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0 pointsdahauns7y ago0 comments

Apart from being the largest and most complex of its kind ever sent to space, the tricky thing is that it will be positioned at the Sun-Earth L2 point, far beyond the orbit of the moon.

Hubble was as successful and long-living as it was because of several manned maintenance, upgrade and repair missions mentioned by others already - but Hubble is in a LEO, only a few 100km from Earth. The JWST? 1.5 million km. So missions like these aren't going to happen, this has to work on the first try.

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ygra7y ago· 4 in thread

Have the Hubble servicing missions been actually cost-effective or was that more something that could be done because the Space Shuttle existed, although building a replacement would have been cheaper? (The latter would probably have had a problem having its budget approved, compared to the servicing missions, I guess.)

dredds7y ago

Hard to put a price on astroscience or cosmology. Hubble was just recently assisting in the search for the very first discovered exo-moon.

http://earthsky.org/space/1st-exomoon-neptune-sized-kepler-1...

In the mid-1990s, after Hubble had its optics corrected, researchers were already planning its successor. The catch phrase in NASA at the time was “faster, better, cheaper.” JWT was announced in 1996 to a standing ovation, yet it's current planned launch is due 25 years after that announcement. (note that it's infrared, not optical)

marcosdumay7y ago

> Hard to put a price on astroscience or cosmology.

It's pretty easy. Did those missions cost more or less than making a copy of Hubble and launching it?

reacweb7y ago

The cost assessment of service missions take into account all the experience gathered when performing them. Even if a replacement telescope is cheaper, you do not learn anything.

SiempreViernes7y ago

What you learn is mainly about engineering challenges of servicing satellites though, and if that's not a cost effective solution due to launch costs it does not seem that important.

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