NASA’s New $8.8 Billion Telescope Can’t Be Fixed If Broken

NASA experts admitted they won’t be able to fix the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) if something goes wrong.

JWST will unfold itself “origami style” in deep space in an extremely technically complicated process which could potentially lead to a disastrous mission failure. If a failure occurs, the telescope will be located far beyond Earth’s orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 LaGrange point, which would make such a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) style fix extremely difficult. NASA currently lacks the capability to send a team of astronauts out that far to fix any problems.

Even if NASA could get out to JWST, the telescope won’t have a grappling ring for an astronaut to grab onto and the telescope could potentially kill astronauts attempting to fix it.

“We don’t want to mess with this one. It is a really cold telescope,” Dr. John Mather, science director for the JWST told Space.com. “The solar panels to protect the telescope have sharp edges and astronauts don’t like being around sharp edges.”