[chmod775]

I think 'simply' is precisely the wrong adjective.

Plus you'd still need spare parts. Why would I build a robot to swap parts, when I can simply put all of the spare parts into the telescope and swap over to them electronically?

[gwd]

<pedantic> adverb </pedantic>

The other thing to remember was that Hubble was designed in an era that the Space Shuttle was meant to make manned missions to repair / upgrade commonplace. My understanding is that this was actually done at least once to Hubble (maybe more? I forget); but unfortunately for Reasons, NASA turned out to be incapable of resisting cutting corners which put people's lives at risk (Challenger, Colombia). A system designed today would be designed assuming that it would be robots or nothing.

[mannykannot]

I was curious myself, and it turns out there were five missions, starting with the one to compensate for the incorrectly ground mirror. IIRC the final one was in doubt, as there was no possibility of a rescue mission in the event of irreparable damage on launch.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.ht...

[DylanSp]

The final servicing mission (STS-125) ended up with a contingency plan for damage on launch, STS-400. Another shuttle was prepped and on the pad for a rescue mission if the primary shuttle was damaged.

[melling]

Knowing what will go wrong is hard to predict. Having the capacity to have robots service satellites, etc would be extremely useful.

Also, the vision is that robots can build on Mars, for example.

“Simply” means fund the research. My comment was from 7 years ago.

We also need the robots here on earth for dangerous tasks

We’d make impressive progress over each decade with more effort.

[gwbas1c]

> Why would I build a robot to swap parts, when I can simply put all of the spare parts into the telescope and swap over to them electronically?

What if the system that swaps parts fails?

[Xylakant]

What if the robot fails?

[gwbas1c]

> What if the robot fails?

Touche. At least you can send another robot!

But in reality, the ideal system is probably a combination of built-in redundancy / spares for parts that can work that way; and then robots for the kinds of things that are too complicated to have a built-in failover.

[melling]

The robot fails to perform the task or fails reaching orbit,etc?

Send up another [improved] robot. These missions are less costly than human missions. We get to iterate more often

[kllrnohj]

> Send up another [improved] robot. These missions are less costly than human missions.

Says who? And how? This seems like an unsubstantiated claim.

[gwbas1c]

Robots don't need air, food, or sanitary facilities.

Launching to space is severely constrained by the mass you can bring up. You can send up multiple robots compared to the mass needed for all the food, life support ect, for a single person.

[kllrnohj]

Instead robots need fuel & more infrastructure support to move around and retrieve tools & supplies.

So again, [citation needed]. We don't have, and are no where close to, general purpose miniature lightweight robots, after all.