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Amazing feat of engineering. NASA can be proud of achieving something that no other space agency could do. It took courage to keep shovelling money and effort into this project and some amazing science to get it deployed into space.
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
Why would we need two? I would think the next one 20+ years from now would hopefully be exponentially better.
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
There's also the fact that for projects like this, so much is learned along the way that you probably wouldn't even want to build it the same way again, having found better, more efficient, cheaper, etc. ways of doing things.
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
I’m assuming all of this was looked at, just curious what the answers to these questions.
Kudos to the team! Huge accomplishment.
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
- due to the time between the start of the project and the end, enough time has passed where there are sufficiently new advances in science/tech/robotics/etc to open up new possibilities
- a second one will probably still cost >10% of the original
- a second one wont yield enough benefit to be worth it
like...the JWST isn't anything like hubble, and can do things that hubble cannot. So it's not like a fleet of hubbles would equal one JWST or something.
Since 90% of the cost is probably in R+D of the telescope, one could build and deploy another for another 10%. Why isn't this done? Why is every space telescope completely unique?
Why would we need two? I would think the next one 20+ years from now would hopefully be exponentially better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm hoping that the 5 months of calibration time is one of those where the engineers were asked "how long", so they thought about it and then padded the shit out of it, then the PMs took that number and padded it yet again. After all that, it only takes a few weeks. It'll be the first milestone JWST would meet early, so not too likely. We've only waited decades, so a few more months isn't that bad. At least it is off…
Similar question was just asked during press conference and the answer was "telescope is cooling a bit faster than we simulated but it is not a significant difference, it might be ready one or two days ahead of current estimation". Current timeline is for getting all 4 cameras to work, but I think only one needs cryogenic cooling, other 3 could work with just sunshield. In another answer one of the engineers said tha…
Probably hard to resist the temptation:)
There might be good engineering reasons to experiment early, like testing comms systems etc