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Well the JWST is in fact a thing. Why not keep getting science from the old ones while they're still working?

NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros, like just plaster the things with gyros and reaction wheels for 50x redundancy since that's always the mission critical thing that fails first. Or maybe a xenon powered ion reaction control system or something that would last longer then hydrazine.

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JWST is an infrared telescope though, which doesn't really replace the Hubble. It is suited for the interesting science of our times though. An upgraded optical space telescope would probably be less groundbreaking but still very valuable to science.

> NASA really needs to just fill their telescopes with gyros upon gyros

It’s an interesting tradeoff. Missions are designed (and costed) for a nominal mission lifetime; adding more redundancy increases costs. But it’s true that the successful missions tend to stay in operations much longer than their normal lifetime.

The builtin gyros didn't even reach the original mission lifetime of 15 years.

There's a limit to how much redundancy you can put in a satellite, but with how consistently these parts fail it would make sense to put in a lot. If 1% of the Hubble's weight was extra gyroscopes it would have 30-40 of them.

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