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spo81rty | 7 months ago

Why does it take 300-400 employees to run a telescope?

As a taxpayer, that's what I want to know.

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roywiggins|7 months ago

It's a $10 billion piece of hardware parked 930,000 miles away.

> Reid said STScI does not yet have a specific plan to deal with JWST’s budget shortfalls, but it will almost certainly involve reducing staff.

> “It’s fewer people, really,” Neill Reid, multi-mission project scientist at STScI, told Astronomy. “[JWST has] got 17 different modes. Each of those modes needs people to support it, to calibrate it, to keep it going. So, if you cut the funding, you have fewer people. And you can’t ask people to do twice as much work. So what will happen is that there will be potentially fewer modes available. There will be less user support.”

coldpie|7 months ago

That's an interesting question! Can you tell us what research you've done to try to answer it? It's public funds, so there's probably some documentation for what jobs were created to support the telescope.