[mortenjorck]

True, though it’s also worth considering that Webb is going far beyond “orbit“ as we generally think of it. I don’t know how much has been launched all the way out to L2 before, but it’s probably an order of magnitude less than what’s in Earth orbit.

[krisoft]

> I don’t know how much has been launched all the way out to L2 before...

There is a handy list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_objects_at_Lagrange_po...

Your intuition is quite right, there is way less satellites parked around L2 than in low earth orbit for example.

But that doesn't really pose too big of a challenges in itself. It is of course far, both distance wise and energetically.

The main complication often mentioned is if something is wrong with the telescope it makes it very unlikely that a crew can visit it to fix it. The way for example how they repaired Hubble is unlikely to happen with Webb.

[ajross]

Meh, but there's nothing to hit in space. The energy required to reach a routine geosynchronous orbit is already ~85% of escape velocity. The added boost is minimally more dangerous and the trip is just empty hours. "Time" does kill spacecraft, but not often.

The Webb self-assembly is absolutely where the scary bits lurk.

[jpgvm]

Yeah valid. Though the whole "hurtling upwards on top of a bomb" part is still definitely scary in it's own right.

[argiopetech]

Particularly given the launch record of the Ariane 5 platform. I did some quick research, and no modern launch platform has as high a mission failure rate (4.5%.) The Delta family comes close at 4.4%, but that's a 50yr launch history. The Delta 4 iteration has had no failures.

[jacquesm]

As I wrote elsewhere, the bulk of those failures were in the first 15 launches, after that it was a very long string of one success after another with one partial failure in 2018.