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by pkaye 1661 days ago
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.
2 comments

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.
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).

That does not strike me as the right direction of progression. We should become better at in-space assembly, not creating larger payload fairing.
Why not both?
Why would anyone need more than 16kb of RAM with hard drives getting so big?