The costs of these Hubble maintenance missions are pretty high, and I'm not sure how big the loss of Hubble really is given the current technology of Earth based telescopes. I may be wrong, but hasn't interferometry and adaptive optics allowed ground based telescopes to surpass Hubble in many ways? There are probably a few instruments (IR maybe?) that cannot be matched from the ground. Anyone know of any particular aspect of Hubble that cannot be replaced with modern technology of ground based telescopes?

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