SOFIA is a steaming turd. It costs as much as the Hubble Space Telescope to operate (~100 million a year) but only about 30 science papers are published a year based on SOFIA's data (Hubble is 30 times more papers). SOFIA is one of the least productive observatories full stop, even including tiny missions and ground based telescopes. That is fucking abysmal.
https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/IG-20-022.pdfTo matters worse, SOFIA was hugely expensive. It's development was 4 times over budget and more than a decade behind schedule. When it did arrive it had been totally eclipsed by Herschel. Over it's lifetime SOFIA will be more expensive than both Spitzer and Herschel combined (3-4 billion), which is absurd.
Most astronomers now want to cancel it, but politicians have got involved. NASA missions are supposed to face senior reviews, to ensure only productive missions continue to be funded. Politicians however decided they know better and have forced NASA to continue funding SOFIA for another 12 years. It is now a pork barrel program, it cannot be canceled because of vested interest and lobbying. In that time SOFIA will waste another 1.2 billion, at least. That money should be spent on much better space missions.
>>12288083SOFIA is not better in terms of cost vs capability. It's very limited and more expensive than a comparable space telescope. No one is going to build another one after seeing the disaster that SOFIA was.
