Maybe it's cheaper to launch 10 not so perfect telescopes and have 9 fail and 1 work.
Kind of like in computing, where we moved from a single ultra reliable mainframe to tens of commodity hardware.
Kind of like in computing, where we moved from a single ultra reliable mainframe to tens of commodity hardware.
Commercial software development practices might be relevant where you can fix things overnight, but this is hard science instrumentation made of atoms, you ship things that must work as expected because the whole point of all this is making better measurements as the field evolves and there's a scientific case for doing it. It is not about selling production versions of the experiment to potential customers.