Science programs get regular criticism here for being overhyped and then delayed with budget overruns as a sweetener.
But the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider are not only. The U.S. military's F-35 is getting renewed dirty looks as the recession continues.
Originally set to roll out in 2011, it has now been extended to 2016 and the cost to a whopping $382 billion for 2,443 aircraft. It's an impressive machine and, like high end science projects, unanticipated problems will occur - especially when multiple countries are involved, in this case Britain, Italy, Turkey, the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Australia - but as Congress and the President discovered in 2009, there is no bottomless money pit they can just keep taking money from.
Here's hoping Lockheed-Martin and the rest get this under control. At already double its original estimate, 'too big to fail' is actually getting big enough to fail.
