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Yeah - I take it back - I spoke too quickly. You can certainly launch large satellites with rockets. I was too focused on Hubble specifically. That said, I rem

Yeah - I take it back - I spoke too quickly. You can certainly launch large satellites with rockets. I was too focused on Hubble specifically. That said, I remain deeply skeptical of the idea of being able to do so cost effectively or in a way that allowed for iteration and development of the systems. That's a lot of eggs in one basket to make 4 duplicates - they'd all fail in the same ways (which Hubble did early and often) and they'd be space junk in a heartbeat. You'd also want different cameras, which would have different requirements, etc. Once the contractors got a hold of that, they'd wind up 4 separate projects costing a fortune, and you'd be right back where you started, except without the budget. Keep in mind how long it took to build the HST. A servicing mission turned around in about 3 years.

dalke 12y ago
It wouldn't be duplicates. A better plan would reuse the same chassis, and have a staggered production. There have, after all, been 16 KH-11 satellites over 30+ years; they surely didn't all use the same technology. Part of the reason for the expense of HST comes from the delay after Challenger. Hitching it to the success of the Shuttle helped make it more expensive. You are right though that it plays to the sunken cost fallacy. Hubble happened because the initial budget was low. Then it ballooned. Congress would likely not have budgeted $10 billion if they knew that was going to be the final cost of Hubble. It's even less likely they would have funded four space telescopes for that price.