and in that time it's required four servicing missions - which require someone to pay for them, you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescop

and in that time it's required four servicing missions - which require someone to pay for them, you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servicing_missions_and_new_instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servici... sending up shorter-lived observatories which are disposed of after a fixed lifespan is fine, that's already the model for stuff like lagrange observatories, those are obviously never going to get a shuttle servicing crew. but it doesn't fix the overall problem that science doesn't get funded on an ongoing basis, if there isn't funding then there will never be any followup missions with disposable observatives either, it will just be the one short-term mission and that's it, we're done. again, you haven't actually solved the problem that science costs money and someone has to pay for it, whether you're operating on a model of servicing a high-end expensive instrument or a repeated missions with disposable ones, and whether it's terrestrial or space-based one. someone has to pay to replace the space-based disposable instrument if you want to continue that capability, the problem is nobody will want to pay for the next mission just like nobody wanted to pay to maintain Arecibo. if you can come up with some way to guarantee ongoing funding for disposable missions then congrats, please let the world know, we can apply that same thing to enduring scientific instruments too. shouting 'disposable missions!' alone isn't a plausible solution for the actual problem here, it's just spacex fetishism. Cheap launches are great but it doesn't solve the problem of funding - someone still has to buy a new instrument and pay to launch it. Moreover missions will naturally evolve to fit the available launch capacity and expenses. when launch capability is cheap, you will get bigger and more sensitive systems that cost more to build and launch. That's a good thing, in the birds-eye view that will be missions with greater scientific capabilities than we could reasonably mount today, but just cheap launch capacity isn't going to magically drive costs to zero, except for some fixed-capacity 'today mission' which will eventually be of no scientific value. Onwards and upwards is the name of the game.