[melling]

To service and relaunch for the next 50 years?

[pkaye]

If they could carry a larger payload, we could have a Hubble with a larger primary mirror. Some of the risks/costs of the JWST is all the folding mechanisms to fit the Ariane 5 payload enclosure.

[squeaky-clean]

There'd be no reason to take down the hubble just because a telescope with a larger mirror goes up. There's a lot of space to look at.

[headmelted]

Also a lot of really interesting science to be done by pointing Hubble and JWST at the same target.

(NASA’s Curious Universe podcast is running a JWST series right now and this came up in a recent episode).

[gotstad]

That does not strike me as the right direction of progression. We should become better at in-space assembly, not creating larger payload fairing.

[ErikCorry]

Why not both?

[kortilla]

Why would anyone need more than 16kb of RAM with hard drives getting so big?

[NikolaeVarius]

Museum

[melling]

But the Hubble could be useful for another century.

Talk about inspirational.

[rtkwe]

It's kind of limping along. It could gather images for a lot longer but it's hardware like gyroscopes are starting to fail. IMO the money to refurbish it would be better spent making a new instrument and cheaper too since you'd just need to build and launch not launch, capture, land, refurb, and relaunch.

[imglorp]

With telepresence and remote manipulators, we're at the point where a robotic service mission should be possible now.