Using starlink as a telescope bus is a great idea. An initial test purchase is well within reach of any motivated group. I also like his point about constructing several of these things. Build several, do some research, expand the telescopes that produce extra questions or the most stunning wallpapers.
Relatively low cost effort by NASA to distribute money to different contractors and build capabilities. It would give Starship something to do between launch seasons and allow ULA and BO to continue existing. With a common bus, multiple contractors could build their own versions.
It would also help smooth things over with the anti-humans. Win/win
Even the current method provides opportunities but could the astronerds contain themselves and just build a 15m or would they look at the paragraph below and think, “Give us that custom fairing and we can origami something bigger in the same volume!”
“The Starship internal fairing diameter is 8 meters. A Hubble-style telescope with a monolithic mirror could quite easily match JWST’s 6.5 m, and without any complex deployment procedure. Alternatively, a JWST-style folding process could extend the mirror up to 15 m, though it would definitely be cheaper simply to engineer a 16 m one-off Starship fairing and, once again, launch it as a monolithic instrument.”
Put small telescope on 10,000 starlink, so can be used as optical interferometer telescope the size of Earth, also have so you just use one or a few or dozens for many users.
Gerard O’Neill would have enjoyed this article. He was advocating for telescopes like this back in the 1970’s.
That $1-billion budget for JWST was lifetime costs, not construction.
The current estimate is $25-billion, and rising.
And the generation after this one? Should be built in space, from in-space components
Using starlink as a telescope bus is a great idea. An initial test purchase is well within reach of any motivated group. I also like his point about constructing several of these things. Build several, do some research, expand the telescopes that produce extra questions or the most stunning wallpapers.
Relatively low cost effort by NASA to distribute money to different contractors and build capabilities. It would give Starship something to do between launch seasons and allow ULA and BO to continue existing. With a common bus, multiple contractors could build their own versions.
It would also help smooth things over with the anti-humans. Win/win
Even the current method provides opportunities but could the astronerds contain themselves and just build a 15m or would they look at the paragraph below and think, “Give us that custom fairing and we can origami something bigger in the same volume!”
“The Starship internal fairing diameter is 8 meters. A Hubble-style telescope with a monolithic mirror could quite easily match JWST’s 6.5 m, and without any complex deployment procedure. Alternatively, a JWST-style folding process could extend the mirror up to 15 m, though it would definitely be cheaper simply to engineer a 16 m one-off Starship fairing and, once again, launch it as a monolithic instrument.”
Casey is getting some serious traction these days! “the scope of our ambitions” ha ha.
Put small telescope on 10,000 starlink, so can be used as optical interferometer telescope the size of Earth, also have so you just use one or a few or dozens for many users.
You could also use the mirrors to reflect sunlight on to asteroids for mining/ smelting.