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Well let's figure out a way to assemble them in space. Hubble is thirty years old, and is being used now as a reference. I don't understand all this negativity
by mstipetic 7y ago
Well let's figure out a way to assemble them in space.
Hubble is thirty years old, and is being used now as a reference. I don't understand all this negativity. Had we had this mindset, Hubble would not have been there
- wpietri 7y agoPart of the negativity is who benefits from the problem versus who has to pay to fix it. If SpaceX were causing a problem for astronomers while also for free launching radically better space-based tools, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. But instead SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money, while the harms are falling on other people.
- mrandish 7y ago> SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money True but to their credit SpaceX's launch prices are substantially lower than pre-existing options and they have been a leader in a step change in competitive launch options coming to market.
- wpietri 7y agoSo? I don't understand how that's material to my point.
- avmich 7y ago> SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money and SpaceX customers hope to pocket a lot of use for that money. So taking that point literally - tiny astronomer's society is against the whole Earth load of Spacelink customers, and of course those customers' needs on average trump astronomers' ones. I'm exaggerating, of course.
- wpietri 7y agoYou're also confusing money with value. If we only go by market price, air pollution should be fine, since lots more people buy electrical power than die from coal plant particulates. But market price only captures a relatively narrow slice of value, and it's heavily biased in favor of people with money.
- kbenson 7y agoHubble's mirror is 8 feet in diameter, and you aren't going to be assembling something as high precision as that in space, at least not from a few components. If we had the manufacturing capability to make it from scratch in space, maybe, but that's a much larger enterprise. There is a question of whether 100 a foot diameter telescopes can work as well or better than one 8 foot one. Or 500. If it's about photons hitting the lens, do enough lenses in an area and post-processing make up for the fact that they aren't connected?
- ceejayoz 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
- mstipetic 7y agoWell let's make the manufacturing capability to do so. It's as if the "manufacturing capability" is some limited rare earth metal. What is the actual limited resource other that ingenuity and engineering?
- ryan93 7y agoYou can’t manufacture complicated objects in space