4 ms·

Is there any economy of scale? Why not wait until the first one fails to build another one?

• java-man 7y ago
  I would expect the R&D costs to dominate. One does not even need to consider economy of scale. For example, if the R&D is $1 million, and manufacturing one mirror costs $100k, the total price for two mirrors is $1.2 million vs. $1.1 million for one. Plus, consider a non-zero probability of a launch failure.
• TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Because that requires keeping all the specialized machinery and knowledge alive for the duration of the whole project. Given the length of this project, I wouldn't be surprised if at this point NASA couldn't order a second one built even if they wanted to. The unfortunate thing about advanced technology is that if you don't use it, you lose it. More specifically, you lose the research and machining setups and people with knowledge about them in their head; the main problem here being that documentation doesn't capture everything - a lot of tacit knowledge is captured in e.g. tuning of the machines, undocumented fixes made on-site, idiosyncrasies in manufacturing steps, etc.
  • Rebelgecko 7y ago
    Unfortunately that's already the case with many long running projects. A friend of mine that works on JWST recently fixed a mistake that was made by someone who retired 10 years ago.