The other thing to bear in mind is the size of up coming launch vehicles. SpaceX Starship will be 9m and Blue Origin’s New Glen is expected to be 7m in diameter. Both of those could take a telescope the size of James Webb with much lest or no “unfolding” required.
Annother option with some of these cheaper launch vehicles is to build the telescope into the upper stage, using it as a bus/platform. So for example you could convert a Starship upper stage into a telescope, using its full 9m diameter for a mirror. Fully assembled on the ground before launch.
Now that the folding trick has been proven and loaded into institutional memory, I'd rather use it, e.g. LUVOIR-A at 15m in diameter, planned for the 8.4m fairing on SLS but suitable for the 9m fairing on Starship.
I do love me a scientific megaproject, but I still do wonder if a glorious $24 billion (and that's before the overruns) monolith is the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar, especially if it also has a limited lifespan due to consumables.
That's fabulously expensive: you could have four LHCs, have enough change to replace Arecibo with 10 FASTs and then maybe a aircraft supercarrier on top just for funsies.
It feels like JWST again: it's so expensive that it cannot be allowed to fail, so it's engineered to near perfection, but that costs so much that it has to be engineered even more to be sure, and so on until it's 1900% over budget, a decade late and muscling other science out of funding.
> I do love me a scientific megaproject, but I still do wonder if a glorious $24 billion (and that's before the overruns) monolith is the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar, especially if it also has a limited lifespan due to consumables.
The 2nd mission with which I got involved, an Air Force Captain explained to me that continual trend was to massively underbudget a mission, and then make it whole through cost overruns.
Of course, my work was all about increasing the security capabilities of the constellation, which likely added in the tens, to hundreds of millions in cost to the system.
> It feels like JWST again: it's so expensive that it cannot be allowed to fail, so it's engineered to near perfection, but that costs so much that it has to be engineered even more to be sure, and so on until it's 1900% over budget, a decade late and muscling other science out of funding.
Launch costs are dropping and the space body of knowledge is changing rapidly
System Engineering tools are in their infancy, so rework or changing requirements are pricey. I expect this will really the cost of missions over time, since it directly relates to labor costs.
Simultaneously, the space operator mentality of "extreme availability at all costs" is meeting the hard reality of "space is now an offensive and defensive cyber domain".
We're building too many one-offs and too few constellations, both the birds, and the sensors. If you want lower cost we need to get past unit volume of one.
> the most effective thing in terms of science per dollar
> muscling other science out of funding
But we don't need four LHCs. We do need a way of observing dim and distant infrared light with high resolution. There's no other instrument that can observe EM radiation from 13 billion years ago. So it's not one or the other; something like the JWST was going to be built sooner or later.
24B is peanuts. Public spending has a greater than 1 multiplier, especially infrastructure, science and R&D.
It took a supply shock and a demand shock and trillions for the economy to see inflation, and unfortunately almost all of that is just due to fucking fertilizer and lack of livable wage for logistics workers, not science equipment manufacturers hiking prices...
I much rather launch 5 9m telescopes then one 15m telescope. And work on the technology to build even larger one in space in the generation after that.
These mega project that cost a gigantic amount and are hilariously oversubscribed are not actually the best return on investment in my option.
I don't know anything about astronomy but my intuition is that since we aren't going to the kind of places you see with a 9m space telescope any time soon the goal should be pushing the boundary rather than filling in a complete picture. In other words, I'd rather the one 15m telescope.
Could you explain what I'm missing? Have we reached a point where the returns of increasing size are very low or is it more that there are enough big mysteries to solve at the smaller size so it isn't much worth increasing until it can be done cheaper?
My question is similar but slightly different: is it possible to throw a "lot" of much "worse" hardware at the problem and solve it through a different kind of brute force than just building ever-bigger mirrors (which will only ever get to low double digit metre diameters at least in the foreseeable future without orbital assembly capabilities).
Say for JWST, there are 18 segments. Could you have 1800 mini Webbs and offset the inaccuracies that come from that with the vastly higher total area? Does that eventually reach an asymptote where a adding more units isn't useful? Does it reach a point where the data re-integration becomes the intractable issue? Can it ever be as good as a gigantic monolith even with an arbitrary number of units? Would the cheapness of individual units be outweighed by the number of them needed?
Its not that a bigger size wouldn't be better, its more that you have lots of scientists who would like to do lots of research in lots of different directions.
Combine a wealth of data sources in many different directions and many different observations can also lead to new insides.
When majority of the community, a whole generation of scientists, all have to wait for one massive telescope that can then only do 1/1000 of what people like to do with it, are you really gaining more insight?
Annother option with some of these cheaper launch vehicles is to build the telescope into the upper stage, using it as a bus/platform. So for example you could convert a Starship upper stage into a telescope, using its full 9m diameter for a mirror. Fully assembled on the ground before launch.