Programs like man on the moon make their contribution to mans knowledge through the engineering required to achieve the end, rather than in what they discover w

Programs like man on the moon make their contribution to mans knowledge through the engineering required to achieve the end, rather than in what they discover when they get there. > Also, is this complementary in function (and mission) to the Hubble? It appears to me that the spectrum is split up between Hubble and James Webb. Hubble's IR compliment was spitzer until it ran out of liquid helium. Webb is spitzer's replacement, with orders of magnitude more resolution. Spitzer has qualified a lot of interesting mid IR targets to go look at in more detail. In general non-vis space telescopes are more interesting than visible spectrum ones: Our vision only covers one octave so the odds that some random important physical process will best be observed in the visible spectrum isn't that great. The visible spectrum is also the same spectrum that is well transmitted by the atmosphere so many vis observations can be conducted from earth with much larger and less costly instruments. Adaptive optics can mitigate atmospheric distortion at least somewhat, but there is no solution to non-transmission but space. The atmospheric transmission has a two fold impact too: To study the atmosphere of extrasolar planets we need to study wavelengths that their atmospheres block. ... which, of course, are also wavelengths that our atmosphere blocks.