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Comment by jylam | Hacker News Reader

I was so convinced, after all the delays, the cost overruns and the general bureaucracy surrounding the whole project, that it would fail miserably.

I'm so happy it seems to go flawlessly since its (perfect) launch.

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The delays, the cost overruns and the general bureaucracy surrounding the whole project are likely the reasons why it _didn't_ fail miserably. It's definitely not a situation where you want to move fast and break things.

Projects that push aside the envelope of what was previously possible and reach entirely new levels of performance tend to have not that predictable schedules and costs. I'm pretty sure the planners involved know that, but on the political level fixed ranges and estimates are required to get funding - so you get cost overruns and delays.

Also, they probably wouldn't have gotten funding at the start if they said it'd take 25 years and 10 billion. Starting with a low-ball and gradually ramping up has a greater probability of (funding) success.

And the fact that everyone knows this leads to some interesting game theory.

Every HN thread brings up the cost overruns, and I just…OK, smart guy, you come up with a reasonable estimate of shooting a telescope into a very distant orbit and then cooling it to 12 degrees above absolute zero.

To <7 degrees!

> … down to its final operating temperature of less than 7 kelvins

I guess the GP means US customary degrees rather than standard ones (also technically kelvins are not "degrees", the unit is simply K rather than °K, but as they share the magnitude with °C the difference gets muddled when talking about relative temperatures…)

No, the bureaucracy is not why it didn’t fail. Cost overruns and delays due to reworking stuff I can buy but I’ve seen tons of projects fail with plenty of bureaucracy (see the initial healthcare.gov launch).

No, cost overruns are generally a sign of things going bad, not 'just more money for double checking'.

The Gov. of Canada Payroll system is now up to $1B with no end in sight.

--> Payroll. System. $1B.

I'm stoked this worked though can't wait to see the photos.

The phoenix project is going entirely according to plan, from the point of view of IBM/PeopleSoft.

Sure, but when we’re talking about NASA the context is quite different from random software “engineering” projects, or even random traditional engineering projects. For NASA cost overruns don’t usually seem to lead to cases of sunk cost fallacy, and their infamous late-90s attempt at “better, faster, cheaper” rather ended up demonstrating how you can have any two of those three, and arguably, in the case of “never done before” flagship projects, only one of them.

It is still true though that many times bad planning and management has been at least a partial cause of cost/schedule overrund at NASA, and they’ve received well-justified criticism for it from both internal and external auditors.

Same here, the relief I felt when it completed the riskiest unfolding steps was huge. I'm so excited to see the results it provides.

This was an interesting article along those lines:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/whats-left-for-the-w...

I hope to learn the stories of the people who made it work, despite the cost overruns and bureaucracy!

Agreed. I was thinking this thing would be a bust or expecting some type of catastrophe, so nice to see none of that happened. This has undoubtedly exceeded the expectations of many.

The two most recent large US mars rovers, and James Webb all seemed way too complex to ever work. All 3 worked!

Shows what I know.

We're all still traumatized by the meters/feet problem. Oops, I mean the Newtons/pounds problem.

Unfortunately small problems can still happen. The recent Lucy mission to the Jupiter asteroid belt had a problem with one of the solar panels not properly unfolding. However they feel the remaining panel has sufficient power to complete the mission.

It’s not just you. I worked at JPL for twelve years and I expected it to fail too. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be wrong about this.

Why did you expect it to fail? You have some inside info about the problems they were facing?

No specific inside info. But seeing how the sausage is made makes it amazing that anything they do works at all, let alone that it so often works as well as it does. I was particularly primed to expect JWST to fail because I lived through the Galileo antenna failure and the Hubble mirror fiasco.

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