>> apparently once a generation

I hope not. This one is only going to last 10 years. Kepler also only lasted 10 years. Given the time it took to build it, I hope the JWST's replacement is already well into development. The reality is that space telescopes are launched every couple years without much fanfare. This just happens to be a very big and expensive one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes

Hopefully this restraint will become less significant for future missions. Starship should mean larger payload volume (less folding/structure required), far more payload capacity, far lower costs, and more frequent flights.

Refueling and refurbishment costs should become much more acceptable as viable approaches emerge due to dropping ticket cost to space.

only reason for 10 years is fuel, I think they are working on a robot to refuel it to increase the lifetime.

What's a generation? Longer than 10 years certainly, but many people have kids by their early 20s if not before.

I think typically a generation is around 30 years, but this changes over time. Currently it's higher in the western world, but it was shorter 100 years ago.

So why couldn’t they delay the lunch by a week so everyone could spend Christmas with their families and then launch it?

There very specific times you can launch to establish desired orbits. Typically these windows only come once every month or two.

Is that the case for an orbit around the earth-sun Lagrange point? It seems like anytime should be GTG

True. I don't think this is an orbital launch window thing. Rather, the date seemed to be driven by operational necessities (range safety, weather, the practicalities of getting the rocket ready etc).

I believe the launch windows are fairly constrained due to the precise positioning requirements as well as the requirement to avoid eclipses throughout the lifetime of the telescope. This study [1] was for a planned 2018 launch, but I'm sure there were similar constraints in this time period too.

In addition, the fuel required to position the spacecraft varies a lot depending on the day - and any fuel saved can be used to prolong the operational lifetime of the telescope.

[1] https://issfd.org/ISSFD_2014/ISSFD24_Paper_S2-6_Yu.pdf

The launching of this telescope is FAR more important and beneficial to humanity than an arbitrary holiday that celebrates the winter solstice.

Christmas doesn't celebrate the winter solstice, it happens to be a few days after the winter solstice. In some places, the solstice is far more important holiday than Christmas, like for Buddhists in HK where I live, who celebrate the solstice with family

What's stopping anyone from staying with their family one or two weeks after Christmas?

What's up with this fixation people have with arbitrary dates for celebration?

Because those "arbitrary" dates are agreed on by many. So everyone can leave their works on the same day and gather together.

that may be, but I'm totally on board with staggered, a la carte breaks. Esp. considering how many work in places that are mission-critical (or service industry) and don't take the same time off.

Moreover, I find (for myself) very little celebratable about a time of year that :

- it's more expensive to fly during

- revolves around buying, just, stuff.

Viva la holiday revolucion. Let's all pick times that work for us and our loved ones and get off the monoculture train.

My employer has a pretty good policy for that: you can bank any holiday, work on it and take the date later as you wish. It's great for other religions, non-religious people, etc., you can choose to re-use any holiday as you wish.

Would that be a part of your holiday revolución? :P

Hells yeah it would! That's really great - it adds flexibility while not clobbering what other people value. What an elegant solution.

Kids have time off school on Christmas and not two weeks later. And all their friends share a particular experience for the holidays and they will be the only ones not to have that. If you’re not a parent it may not be as big a deal to not be there on major holidays.

It's a Schelling point.

Yeah. I commented to my family that this telescope took multiple countries years to build. I'm not sure if it's just that difficult, or if budgets are too small.

The JWST has a number of trailblazing technologies. Real Engineering did a great video on it:

https://youtu.be/aICaAEXDJQQ

Let's hope Starship lift capacity will make Webb obsolete in a decade!

Doubtful considering how long it took to put JWST together. What, 30 years almost?

Granted a lot of that was scope creep but nonetheless, I'm betting it's not launch capacity that's the bottleneck.

A lot of complexity of JWST is driven by the very restrictive mass and size limits. If you get a wider rocket and a 50% larger mass budget, then you can skip a lot of the complex unfolding and you can probably make a comparable diameter space telescope for literally 10 times less effort, cost and time.

The available launch vehicles probably demanded a certain amount of ambition in the plans. You can't launch small experimental telescopes with a short planned operation on the shuttle. It's too expensive just to show up with anything less than Hubble's successor. Now the new space race is aiming at making access to space cheap and common.

Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.

>> probably won't be a big telescope.

It will be another infrared telescope. Hubble's capabilities have been all but surpassed by ground-based optics. Some of the new giant telescopes already being built will easily surpass Hubble (100+foot mirrors etc). What JWST does is see in infrared, something that ground-based telescopes can never do as IR is absorbed by atmosphere. So whatever replaces JWST will likely be another, bigger, IR telescope.

https://www.tmt.org/page/about

>>With its 30m diameter prime-mirror, TMT will be three times as wide, with nine times more area, than the largest currently existing visible-light telescope in the world. This will provide an unparalleled resolution, with TMT images more than 12 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Fast, cheap and out of control!