I hope you are incorrect. I will be extremely sad if this mission is not successful.
Although tragic, it would be a fitting end to this boondoggle of a project. JWST was originally marketed as a quick, cheap win for NASA, but it turned into the polar opposite of that.
My thinking is the solar shield gets stuck/torn on deployment. Among the numerous bad decisions, they have no cameras watching the deployment
Why is that a bad decision? Would watching it help in any way?
There are about 50 deployment actions that have to occur. If everything works perfectly, great. But if something hangs up or gets tangled, the people running the mission are blind when trying to debug the problem
I mean, SpaceX would have put 4 cameras on it. Also, pics, or it didn't happen.
But they all would have broken due to "communication issues"
To learn from what went wrong. Even if it cannot be corrected for the telescope, we can hopefully see enough about what went wrong to be able to prevent the same thing from happening on future complex satellites.
Most of the time and money was spent on design. If it blows up they should be able to build a second one for a fraction of the time/cost of the first one.
Wasn't a major part of the problem that the design kept changing based on the pushed timeline? So what we are getting now is completely different from what was planned in 1996 to be launched in 2007? If that's the case, and the JWST fails to deploy, we probably wouldn't just build another copy of it - we would build a completely new/reworked space telescope that would take another 25 years to design/launch.
In this case, they should have build a half dozen instead of one..
"First rule in government spending: Why build one, when you can build two for twice the price?"
-Contact
I was expecting it to read something like “why build two when you can build one for the price of 5”
On what do you base this conclusion?
A keen sense of irony.
I see I'm not the only one that believes the universe operates to maximize irony (also, I correctly predicted both Boeing dreamliner snafus)