Oddly paralleling a discussion in email: are NASA's two flagship programs exampels of Plan Bs?

[james_davis_nicoll]

From an old article

I was just reading Freeman Dyson's collection of essays, FROM EROS TO GAIA, and he touches on the processes that led to the shuttle being, as he called it, a turkey. If I recall correctly, that was in an essay from 1988.

The interesting bit, and I am not going to say that this gospel but just something that seems like it should be a story seed, is that communities faced with a choice between Plan A (a low prestige, low cost, fast, reliable pay-off project) and Plan B (its high-cost, time-consuming* and probably doomed cousin) will generally pick the latter. Sure, you might end up with a telescope made from used battleships in a region known for its cloud cover but the people making the decisions won't be using it and may well gain personal prestige from being associated with the shiny new program.

And from physorg:

The cost of NASA's two flagship programs - a new space telescope and its next rocket - is poised to devour much of the agency's shrinking budget in coming years, putting at risk everything from efforts to develop futuristic spacecraft to returning rocks from Mars, scientists and congressional insiders warn.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I've seen at least some people claiming that the big costs on JWST are mostly already sunk. But I don't have data to support this.

SLS is just ridiculous; it seems to exist purely because somebody thinks it's wrong for NASA not to be building a big rocket.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

They have spent $3.5 billion; they've made the reflecting surface of the mirror, and the instruments are built (though I recall reading about a problem with the detectors which might require replacing $30 million worth of infra-red focal plane arrays), but it's not clear how much of the spacecraft is built already. According to current price estimates they're not quite half-way through the spending.