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Not really. They gave NASA two "telescopes" that have mirrors and a chassis and basically not much else. It will still require billions of dollars and years of
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Not really. They gave NASA two "telescopes" that have mirrors and a chassis and basically not much else. It will still require billions of dollars and years of work to turn them into space based observatories. One of them is actually being built (WFIRST) but isn't expected to be launched until the 2020s.
Also, overall there isn't a huge advantage to this hardware. It doesn't save much money as most of the cost of the telescopes is in the other components: the spacecraft parts (including the attitude control system which as we've seen with Hubble is quite important) and the instruments. The biggest advantage to the NRO gifts (the NSA doesn't have telescopes, that we know of) is not that they make building space telescopes cheaper but that they mainly just make those missions more likely to be funded.