NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope explained

A superb job by The Verge on summing up the importance of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and why the telescope has taken over 2 decades to make and why it has a budget of several billion dollars.

After a reshuffling of numbers, NASA hopes to complete the telescope and launch it by October 2018. At that point, assuming nothing changes, it will have cost $8.8 billion.