I often think about the shuttle program in relation to all these crazy complicated, wildly expensive, and incredibly fragile space telescopes we're sending to LEO or the Earth-Sun L2. Would be damn useful to be able to repair/upgrade these things like with Hubble.

Obviously I realise the shuttle program was pretty far away from being able to head out to the Earth-Sun L2(AB, and wasn't even working towards it. But man, it would be nice to have that ability.

Really? Seems like it would be cheaper to build extra telescopes (economy of scale). When one of them breaks, just launch another.