this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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The number of telescopes capable of doing astronomy will get smaller, the available hours on that scope will need to be shared among all academic astronomers, and therefore, the number of people able to do astronomy will get reduced.
Having a few telescopes floating in space is not a solution. Not when there is so much space unexplored. Mankind does not own the night sky, only a few billionaires do.
These growing pains suck, but the future of space exploration is in space. Any future of humanity is a future in which earths night sky is filled with stations and spaceships and satellites.
We ain't flying to anywhere the telescopes are pointing.
The future of astronomy is not in plopping people onto asteroids. That's the future of mining, and increasingly that future is looking dark and dystopic.
that's a great vision, but we don't have to trade ground-based astronomy for space-based astronomy. that would put us in a 'dark age' of astronomy for the rest of my lifetime, until all these yet-to-be-launched telescopes get built.
It's not a great vision, it's what is happening. It is the very thing that is being complained about in this article and in your comment.
There will be mitigations, and no, it won't be as good as not having the interference in the first place, but we're not putting the expansion of space infrastructure and exploration on hold until novel terrestrial observations are exhausted, because that day will never come. So when to rip the bandaid off? Let spacex build their network, let starship go online, let the new lift capabilities drive the price of launches to unseen lows, and let the actual exploration of space begin.
Instead of 1 James Webb that was super complicated to build in part due to payload size and dimension constraints, we're going to end up with thousands of them, even further into space,
That thing cost 10b to make because it had to work in part also due to launch costs and risks. Launch costs go down, risks go down, cheaper and more satellites go up.
Even better than that, starship is HUGE with its 9m diameter.
STARSHIP will be the telescope and an array or starship could be linked together. No need to design on board fuel or other navigation systems, it's already there. Without any fancy folding mirror mechanisms well be able to do 9meter mirrors. Webb is only 6.5m
A single starship is going to be in the 10s of millions to make. Dirt cheap.
Who's we? And who's doing this exploration?
The privatization of space is not some great move forward for humanity. We don't need science to bow down and open wide for rich technocrats who adhere to and aspire to the Great Man theory of history.