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by ditn 1655 days ago
It's a hard limit due needing fuel to maintain its orbit. It's in a lagrange point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) which requires occasional orbital corrections.
4 comments

Yes and no. Fuel is the limiting factor, but it could go beyond a decade. See here: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55309/james-webb-t...
IIRC, it was also not designed to be serviceable.
-ish. They have no firm plans for servicing it, but it does have a docking adapter and the fuel/coolant connections are designed to be usable in space.

Basically, because there is no reasonable way to service something in L2, they can't really plan for it, but it's expensive enough that they made sure there is the capability if someone in the future would, say, build a spaceship that is orbitally refuelable and designed so it can take crew that far out.

It has a docking ring for potential service mission.
Well it's not strictly a hard limit but it's currently planned to be a hard limit. If SpaceX can pull off even a fraction of what they claim with Starship, it's not unrealistic to think that it'd be financially viable to attempt a refuelling of the JWST.
That's an event I'd like to see!
a good video about lagrange points https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu4vA2ztgGM