The James Webb Space Telescope, with its ability to peer further into space and time than the Hubble, is expected to provide similar rewards to our scientific knowledge. Few (if any) people now wish that the Hubble had been canceled during its troubled development period. It literally revealed new perspectives on the cosmos and is one of a handful of scientific projects to become a household name. As of 2021, the program had produced over 18,000 peer-reviewed publications that had been cited more than a million times in the scientific literature. For comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope also suffered years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns, but it is arguably the most successful space science project of all time. Most scientists believe this investment will be worth it. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the top recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences’ decadal survey for the 2010s, will not launch until 2027 at the earliest. Only a handful of small missions have launched in the last decade. Since 2003, one out of every three dollars spent on astrophysics has gone toward the Webb telescope, crowding out and delaying other projects. This did not come without consequences for NASA’s Astrophysics Division, which is responsible for the agency’s space telescope missions. This final delay added yet another billion dollars to the total cost. In the intervening years, the program struggled to address serious technical problems, further delaying the launch to 2021. After NASA restructured the project to launch in 2018 the total cost increased to $8.8 billion. But serious mismanagement and under-resourcing during critical early planning stages caused the ambitious spacecraft to fall behind schedule. It was originally estimated to cost $4.96 billion and launch in 2014. The Webb telescope was not always planned to be a megaproject. Despite its delays and cost overruns, the project never required more than 3% of NASA's annual budget. This type of cost phasing makes it easier for NASA to shoulder the expenses of a large project year-to-year. Annual expenditures vary depending on the particular needs of the project and how many highly-trained technicians, engineers, and scientists are assigned to the program at any given time. NASA’s contributions to the telescope were not paid out all at once, but spread out over the course of two decades. This places the James Webb Space Telescope among the most expensive scientific platforms in history, comparable only to the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Canadian Space Agency contributed sensors and scientific instrumentation, which cost approximately CA$200 million. The European Space Agency provided the Ariane 5 launch vehicle and two of the four science instruments for an estimated cost of €700 million. Adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars, the lifetime cost to NASA will be approximately $10.8 billion. Of that amount, $8.8 billion was spent on spacecraft development between 20 $861 million is planned to support five years of operations. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to cost NASA $9.7 billion over 24 years.
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