My understanding is that all major observatories, and certainly Hubble, are overbooked by a factor of 3 or more for months, and sometimes years, in advance.
Which implies that having 3 Hubbles would allow us to do more research than we can do today. It's not ready for the museum while astronomers still battle over who gets to use it.
An instrument doesn't have to be cutting edge in order to be useful and produce valuable results. Even today, amateur astronomers are still making discoveries (asteroids, sometimes comets) with telescopes that major observatories would have laughed at 100 years ago already.
"The telescope that ate astronomy" (Webb) will undoubtedly make important discoveries. Whether it will be worth its cost considering what we could have built for the same price (such as 10 ELTs!) remains to be seen.
This makes a lot of sense. Imagine being able to afford on a reasonable research budget to schedule within a few days notice the use of a visible light space telescope the equivalent of a Hubble but much cheaper due to optics advancements and miniaturization.
I do have to believe that any satellite designed specifically for one type of measurement would be more robust and cost less than something that did more than one, but I suppose that's not really true. Sometimes multiple measurements simply complement each other too much not to use.
My understanding is that all major observatories, and certainly Hubble, are overbooked by a factor of 3 or more for months, and sometimes years, in advance.
Which implies that having 3 Hubbles would allow us to do more research than we can do today. It's not ready for the museum while astronomers still battle over who gets to use it.
An instrument doesn't have to be cutting edge in order to be useful and produce valuable results. Even today, amateur astronomers are still making discoveries (asteroids, sometimes comets) with telescopes that major observatories would have laughed at 100 years ago already.
"The telescope that ate astronomy" (Webb) will undoubtedly make important discoveries. Whether it will be worth its cost considering what we could have built for the same price (such as 10 ELTs!) remains to be seen.