There's a Christmas every year. A major telescope launch is apparently once a generation.
I hope not. This one is only going to last 10 years. Kepler also only lasted 10 years. Given the time it took to build it, I hope the JWST's replacement is already well into development. The reality is that space telescopes are launched every couple years without much fanfare. This just happens to be a very big and expensive one.
Refueling and refurbishment costs should become much more acceptable as viable approaches emerge due to dropping ticket cost to space.
In addition, the fuel required to position the spacecraft varies a lot depending on the day - and any fuel saved can be used to prolong the operational lifetime of the telescope.
What's up with this fixation people have with arbitrary dates for celebration?
Moreover, I find (for myself) very little celebratable about a time of year that :
- it's more expensive to fly during
- revolves around buying, just, stuff.
Viva la holiday revolucion. Let's all pick times that work for us and our loved ones and get off the monoculture train.
Would that be a part of your holiday revolución? :P
Granted a lot of that was scope creep but nonetheless, I'm betting it's not launch capacity that's the bottleneck.
Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.
It will be another infrared telescope. Hubble's capabilities have been all but surpassed by ground-based optics. Some of the new giant telescopes already being built will easily surpass Hubble (100+foot mirrors etc). What JWST does is see in infrared, something that ground-based telescopes can never do as IR is absorbed by atmosphere. So whatever replaces JWST will likely be another, bigger, IR telescope.
https://www.tmt.org/page/about
>>With its 30m diameter prime-mirror, TMT will be three times as wide, with nine times more area, than the largest currently existing visible-light telescope in the world. This will provide an unparalleled resolution, with TMT images more than 12 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.