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Professional astronomers would rather use a swarm of large and better working telescopes in space instead of dealing with clouds, city lights, and the Sun not a
by chr1 7y ago
Professional astronomers would rather use a swarm of large and better working telescopes in space instead of dealing with clouds, city lights, and the Sun not allowing to work at normal hours.
> Not the greedy entrepreneurs littering the sky with Internet access satellites.
The "littering" will be done not just by "greedy entrepreneurs" but by millions of people who will pay for faster internet, and by astronomers who want better telescopes.
- Tomte 7y ago> Professional astronomers would rather use a swarm of large and better working telescopes in space Sure. How many telescopes do those StarLink satellites have? None, right.
- chr1 7y agoThey do not need to be part of StarLink. The more satellites are launched the more money SpaceX gets to develop starship, starship reduces the cost of launching satellites and increases the maximum volume of the satellite, with cheaper launches and cheaper mirrors that do not need complex folding launching space telescope becomes cheaper than building a telescope on the earth, which means that new telescopes will be built for space.
- Tomte 7y agoThe same line of reasoning works for selling weapons to conflict parties.
- chr1 7y agoHow does it work? By building rockets spacex learns how to build better rockets, by selling weapons it would only learn how to build weapons. If you mean someone could start another company selling weapons and redirect all profits to SpaceX, that could work, but why would anyone do that if there is a better way of selling network connection?
- chr1 7y agoI'd be very interested to know if any of the people who strongly disagree with the above comment are professional astronomers, or physicists.
- mlyle 7y agoUh, being up above the atmosphere is great and all. But we also like having big apertures and lots of light gathering, which space telescopes don't have. We're not going to have a 39 meter scope with a high quality mirror in orbit anytime soon. Also, space telescopes are very expensive, so we have a very small number-- we're not going to ever have enough to look at as much of the sky as we'd like to look at. We've got hundreds of thousands of 0.3 meter scopes out there, employed by everything from outright amateurs to citizen-scientists to auxiliary observing and discovery for research astronomers. We can't give all these people time on orbiting telescopes.