What you're saying isn't crazy. I guess I don't have a lot of faith in their estimates. NICMOS was supposed to last something like 4 years if I remember correctly. It died in about two. A whole slew of gyros failed, degrading performance, and jacking up schedules so we could replace them. COSTAR is a pretty obvious failure that wasn't fully recovered from (COSTAR took up one of four slots that were meant for instruments). Lots of stuff goes wrong. But maybe they could have designed a Hubble-class telescope that would last ten years back then. I don't know for sure. My gut says the first one would have been a piece of crap with a bad mirror and shitty gyros. That's a lot of work to throw away.
Either way, would launching three (or six or whatever) of those on rockets really have been cheaper than the Hubble in terms of science/dollar? I have some serious doubts. Throw in the politics and overhead of three major missions, and you're talking big numbers.
And that ignores the intrinsic value of manned missions for their own sake - you must do them to get good at them. There are people who say that we should never do a manned mission, and that all the data we want to collect can be had by unmanned satellites and whatnot. While it may be very close to true, that's a very short-sighted point of view in my opinion.
Either way, would launching three (or six or whatever) of those on rockets really have been cheaper than the Hubble in terms of science/dollar? I have some serious doubts. Throw in the politics and overhead of three major missions, and you're talking big numbers.
And that ignores the intrinsic value of manned missions for their own sake - you must do them to get good at them. There are people who say that we should never do a manned mission, and that all the data we want to collect can be had by unmanned satellites and whatnot. While it may be very close to true, that's a very short-sighted point of view in my opinion.