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Seems it would have been better to send it up in pieces then perform final assembly in orbit. Wonder why they didn't do it that way?


1. It turns out that any sort of assembly work as you'd think of it is incredibly difficult in zero-G, much harder (and more strenuous!) than on earth. It's so bad that it's necessary to do substantial effort (expense) on engineering designing the vehicle around in-orbit work (like Hubble was designed). All in all it's cheaper to launch fully assembled if at all possible than pay to keep a crew in-orbit for the duration of assembly.

2. There might not be anyone in orbit to do the work anyway. Currently the only place to find astronauts is I.S.S. and they can't venture more than 30'-40' from the station (or the end of a robot arm). The Russians have had MIR but not the ability to move crew from MIR to other orbits; MIR's orbit might not have worked for this thing. But the Russians did have the ability to simply launch crews for a continuous series of short jobsite visits if necessary.

(moving from one orbit to another is very expensive in fuel. Moving up and down isn't bad, but moving "sideways" - changing orbital inclination - is extremely costly)

3. Whatever that payload is might not disassemble.

As for robotic assembly, that seems to still be a pipedream. Ironically, the US might be ahead of everyone else here since the military gave up on NASA and manned spacecraft after Challenger. The Russians are very successful at unmanned launches at docking but probably not a lot more - they haven't had to learn to avoided manned spaceflight like the US military.

The military isn't the only group in the US to give up on manned spaceflight. Hubble was designed for periodic maintenance, but Hubble's replacement isn't. They made no assumption that the US would have manned spaceflight capability or any other sort of in-orbit servicing.
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