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by beamatronic 1639 days ago
The answer to your redundancy question is: Assembly line.

Instead of ramping up a project, and building 1 of something, you would plan to do more than one, and you could iterate over time as you learn. SpaceX is doing a good job of this.

If 1 Webb telescope is valuable then wouldn't 3 or 5 also be valuable?

We have a number of proven space designs at this point: Soyuz, Spirit/Opportunity rovers.
2 comments
bernulli 1639 days ago
It's really not - just by having more hardware available (at higher total expenses) doesn't make the pool of money available (public research funding) to book time on these things more. These things are one-off, you build a new one if you expect 10x improvement over the old one.

We don't need a fleet of X1 to break the sound barrier for the first time. We do need many Airbus/Boeings to fly people and stuff from A to B.

Note that that is the case with the unique research hardware you cite as well - we're not sending another Spirit/Opportunity, but have graduated to something else.

Soyuz is a different use case, as there is an economic demand to be filled - that's why a private company like SpaceX is in that sector with its Dragon. On the other hand, you don't see SpaceX cranking out Spirits or JWSTs or Washington Monuments.

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twistedpair 1639 days ago
They calculated that. Building a second JWST would have added 10% to the budget, but the budget committee nixed that.

YOLO (you only launch once).

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devoutsalsa 1639 days ago
The JWST only has a planned mission duration of 10 years. If it’s as epic as everyone claims it could be, there must be a follow up mission planned. So even if it fails, we’ll still see a successor at some point.
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thebigman433 1639 days ago
There are quite a few more telescopes planned, I think the next major one is the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, which is another infrared scope, made from an old NRO telescope. The decade survey called for another massive space telescope to look at the optical and UV spectrums, so Id expect that to be the next truly big flagship telescope.
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dylan604 1639 days ago
>there must be a follow up mission planned

https://www.universetoday.com/139461/what-comes-after-james-...

The write up goes into detail on how missions are planned, and what is in line to follow JWST.

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wmf 1639 days ago
Since JWST was delayed ten years the successor will probably be delayed 20 years and launch in 2050.
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throw0101a 1639 days ago
> They calculated that. Building a second JWST would have added 10% to the budget, but the budget committee nixed that.

Do you have a citation for that?

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