Why Only Make One JWST?
It seems like the most expensive part of space programs is figuring out how to do what we want, not the marginal cost of manufacture. That's costly, to be sure, but if it was most of the cost, the projects wouldn't go 10x overbudget very often.
So why not make 20 JWST-design telescopes? Why not go totally wild? Is there not enough room in their orbits? Why not make more than one orbital plan? Is it because the value of the science drops off too quickly? Then wouldn't even the one telescope be useless after the first few years of looking? Surely speeding things up by 20x would result in a lot of new science we didn't know we wanted, because of downward sloping demand curves?
This seems like a simple mistake, unless something is very different from the way I'm imagining things. Either NASA is just completely aware it's doing things without any plausible cost-benefit approach, or it's failing to utilize economies of scale because marginal value drops insanely fast, or something. I don't know what, though.
Private space spending on cameras has been so aggressive that much of the world is being surveilled at any given moment. We could make that the case for the sky as well, I think, if the budgets for NASA were handled with that in mind.
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