I often wonder how come we(as in, humanity) ever only launched a single Hubble telescope. Surely, once you built one, you should be able to build more. Or other countries should be able to take the designs and launch their own versions. Hubble was(and I imagine still is) occupied for weeks at the time taking pictures of certain areas of the sky. Why don't we have 50 Hubbles up in the orbit, doing different things simultaneously? Is it simply because there's no money to do so?

I also do remember the story how NASA got a couple decommissioned telescopes from some intelligence agency, which turned out to be an order of magnitude better than Hubble is, and the agency was getting rid of them because they were already outdated. I do remember reading that if those were put into astronomy use they would be a lot better than anything we have currently, but of course those are being used for taking pictures of military sites and tanks, rather than stars.

The two donated telescopes were the same diameter as the one Hubble had, but were designed to cover a larger field of view (since the small FoV of Hubble wouldn't have been very useful for reconnaissance). But they came without any instruments, so one would have to develop (or adapt the ones from Hubble) to be able to actually use it (and that's were most of the cost is).

And the main limitation is quite simply money.. and since a lot of the things that were only possible with HST in the past are possible from the ground now people started focusing on building space observatories for the parts of the optical spectrum that simply cannot be done from the ground (x-ray, far-infrared, gamma-ray).

If you want an answer to this question, the search string is "James Webb Space Telescope".

Be warned: it isn't a pretty picture.

It’s a great point — how much would it add to the cost of these projects to convert them into assembly lines?

Separately, I was surprised to learn how many observatories there are in space. Here’s just a selection:

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_telescopes.j...

Dude, the astronomers don't pay , the public pays. So the people in all the world will have to pay more billions to american companies to workaround the mess those created. This sounds very mafia like - or Cyber Punk where you can't see the sky or the sun anymore unless you are a billionaire.

Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less bright and we make the people that pollute pay and not the public.

>>Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit

Well, couple small problems with this idea

1) who collects the taxes? I can imagine some international agency in charge of it which then proceeds to spend the money on other international projects, but how could you guarantee compliance?

2) Countries which are only now starting to launch things into orbit would(rightfully) say - hey, how is that fair? Others have been able to launch thousands of satellites for free, but now that we finally got the capability to do so, we have to pay? Why?

1) we can make an international project to put some telescopes in space, nobody should be excluded because politics, should be only scientists.

2) this always happens, look at intellectual rights. The country with the bigger army forces the rest to play by their rules.