Kepler is millions of miles away from Earth, even with a Saturn V and an Apollo spacecraft we couldn't fix the thing and come back. Also, it was never economic

Kepler is millions of miles away from Earth, even with a Saturn V and an Apollo spacecraft we couldn't fix the thing and come back. Also, it was never economical to fix Hubble with the Shuttle. It was just fortuitous that the Shuttle program was desperate for things to do and ended up subsidizing the launch costs for the Hubble servicing missions. In terms of the ultimate bottom line the US spent nearly $8 billion to fix a $2.5 billion telescope. Granted, I think that even that expenditure was worthwhile but from a strict cost accounting it would have made more sense to simply build and launch additional telescopes.