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
Amen to that. The same could be said for all spacecraft.
OMAC!
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.
I was going to suggest the same thing. You’d get a synthetic aperture 13000 km across. Bigger when we start moving out to the asteroids. Doesn’t need to be launched all at once, can be incrementally improved, individual parts can fail without affecting the overall image.
You could also use the mirrors to reflect sunlight on to asteroids for mining/ smelting.
“Starship is designed to launch at least 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit at exceptionally low cost, with a launch cadence high enough to ultimately deliver over one million metric tons per year, roughly two thousand times the current global launch volume. This represents a transformation in human logistical capacity in space.
One of the reasons JWST was so expensive was that in addition to being exquisitely precise, robotically operated in a pitiless vacuum, and parts of it at cryogenically cold temperatures, it also had to be feather-light and capable of folding up like origami to fit within the Ariane V payload fairing i.e. nose cone. Starship has mass, volume, and launch capacity to spare, relaxing these engineering constraints and significantly simplifying design.”
Another problem with the JWST is that it is in a high earth orbit beyond the reach of current manned space capability. So it had to be made robust enough to (hopefully) require no repair/adjustments/service calls. Given the capacity of the SpaceX superheavy/starship combo that would no longer be an issue. Regular manned visits to JWST itself and its larger future successor telescopes would likely quickly become feasible for said maintenance/repair/hardware/software/upgrades. Got to be allot easier to get a million miles or so from Earth for a repair mission measured in days to weeks versus the many months for the Starship’s alleged true port of call Mars.
As far as manned servicing missions go, there are issues with the relative fragility of JWST. pertaining largely to thruster exhaust. That said, if you could approach it, a combo of Dragon-XL and a lunar Dragon based on Dragon USDV could do the job. XL would have an airlock and an RMS and could remain on site for later use with JWST and anything else nearby. Starship might be overkill, unless you planned to somehow return JWST to Earth.
Should consider not only self-contruction but self-replacement: If a segment of the Monster Mirror fails it should be able to back out of the mirror and be replaced.
So, the Starkicker variant should be able to put 330 metric tons in LEO. How big a hammerhead fairing could you get away with if weight was no object?
“The full 1 km telescope will require about 20,000 mirrors. ”
Interesting of course but what about the ramifications of combinng this with optical and/or infrared interferometry? Imagine several of the discussed 1 km diameter telescopes spaced (or dozens /100’s of smaller scopes) spaced kilometers apart combining their image into the equivalent of a really supertelescope maybe 10 clicks or larger of effect of resolving power?.
Space-based optical phased arrays would be a wonderful thing, but coherence must be maintained across the entire constellation, which is very challenging at optical frequencies (although less so in space than on the ground), and truly huge data rates are required to assemble the image from the synthetic aperture. But not impossible.
I think Starlink desires huge data rates.
It’s pretty easy to imagine all these Rube Goldberg telescopes, but the necessary thrusters and guidance packages are another matter entirely. Easier to think of a telescope made of seven 8-meter mirrors, self-deploying with Canadarm technology. You’re still talking about a 24-meter mirror.
What is fascinating to me is that the oldest observational science, Astronomy, still discovers new and exciting phenomena with every new generation of telescope.
I think there is still a bias against large, Dandridge Cole type thinking.
For years, America’s most inexpensive LV was Delta II.
That thing was a real crutch.
Where R-7 opened up space, the tiny payload of Delta II threatened to choke it.
Lefties hate Musk and Starship
Libertarians hate MSFC and SLS.
—but it’s tiny little Delta II that I reserve my ire towards. JPL chain-smoked those bloody things than Dan Goldin handed out like lollipops so’s their little bomb-disposal robots could have a ride.
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
Amen to that. The same could be said for all spacecraft.
OMAC!
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.
I was going to suggest the same thing. You’d get a synthetic aperture 13000 km across. Bigger when we start moving out to the asteroids. Doesn’t need to be launched all at once, can be incrementally improved, individual parts can fail without affecting the overall image.
You could also use the mirrors to reflect sunlight on to asteroids for mining/ smelting.
“Starship is designed to launch at least 150 metric tons to low Earth orbit at exceptionally low cost, with a launch cadence high enough to ultimately deliver over one million metric tons per year, roughly two thousand times the current global launch volume. This represents a transformation in human logistical capacity in space.
One of the reasons JWST was so expensive was that in addition to being exquisitely precise, robotically operated in a pitiless vacuum, and parts of it at cryogenically cold temperatures, it also had to be feather-light and capable of folding up like origami to fit within the Ariane V payload fairing i.e. nose cone. Starship has mass, volume, and launch capacity to spare, relaxing these engineering constraints and significantly simplifying design.”
Another problem with the JWST is that it is in a high earth orbit beyond the reach of current manned space capability. So it had to be made robust enough to (hopefully) require no repair/adjustments/service calls. Given the capacity of the SpaceX superheavy/starship combo that would no longer be an issue. Regular manned visits to JWST itself and its larger future successor telescopes would likely quickly become feasible for said maintenance/repair/hardware/software/upgrades. Got to be allot easier to get a million miles or so from Earth for a repair mission measured in days to weeks versus the many months for the Starship’s alleged true port of call Mars.
As far as manned servicing missions go, there are issues with the relative fragility of JWST. pertaining largely to thruster exhaust. That said, if you could approach it, a combo of Dragon-XL and a lunar Dragon based on Dragon USDV could do the job. XL would have an airlock and an RMS and could remain on site for later use with JWST and anything else nearby. Starship might be overkill, unless you planned to somehow return JWST to Earth.
Should consider not only self-contruction but self-replacement: If a segment of the Monster Mirror fails it should be able to back out of the mirror and be replaced.
So, the Starkicker variant should be able to put 330 metric tons in LEO. How big a hammerhead fairing could you get away with if weight was no object?
“The full 1 km telescope will require about 20,000 mirrors. ”
Interesting of course but what about the ramifications of combinng this with optical and/or infrared interferometry? Imagine several of the discussed 1 km diameter telescopes spaced (or dozens /100’s of smaller scopes) spaced kilometers apart combining their image into the equivalent of a really supertelescope maybe 10 clicks or larger of effect of resolving power?.
Space-based optical phased arrays would be a wonderful thing, but coherence must be maintained across the entire constellation, which is very challenging at optical frequencies (although less so in space than on the ground), and truly huge data rates are required to assemble the image from the synthetic aperture. But not impossible.
I think Starlink desires huge data rates.
It’s pretty easy to imagine all these Rube Goldberg telescopes, but the necessary thrusters and guidance packages are another matter entirely. Easier to think of a telescope made of seven 8-meter mirrors, self-deploying with Canadarm technology. You’re still talking about a 24-meter mirror.
What is fascinating to me is that the oldest observational science, Astronomy, still discovers new and exciting phenomena with every new generation of telescope.
I think there is still a bias against large, Dandridge Cole type thinking.
For years, America’s most inexpensive LV was Delta II.
That thing was a real crutch.
Where R-7 opened up space, the tiny payload of Delta II threatened to choke it.
Lefties hate Musk and Starship
Libertarians hate MSFC and SLS.
—but it’s tiny little Delta II that I reserve my ire towards. JPL chain-smoked those bloody things than Dan Goldin handed out like lollipops so’s their little bomb-disposal robots could have a ride.
Ugh…