# Couldn't the Webb telescope get better photos of Jupiter? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 15, 2022, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/couldnt-the-webb-telescope-get-better-photos-of-jupiter/968010 "2022-07-15T13:24:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 20
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2022, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/couldnt-the-webb-telescope-get-better-photos-of-jupiter/968010/20 "2022-07-16T17:46:06Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Not directly, maybe, but if launches were trivial in cost, that would drive down all of the other costs. A great deal of the cost of space missions is because they need to be extremely reliable. You can make a much cheaper spacecraft if you’re willing to accept, say, a 90% mission failure rate, and you can afford a 90% mission failure rate if that cheap mission is so cheap that you can afford to launch it ten times. As it is now, no matter how cheap the mission itself is, you can’t afford to launch it ten times, because the launches themselves are expensive, but if the launches were cheap, maybe we could go with that paradigm. No, not really. I know it is an article of faith among the ‘space enthusiast’ community that space launch costs drives everything and if you had dirt cheap launch capability it would suddenly result in space industries, mining, colonizing the Moon and Mars, et cetera, but that is a naive assumption that is demonstrably not true. To be sure, the cost of space launch has been a limitation on low cost micro/nano satellites that have been largely limited to rideshare opportunities on bigger launches (and even with the emergence of RocketLabs, Virgin Orbit, Relativity, Firefly, et cetera it isn’t clear that smallsat launch is a fiscally sustainable industry for more than a couple of launch providers) but for larger complex satellites and interplanetary missions the launch costs, while not insignificant, are not the main drivers. Aside from the inherent costs of fabricating spacecraft and instruments—which even done absent to the extensive ground testing will still be quite expensive for the kind of spacecraft and instruments useful for interplanetary exploration and large space observatories—there is the opportunity cost that is lost every time a mission fails because it is much better to spend 20% to 30% of your budget than to spend three or more years building up a payload to launch it only to have it fail and have to go back through the entire acquisition/contracting/fabrication cycle, especially if you have a mission critical need for your program or company. I know space enthusiasts try to apply the paradigm of smallsats to everything and assume that that design-build-break-redesign is the way to go which works fine with CubeSats and other small satellites that you can handle without large cranes and fixtures and that cost a few tens of thousands each with a fab cycle of a few weeks, but when you get into the tens or hundreds of millions per unit and a design/fab cycle of years, that entire notion just completely breaks down, again both because of the invested engineering and labor as well as the opportunity cost lost versus a successful mission. The CubeSat was originally conceived as an educational project that would enable literal hands on experience with satellites that were quick enough to build and cheap enough to rideshare that college students could build them, and the CubeSat form has grown into a commercially useful platform for certain applications and even considered for certain types of low cost interplanetary missions, but neither it or other smallsat form factors are suitable for the entire array of satellite and spacecraft applications, and in particular you are never going to build a space telescope that can look back into the origins of the universe in a 6U or 12U form factor. This is precisely what I mean about the functional distinction between _microspace_ and _macrosapce_; for the missions that low cost, small form factor spacecraft will work, they are as great an innovation as the PC was over mainframe computing, but there are many applications where those types of spacecraft just won’t work and aren’t desirable regardless of how cheap the launch cost is. As for accepting an estimated “90% failure rate” I guarantee that nobody is going to go for that in the million dollar or higher spacecraft category. It is difficult enough to get acceptance of a mission risk that is at 5% probability of failure because, again, nobody wants to lose either the invested value in building the spacecraft nor the opportunity cost versus a more successful mission. These are the kinds of wild-ass notions that space enthusiasts throw around without knowing anything about the actual space industry or the engineering behind complex spacecraft. There are just marginal limits on how cheaply and quickly you can make a spacecraft of some particular level of capability (mostly based upon the instrumentation it has to carry and support) regardless of how much of a production line you conceive of building it on. While there is merit to common spacecraft systems and buses, you just can’t assembly a JWST-like observatory from off-the-shelf spare parts regardless of how innovative or entrepreneurial you believe yourself to be. And again, for these larger complex missions, the actual ride to orbit is only a small fraction of the total cost and making it even cheaper is only shaving a few points off of the total mission cost, so it just isn’t the main driver or opportunity for cost reduction that people believe it to be. Stranger --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/couldnt-the-webb-telescope-get-better-photos-of-jupiter/968010)._