>>12384350I don't want to suppress your opinion but your solution is very wasteful and inefficient. The fact is that doing it that way still makes for very expensive operations. It's not old space. It's a very real limitation that will always be there.
Consider this, if you launch something with redundant systems and the cause of failure is radiation related (As most failures in flight are) then all you've done is sent up a bunch of redundant failures in lieu of one quality product. So your cost increases as you keep sending up missions that fail on orbit. Let's use that 100$/kg launch price. It's still unattainable for 15 years but It's a nice round number.
A standard space telescope such as the james webb is 6,500 kg which is lower than the hubble at around 11000 kg.
That's 650000 per telescope.
If we use the average lifetime of electrical components in space without radiation protection, we see a failure after 130 days on average. So that would mean sending up 3 650000 dollar telescopes every year. so that's 1.95 million dollars of additional expenses. That may not seem like much but the average ground based telescope has a one time cost of 10 million as a high mark (Assuming it's not a major project like the VLBI) and sub 100K yearly operational costs.
So, you've incurred the cost of building a new telescope of 5 million every time, plus an additional 650K in launch costs, plus the fact that you need 3 telescopes a year on average to replace your failing ones, and you see it adds up to being more cost effective to just build on the ground.
It's not an old space mentality, it's a cost benefit analysis for project management purposes.
If I was to be submitted with 2 proposals, and one cost way more than the other because we had to keep replacing a scope in orbit multiple times a year, and I was only allocated a total of 10 million from the NSF for 3 years of operation, I would have to go with the ground based option. By necessity.
