This is John Bachelor, conversation with my colleague David Livingston, Hotel Mars,

and we speak with David Southwood, a veteran of the Imperial College

and of the European Space Agency, a man who was there at the beginning of the James

Webb Space Telescope that spectacular success now giving us flashes of the

early and early and earlier universe challenging all the standard models a great

success however decades over budget decades overdue the original number was 1 billion. It came in somewhere between 10 and 11 billion.

And David here explains why. What it is about the funding process, especially out of Congress, that makes James Webb's

Space Telescope such a spectacular success so over budgets, so over time, and how that may contribute to the quandary of the Mars

sample return mission which is budgeted 11 billion and is now going back to

the drawing boards, David Southwood explaining the James

Webb Space Telescope and why it took so long and what is to be done. More of this tonight.

Well, I was deeply involved in it.

Of course, it was a European launcher that was used and that actually saved a lot of money because I was paying for it. And I also provided a two major instruments for the vocal plane.

So this was very important to me.

I started working on it, believe it or not, in 2000.

Can you remember that 2000? That was a year a long time ago. And it really seemed to me that it was going to be a wonderful thing.

There wasn't in doubt.

The question was, could we do it?

Well, what happened, I think optimism got ahead of us? It started off at a price that was clearly not true.

And but then you build up the engineering teams.

And one of the things that doesn't get paid attention to

is NASA gets its budget every year and Congress in the end decides how much money is going into a major project

...