I'm a little surprised that billionaires haven't already done things like launched a couple more Hubble telescopes. The design is already done and debugged, just clone it, and launch it.
The same for several other successful interplanetary probes - build a (relatively) cheap fleet of clones of successful designs, and send them out to explore the solar system fully.
Heck, you don't even have to come up with all the money yourself. Sell advertising on the mission. Having a logo on the rocket, and logos on the returned pix, etc., are all fantastic opportunities for advertising.
Well yeah, it makes sense when you work it out; every fact makes sense once you work it out. And there's a certain pleasing symmetry in that control over information, and the business model of attaching advertising to that information, has made the Google execs rich enough to invest in mining asteroids. I was just reflecting on how big a change it was.
It's actually not so easy to operate a space telescope, let alone build one. More so, billionaires that would look to astronomical investments would usually be better served by merely investing in ground based instruments, which they do.
The Keck telescopes are named after the W.M. Keck foundation, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is named after the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, for example.
Space based observatories are still an enormously expensive (billion dollar) endeavor and are generally quite risky.
Even if you had blueprints that said "here's exactly how to build a space telescope" just building it and going through all the proper testing would be quite expensive. Certainly you could just privately fund, say, Johns Hopkins University's APL to build a spacecraft for you, but it would still cost hundreds of millions of dollars and still be a comparatively risky endeavor. More so when you consider that the operations side would run to the millions of dollars a month level, and require a substantial build out of infrastructure.
That sort of thing will happen, but it'll probably take until after launch costs have dropped a fair bit.
I'm not sure which Mars landers you're referring to, I'm not aware of any that were so cheap. The Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) cost $2.5 billion. The total cost of the MER rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) was $820 million. The Mars Phoenix mission cost $420 million. The Mars Pathfinder mission cost $280 million in 1996 dollars, or $380 million adjusted for inflation. There have been no other successful Mars landers within the last 2 decades.
> Even if you had blueprints that said "here's exactly how to build a space telescope" just building it and going through all the proper testing would be quite expensive.
As launch costs go down, the cost of experimentation is going to go down, leading to faster turnaround and less on-the-ground testing. Rapid iteration will eventually be the norm.
No doubt with SpaceX leading the way to lower launch costs we'll see more private ventures and public/private partnerships.
However, more than likely there will need to be new designs purpose built: The manufacture of new telescopes and probes from old designs is not really practical. These craft were mostly "one offs"; their supply chains, tooling, and work groups are not waiting and ready to go. Their optical, structural, guidance, and computational technology is no longer state of the art, so you'd have to kludge together new systems based on old design docs and specifications. Not the kind of efficiency a privately funded venture would aspire to.
Far better to start anew, using the cumulative data of previous missions as a stepping stone, and employing lean design-build techniques such as SpaceX, Scaled Composites, and others have done.
I'm aware of one new generation of lean-manufactured, government-contracted observational satellites that are designed to be cheaper and replicable, but they're tactical in mission: they point towards targets on earth.
More hubble telescopes have a limited use. We can learn mysteries of the universe, sure, but they aren't great for finding readily-mineable asteroids.
Even with the James Webb telescope discovering habitable planets, we're centuries away from doing anything particularly useful at scale.
We need to focus on the the inner-solar system, the asteroid belt and a few outer moons. There are trillions of dollars in immediately-useful research to be done locally. None of which needs a deep space telescope to succeed.
The same for several other successful interplanetary probes - build a (relatively) cheap fleet of clones of successful designs, and send them out to explore the solar system fully.
Heck, you don't even have to come up with all the money yourself. Sell advertising on the mission. Having a logo on the rocket, and logos on the returned pix, etc., are all fantastic opportunities for advertising.