From today’s Orbital Index (<a href="https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-01-30-Issue-49/" rel="nofollow">https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-01-30-Issue-49/</a>):<p>The Best Way to Make a Profit as an Aerospace Company is to Fail (<a href="https://qz.com/1784335/the-space-military-industrial-complex-profits-off-us-failure/" rel="nofollow">https://qz.com/1784335/the-space-military-industrial-complex...</a>), a compelling piece about how massive corporations like Northrop Grumman have little incentive to hit their contract budgets and are arguably incentivized not to. “Northrop Grumman […] won the James Webb Space Telescope contract in 1996 with a promise that the project would cost $500 million and be flight-ready in 2007. The telescope is now likely to launch in 2021 and is expected to cost nearly $10 billion. [...] [W]ith every delay and snafu, Northrop Grumman rakes in more money as missed deadlines extend the timeline and require more funding from the government. One delay in 2018 brought Northrop Grumman close to a billion dollars alone—twice the price the firm originally quoted to the government for the entire project.” According to this document (pdf) released on Jan. 28 by the Government Accountability Office, the JWST has only a 12% chance of launching in March 2021. The massive overruns by Boeing on SLS are a similar example.