This video explains it very well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8yRDrl76d0

Half way through the video, I understood why it's so expensive and risky.

On the other hand, Apollo 11 had many 'firsts' that couldn't be tested before the actual mission and it worked out 'first shot'. Of course there were some problems and Apollo 13 showed that the odd's where not too good.

Huge difference is that Apollo had highly trained human beings on board to fix things that could not be planned for. There were also 10 previous missions to Apollo 11 to work out the kinks, with one failing with loss of life.

JW is not designed to be fixed or fail, nor are there training runs. It HAS to work first shot.

Regarding the 10 missions before Apollo 11: It's a little more complicated. Apollo 1 is the name that was given to honor the astronauts who died in the pad accident. Apollo 2 and 3 didn't exists. But a whole bunch of other tests did exist testing Saturn 5 before we got to the unmanned Apollo 4, 5 and 6 tests. And starting with Apollo 7 humans were included. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Apollo_missions for details.

I probably should have known this. I've read alot on Apollo, but never really internalized some of these facts.

People forget there was an entire series leading up to the Saturn V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Saturn_development

They've got a Saturn IB at an Alabama rest stop outside of Huntsville. Surprisingly small, but still towers above you!

> People forget there was an entire series leading up to the Saturn V

Well, sooorta. The Saturn V was the third in that series, after the Saturn I and Saturn IB. [0] While there were proposed intermediate Saturns (and ones past V, too) only two first stages were developed, and the V was the only launcher to fly with the F-1 engine.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_(rocket_family)

The really amazing thing is it took just over a year and a half to get from the first unmanned launch of a Saturn V to the moon landing.

Apollo is probably the wrong thing to compare with, but sky crane did work first shot.

You are right! Sky crane still blows my mind!

Wow, this video is mindblowing.

I think a big amount of the complexity comes from the folded up sunshield. I remember it had torn during a test deployment last year.

Here is a quick animation showing the whole deployment process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpVz3UrSsE4

If it tears bad it's technically possible to send up a shield that floats near the telescope. There were some plans for that way back during the design phase if I remember right. Still wouldn't be cheap or easy

It looks from the renders like the telescope has solar panels, antennas, etc on the sun/earth-side of the shield. Wouldn't sending a standalone shield screw that up as it would shade them?

Probably, although you could shape the shield not to.

It's still far more complex than just attaching the thing right to the telescope. And glancing starlight leaking in between the shield and the telescope could be a big problem.

I looked it up, the original proposal was actually to use a mobile shield to occlude far away stars for direct planet imaging. I think a similar approach could "fix" JWT but let's hope we never get there

For one, I think it has an astronomically (ha) high number of single-points-of-failure. A quick Google search reported 344.

One imagines that for every single point of failure they've got some kind of plan for how to still derive scientific value while operating it in a degraded state, similar to how Hubble was able to take pictures before service mission 1 and COSTAR.

I'm a layman too, and just watched this https://youtu.be/bTxLAGchWnA to better understand the complexity.