a $10b telescope, you going to lose your mind when you find out how much taxpayers overpaid on the F35 and the War in Afghanistan.
When we are talking about "directly observing a part of space and time never seen before. Gazing into the epoch when the very first stars and galaxies formed, over 13.5 billion years ago." I guess 2000% over budget seems fine to me. Even if you are thinking only about profit, I think the discoveries will pay for themself.
Plus I think the budget didn't jump from 500 million to ten billion dollars in on day, project grew and budget grew with it, and someone had to approve it, we are talking about multinational project, so I think everything is well documented and well approved from people who knows the project well better than us.
I do agree with you that if that was military budget, I would think that something is really wrong.
Why do downvoted and clearly negative comments like this nonetheless end up at the top of responses to the parent comment? Is it because it fomented a lot of responses?
On another article today, again the top response to the top comment was so negative that dang stepped in, and yet again, it's the first thing you see.
It's frustrating, because HN is doing a great job keeping things pretty constructive, but this still seems to reward negativity by thrusting it into view. Shouldn't it at least be below less-downvoted responses?
It honestly seems to have gotten worse over the past several years. I don't know exactly when it started, but I've noticed a distinct dip in the quality of conversations here. I don't know if it is HN specific, but I think it is an overall societal increase in people that are stuck in information bubbles, like all of us, but when they find they are in an information bubble, they don't care. They obstinately refuse to get out of their bubble.
>Selling a program to taxpayers as a 500 million dollar endeavor and then extracting ten billion dollars from them is the kind of thing that should put people in prison for life.
Would you say the same about LIGO, for example? Originally thought to be easy, it turned out to be a 40 years long endeavor.
LIGO is a great example! The LIGO project repeatedly failed to meet requirements and in exchange had its funding requests rejected. The project management was completely restructured, with several people including the original team lead ejected from their roles. Only after coming up with a new budget were they granted additional funding, and after meeting those requirements they were given $200 million in additional funding with which they increased LIGO sensitivity by 400%.
