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by captn3m0 1636 days ago
The seemingly costly part of JWST - The Gold Mirrors are cheaper than one might guess, for eg. it’s a 0.1 micron coating that only used 45g of gold.
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The material cost for a lot of "high technology" things can be very small, but the process is expensive. For example fancy chips are only some x grams of silicon, and expensive inverted mesa quartz crystals might cost a good bit while only being x microns thick piece of quartz..