Except we launch well over 1000 satellites a year. The JWT is clearly a bigger deal than that. This has been advertised as NASA's magnum opus. The fact that it was only supposed to last 10 years makes it feel much less significant...
JWTs location in L2 (a mathematically unstable location that requires energy to not roll back into a gravity well in any direction) is like putting it on the satellite equivalent of K2 and not coming down from the peak for 20 years and you compare it to the thousands of commuters that made it up the hill down the road from your house.
> legally mandated reentry in 25 years.
FCC subsequently fined them $900k.
[0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-363486A1.pdf
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-satellite-fine-idUSKC...
https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/Mitigating_...
JWST pivots the entire spacecraft to point the 6 meter mirror. I'm sure they've optimized the consumables on the schedule, but it simply 'costs resources' to do this sort of work. I assure you there are gruellingly dense and optimized observations plans afoot.
Compare to e.g. the very successful Herschel Space Observatory -- it too went out to L2(-ish), did everything it was meant to do in its three year mission, and managed to extend to four before (drum roll) running out of fuel, this time for cooling. JSWT solves this cooling issue by some incredibly funky mechanical resonance cooling. Herschel "only" cost about $1 billion, and it will be interesting to compare the science results.
https://www.hpcwire.com/2019/06/24/a-behind-the-scenes-look-...
Perhaps there's some altrusitic archive.org style site that needs to exist for science, that features datasets of multiple PB in magnitude and allows anyone to pull the full archive.
Maybe in the future, but still, people still have access to source imagery and they regularly make spectacular images and material from public domain data from space agencies and interest groups. You don't need 4PB unless doing something like, well, imaging a black hole.
It's fun, not sure how much there is run a business from it, unless you plan on taking the data and creating spectrographs for some future mining mission way in the future? :D
I'm worried that NASA has spent all its money and political will (and then some) getting JWT over the finish line.
I mean, we'll still have some big terrestrial infrared 'scopes. And we'll be coming off 20 years of very good space infrared scope data... And we'll have had the smaller Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope up in L2 also (launching in 2027, nominal life 5 years).... ESA is launching an exoplanet-focused infrared scope to L2 in a similar timespan... Presumably other "smaller" infrared scopes will fly by 2042. So...
There's so many wavelengths and different possible space telescope missions. Let's not replace JWST (assuming it gets a normal mission life)-- let's keep some infrared capability and do something else.
wonder if we could put a telescope on the moon for $10B though.
Most of JWST's wavelength coverage is energies that terrestrial telescopes can do (just less well). It's not like Herschel which went into the far, far infrared (and had its life limited by liquid He as a result).
Re: Moon-- Why put a telescope down a gravity well?
Most of the discussion of telescopes on the moon I've heard has been about radio telescopes, where a huge hunk of rock between you and Earth can be a feature.
Roman is slated for launch in 2027 (and survived the JWST overruns!), LISA in the 2030s, and there are a few competing proposals that haven't totally firmed up for the next decade too: LUVOIR, HabEx, and a few others
Further optical and gravitational observatories are amongst further options.
Trust that plans are in process.
L2 is an unstable orbit and needs constant corrections to not drift away, so JWST has much more significant fuel needs than if it were in say Hubble's orbit. How much fuel it would have left for these maneuvers depended on how precise the launch was (i.e. how much fuel it needed to spend on corrective burns just to get to L2). This was obviously uncertain until after the launch, but ten years was a lower bound above which the launch would not be considered a major issue--if it only had say 5 years of fuel left after the launch that would be an indication that the launch was flubbed some how.
TLDR: JWST was not "supposed" to last only 10 years. It was designed and built to last much longer, that was just a lower bound assuming nothing went very wrong.
cf. Mars rovers operating long past the "planned" mission length, e.g. Opportunity's "planned" 90-day mission turning into over 5,000 days. It is vastly unfair to the people who designed and built Opportunity to say it was "supposed" to last only 90 days. It was built to last much longer; 90 days was a lower bound for the mission to be considered a success.
This one is hundreds to thousands of times further out than any of those satellites, for instance. It also has a far longer lifetime compared to the average, even before this news. Four times the distance of the moon from Earth. There's no luxury of being able to repair, service and refuel such a thing without approaching or exceeding the costs of just making a new, better one with the learnings and savings from before.
(edit - the "earth moon" distance isn't to scale with respect to planetary diameters... the distance from the earth to the moon is about the same as the sum of all the diameters of all the planets - that's a long way itself)