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The James Webb Satellite seems to be a highly successful project and it looks like humanity will get useful observations from it for many decades to come. But the question is... why not make 3 more copies of JWST and launch them into orbit so that we could get new data 4x faster? Or even 9 copies to get data 10x faster?

Since all the engineering has already been done and the satellite has been tested in practice, surely this would be much cheaper and faster than designing a new satellite from scratch? And you'll get a bit of savings from economies of scale, as you'll make several copies of the same part.

JonathanReez
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    'Economies of scale' really don't kick in for complex things at the 1-10 level. Sure, the next one won't take 20 years, but each one will basically be a one-off repeated. – Jon Custer Jul 20 '22 at 18:22
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    This is a completely different question to the claimed duplicate, which is asking about interferometric combination of multiple telescopes. – ProfRob Jul 20 '22 at 19:32
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    @JonCuster they kind of do? At the very least you no longer have to pay the engineering teams and just copy&paste the original designs – JonathanReez Jul 20 '22 at 21:11
  • Finite resources (money, time, people) and infinite questions dictates that money be spread across as many different technologies as possible. In other words, what money there is will be always better invested in telescopes that differ substantially from all previous telescopes. – uhoh Jul 20 '22 at 21:11
  • @uhoh doesn't this assume that JWST will be able to survey 100% of the visible stars over its lifespan? I've added a related question. – JonathanReez Jul 20 '22 at 21:15
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    Economies of scale are about mass production, not small run ultra precise things like this. Not even close. It could easily be much more expensive to try and make more in any reasonable time frame for a variety of reasons. The benefit of EoS comes from the fact that even an extremely small savings per widget will offset the incredible amount of upfront cost required to build out the mass production facilities and get everything up and running. But it only works because the small savings is multiplied by gigantic volumes, not 10. – eps Jul 21 '22 at 02:20
  • We do have a few telescopes, each doing something different: Chandra does X-ray astronomy. The Fermi telescope observes in gamma rays. The Swift Observatory searches for gamma ray bursts. Gaia measures the position of stars with exquisite accuracy. Kepler and later TESS look for transiting exoplanets. Planck mapped the cosmic microwave background, etc etc. The point being, that you get a lot more science by having different telescopes. – James K Jul 21 '22 at 08:25
  • @eps but it would still be faster/cheaper than building a brand new telescope from scratch? Instead of waiting another 10 years for a JSWT replacement, you launch 9 more clones of it in 5. – JonathanReez Jul 21 '22 at 18:57
  • @Jonathan The design of most of the JWST components was finalised by 2007. Some of the relevant technology has advanced since then. And I expect that the builders of the JWST would have done some things differently, in hindsight. So although cloning the JWST might save a little time & money, it would be better to build an improved design, with more modern technology. Also, we need to actually use the JWST for a while to get a clearer idea of what the design should be of the next high resolution infrared telescope. – PM 2Ring Jul 21 '22 at 19:50
  • You could build 9 or 10 cheaper than the first, but not cheaply. It's not like the first one costs billions, but the next 9 will cost hundreds-of-thousands. Economies of scale work when the market is huge (think a minimum of "thousands" to "millions" of copies) and you desire a decrease in costs measured in orders of magnitude. If we wanted 1,000,000 JWST's launched in the next 5-10 years to create a constellation of telescopes with a target price of $250,000 USD each, then "economies of scale" might kick in. @ElonMusk, can you help us out? – Greg Burghardt Jul 21 '22 at 19:53

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