Not sure why it takes 10 days to put in 63 gallons of fuel and oxidizer, but hey, this is JWST.
James Webb Space Telescope may actually truly launch this century, says NASA
The very-much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope is being pumped with fuel and prepared for liftoff after an anomaly knocked back its launch date to no earlier than December 22. “Engineering teams have completed additional testing confirming NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is ready for flight, and launch preparations are …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 30th November 2021 18:14 GMT Alan Brown
In a word, "no"
In a few more words, "it's a lot harder than you seem to think it is" - and more to the point, the fuel (incredibly toxic to people+dangerous in other ways) needs to be loaded into something that's going to be launched on the pointy end of a firestick at some point.
Doing so in a way which requires even more handling later, with even more complications and therefore possibilities of something going wrong - is generally a bad idea from the outset
Any question that that starts "why can't they just" or "it doesn't seem particularly hard" usually turns out on analysis to be VERY difficult to achieve
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Tuesday 30th November 2021 11:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
If you make a mistake fuelling your car then perhaps it catches fire and if you have expensive car maybe this costs you $100,000. If you make a mistake fuelling JWST then perhaps it catches fire and this costs you $10,000,000,000. Enough to buy 100,000 new expensive cars. So you do it rather carefully.
Also both fuel and oxidiser are very toxic and corrosive and very very nasty. And if they come into contact with each other they will explode. So you do it rather carefully.
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Tuesday 30th November 2021 18:35 GMT Alan Brown
In this instance, possibly the best thing which could happen to the JWST would be to park it and build another one which doesn't need the complex orgami
It was built around a 3 metre fairing. Starship makes this redundant. It also makes a lot of the other orgami redundant. Ion tugs make travel to and from Lagrange points actually possible.
None of this existed 25 years ago, but the problem is that people keep piling on complexity onto a sunk cost instead of starting over
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Thursday 2nd December 2021 00:44 GMT Timbo
"Same with the telescope: building number 2 would cost a few orders of magnitude less than designing and building #1. See also: "The Machine" in "Contact"."
I seem to recall in the film Contact, that Hadden said: "1st rule in government spending - why build one when you can have two at twice the price".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZ2nhHNtpmk
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Tuesday 30th November 2021 12:27 GMT bigphil9009
Scott Manley had a great line in one of his recent videos when discussing this matter and addressing the chances of the launch impacting Santa's ability to delivery presents at the right time:
"Don't worry, the James Webb telescope launching on time is just a story we tell our children at Christmas"