[onion2k]

Google says that James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn. That's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Private citizens could afford to put similar things into space if they chose to. We don't need them to be cheaper.

[JumpCrisscross]

> James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn

I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.

[HPsquared]

A big part of the complexity of JWST was the way everything had to fold and fit into a small launch vehicle. With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler. The whole thing was engineered to the max to fit within tight constraints, which is very expensive.

[JumpCrisscross]

> With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler

Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Telescope_Element

[m4rtink]

Not to mention it would be much cheaper and quicker to launch if it could have any form of robotic or human servicing/tuning available.

Designing it to not fail at the start & then work without any help for decades must have also made it much more expensive.