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The answer is no for mainly two reasons: 1. Prohibitive costs. Its extremely expensive (both in money and time) to manufacture many of the parts of the telesco
by dgrin91 5y ago
The answer is no for mainly two reasons:
1. Prohibitive costs. Its extremely expensive (both in money and time) to manufacture many of the parts of the telescopes, such as the reflector dishes. Its even more expensive to do all the testing & certification of the manufactured parts.
2. Its all outdated anyways. The JWST project has been ongoing for literally decades (starting in '96 if I remember). If we were to start from scratch today we would make a lot of different design choices based on more recent technological developments
- gibbonsrcool 5y agoI would love to see a video where one of the engineers on the project talked about what would be different if Webb was started today. Materials, software, processes, everything!
- p_l 5y agoA huge design issue that might - or might not - be pushed would be the power system. Solar panels require that JWST stays in the sun while conducting observations, while at the same time being critically dependant on the observing equipment to be cool - and being unable to just keep it inside bigger structure like with Hubble. This means that there's a huge problematic sun shade structure which is considerable part of the SPOFs still endangering JWST even if it is inserted into orbit correctly.