"bob haller" wrote in message news:32457e27-8398-40e2-
...
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n1107/06jwst/

And rightly so! After Hubble's later success NASA wanted to out-do
Hubble with something grand and came up with something monstrous. JWST
is too complex and therefore wildly expensive to build. Being located
at L1 the thing would have to work perfectly first time around and
that's going to be a challenge with so many moving parts. How far along
with development are they anyway? About a third? Except for a few
mirrors I haven't seen much. And if something snags we'll have a $10
billion turkey on our hands. I thought the Europeans were crazy flying
two telescopes on a single Ariane 5 to L1, but those didn't have
complex mechanisms to deploy.

Why didn't they just build another Hubble, bigger and better, but
serviceable robotically with replaceable batteries and reaction wheels
or something? How big a telescope can one fit inside a Atlas V or
Falcon Heavy anyway? Surely something Hubble-sized would fit, right?