> Is that true? Absolutely. > What are they missing? Everything. Whatever one can do on Earth which requires big optics and maintenance is many millions time

> Is that true? Absolutely. > What are they missing? Everything. Whatever one can do on Earth which requires big optics and maintenance is many millions times more expensive to do in the orbit. And the many million times higher expenses of all astronomical projects in the world are certainly not going to be covered by the operators of the "cheap and small" satellites. Optics, for the purposes we talk about, just doesn't work small. One needs big telescopes, big telescopes just can't be simply launched like the "cheap and small" can -- there are no scalable technologies for that. Imagine it like this: there is a technology to launch "ant" satellites. But on Earth, one has "elephant" observatories everywhere. No rocket can even launch a single one. And the maintenance of an elephant in the orbit is insanely complicated. So those who dismiss the problem with "ha ha we can send ants for them too" just show that they don't even understand what the problem is. But to uninformed people, it sounds "plausible." No, not everything we've discovered was made by Hubble, and also won't be made with JWST. And the demonstrated complexity of JWST should just give you pause, if you read about it. It's still not launched. The direct development of it started in 1996, the current plan is to launch it "just" 25 years later(!) You know all the problems to "get it right" to unfold? Exactly because the limitations of what can be launched and how. More specifically, at one moment in time it was believed that the atmosphere limits what can be done from Earth. But then these problems were solved: for almost all purposes, Earth based observatories remain millions of time cheaper and better ways to make observations (as in, when something gets expensive enough, it won't even be done at all). From 2019: "This Is Why We Can't Just Do All Of Our Astronomy From Space" by Ethan Siegel https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/27/this-is-why-we-cant-just-do-all-of-our-astronomy-from-space/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/27/this... Moreover, you can also read in other articles that even the approaches that were suggested by the astronomers to mitigate the problems were completely ignored by the satellite operators. https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/20/this-is-how-elon-musk-can-fix-the-damage-his-starlink-satellites-are-causing-to-astronomy/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/11/20/this... https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/30/dangers-to-astronomy-intensify-with-spacexs-latest-starlink-launch/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/30/dang...