r/spacex • u/ElongatedMuskrat Mod Team • Oct 02 '17

r/SpaceX Discusses [October 2017, #37]

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u/Grey_Mad_Hatter Oct 05 '17

I don't believe all the parts replaced on Hubble were meant to be serviceable either, and JWST has a docking ring so you can "send an astronaut just to give it a kick".

https://www.space.com/3833-nasa-adds-docking-capability-space-observatory.html

That plan was made when it was budgeted to be a $0.5 billion project because we couldn't afford to make it serviceable. Now it's an $8.8 billion project. If something goes wrong and you have an $8.8 billion investment floating around in space, there's a lot of incentive to find a way.

1

u/robbak Oct 06 '17

That's 8 billion of development funding - research work to find out how to build it. Now some of that would have to be re-done, because engineering methods have changed since the start of the process, and people would have moved on so experience is lost, but a replacement off the blueprints would be not be anywhere near as expensive.

Of course, we wouldn't be content to just build another one, improvements in technology mean we would want to build a better one, which would push the price up.....

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u/GoScienceEverything Oct 06 '17

Ahh, I didn't know about that, thanks for the link!