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They've worked on the design for over 20 years AFAICT. Even tho Starship will enable bigger and better telescopes, if there's a repairable problem and it is wit
by BbzzbB 5y ago
They've worked on the design for over 20 years AFAICT. Even tho Starship will enable bigger and better telescopes, if there's a repairable problem and it is within reach, would be odd to just bail on JWST when the whole design/build process of the next gen will likely be a very long endeavor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#His...
- ravi-delia 5y agoI think it's fair to say that with lower stakes you can definitely take less time on each telescope. The Webb is a miracle of engineering, but a lot of that miracle goes towards squeezing it into a pretty narrow fairing.
- BbzzbB 5y agoSure, I'd also expect (as an outsider) that new iterations will be quicker from this new knowledge base and a 9m x 18m rocket payload, I'm just saying if there is a way to fix broken JWST I see no reason to not even try and wait out the next gen. They are not mutually exclusive.