If anything goes wrong with the mirrors, I’d expect it to be that they switched some between the inner and outer rings or oriented them wrong. But I’m sure they check all that.

Although I guess if the Apollo spacecraft were able to go to the Moon they might’ve been able to get to L2 too, right? But then possibly not back again assuming they needed the Moon to whip them around and change their course so much rather than being able to decelerate to a stop, and turn around without it? Not sure.

People were and still are talking about future human spacecraft visiting Mars and some asteroids in person so you’d think / hope we could find solutions to those problems.

‘Spose I should’ve said “if only we had developed the spacecraft ..” leaving out the “still.”

We’ve never had manned spacecraft that could reach Sun-Earth L2. L2 is about a million miles beyond Earth. There’s also the issue of getting men back from there and keeping them save from the radiation of deep space, capabilities none of our manned space craft have ever had.

@3. Ian : “Phil, I thought this project got scrapped due to budget cuts!? This is supremely good news.”

If I remember right, the JWST certainly came pretty close to becoming a budget casualty. I’m glad it wasn’t but its going to be pretty nerve-wracking considering there’s only one James Webb great space robot observatory with just so much invested and so many hopes and possible science resting on a single launch going smoothly and successfully and being as designed once orbiting as (#43) Daniel has noted.

I so wish there were at least two of these – preferably a whole production line of ‘em – and we still had the spacecraft to visit and repair them if need be. The consequences if something
were to go badly wrong I really hate to think about.

Then again, as with the Curiosity rover if we dare mighty things .. 8)

@10. thetentman asked : “When is this scheduled to launch?”

It’s Wikipedia page – linked to my name for this comment – says 2018.