The other thing to remember was that Hubble was designed in an era that the Space Shuttle was meant to make manned missions to repair / upgrade commonplace. My understanding is that this was actually done at least once to Hubble (maybe more? I forget); but unfortunately for Reasons, NASA turned out to be incapable of resisting cutting corners which put people's lives at risk (Challenger, Colombia). A system designed today would be designed assuming that it would be robots or nothing.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/servicing/index.ht...
Also, the vision is that robots can build on Mars, for example.
“Simply” means fund the research. My comment was from 7 years ago.
We also need the robots here on earth for dangerous tasks
We’d make impressive progress over each decade with more effort.
What if the system that swaps parts fails?
Touche. At least you can send another robot!
But in reality, the ideal system is probably a combination of built-in redundancy / spares for parts that can work that way; and then robots for the kinds of things that are too complicated to have a built-in failover.
Send up another [improved] robot. These missions are less costly than human missions. We get to iterate more often
Says who? And how? This seems like an unsubstantiated claim.
Launching to space is severely constrained by the mass you can bring up. You can send up multiple robots compared to the mass needed for all the food, life support ect, for a single person.
So again, [citation needed]. We don't have, and are no where close to, general purpose miniature lightweight robots, after all.
Plus you'd still need spare parts. Why would I build a robot to swap parts, when I can simply put all of the spare parts into the telescope and swap over to them electronically?