> Nobody is, nor was, sending the equivalent of a ground telescope installation upwell. You only send the looking part, with a downlink bolted on them. You do c

> Nobody is, nor was, sending the equivalent of a ground telescope installation upwell. You only send the looking part, with a downlink bolted on them. You do control and data processing planetside. That rack full of electronics is the looking part (temperature controllers, power supplies, CCD controllers, motor controllers, ...). The data processing happens in a server rack on the other side of the planet in either case (ground-based or space-based). And you somehow are under the impression that telescopes and instruments are so cheap that it doesn't matter if we loose one every year and then just launch another one. If that were the case we would be building dozens of 3m+ telescopes all over the planet every year - but we are not, because we don't have the money to do that. Telescopes are multi-decade investments by the institutes, so even with free (free!) launches exactly as much testing will be done as before, because we can still only afford one shot.