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With SpaceX Starship the space industry is going to be very different in 20 years time. Launching new telescopes, even larger ones, will be much easer. Attempt

With SpaceX Starship the space industry is going to be very different in 20 years time. Launching new telescopes, even larger ones, will be much easer. Attempts to refuel will be completely unneeded. Edit: This seems to be a controversial opinion (based on down votes). To clarify, my expectation is that if launch costs have come down as much as people suggest, launching a new and improved (potentially significantly larger) space telescope would be a better use of funds than a complicated and risky refuelling mission. There will be many lessons learnt from JWST that by then there will be an appetite for something new. My hope also is that if the cost to launch has come down so would the development costs of any new satellites, leading to reduced costs for science missions.

ericbarrett 5y ago
That's negating the cost of the telescope itself, though. JWST may be more expensive than something you could launch with e.g. Starship, due to the need to fit into an Ariane 5 payload, but it's still an insanely high-precision instrument that would surely have cost $billions even without the unfolding procedure. If you could refuel it for, say, $250 million, because Starship, why not do that instead of launching a new telescope for $5 billion?
- sebzim4500 5y ago
  I agree with your point but I think that $5 billion is an overestimate for a telescope as capable as JWST which is much less mass/volume constrained. ELT, a ground based telescope vastly more capable than JWST, is expected to cost €1.3 billion.
  - ericbarrett 5y ago
    I don't think ground-based telescopes are really comparable to space-based. Just one of the issues with JWST is the exotic construction required for heat management, which would be an issue for any space telescope even if it was teleported into orbit. This is comparably not an issue with ground-based stuff where you have infinite power, coolant, and heat sinks; e.g. for the ELT: "ESO is aiming to implement proven technologies and commercial off-the-shelf components to build the cryogenic infrastructure for the ELT instruments. A combination of open loop Liquid Nitrogen cooling and low-vibration mechanical cryo-coolers will be installed to provide the required temperature levels and cooling capacities."[0] I grew up at Lick Observatory in the Bay Area, and really love ground-based stuff, but I'm somewhat familiar with their operations and I guarantee it's got nothing on space 'scopes. [0] https://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/SPIE2018/10706-47.pdf https://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/SPIE2018/10706-47.pdf
    - Robotbeat 5y ago
      You yourself are making a good argument for why massive reduction in launch costs (like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude compared to Ariane) changes things dramatically. Heat management becomes easier when you can afford liquid cryogens like Spitzer or a larger and cheaper (more ground-like) cryocooler. You literally could have 1000 tons of liquid nitrogen delivered to your telescope if you needed to, if it saved $1 billion. I think people still aren’t understanding the ambitions of Starship. We’re not talking about a 30% improvement in cost. But a 300000% improvement in part because you could even afford human technicians…
      - ericbarrett 5y ago
        I'm well aware of the capabilities SpaceX is promising! This is why I said, "even if the telescope was teleported into orbit." If a new ground-based telescope is still $1 bil then something which has to operate in hard vacuum, high radiation, and with even greater temperature differences, with far less provision for repair (even with Starship), will be hard-pressed to come in at an even smaller budget. Then again, $1 bil ain't what it used to be.
        Robotbeat 5y ago
        On the other hand, you don’t need a massive, expensive structure to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity, everything is already vacuum insulated for you, humidity isn’t a problem, you get 24/7 energy from the Sun using just solar panels (no diesel generators), you don’t have concerns for building on sacred land, you have like 3-4 times the observing time per day (which directly impacts cost per observing hour), independent of weather, access to both hemispheres, and no (or much less) need for expensive adaptive optics and laser systems to partially correct for the atmosphere.
        ericbarrett 5y ago
        All true! And mostly better for the ultimate purpose of a telescope, which is why we prefer to put them in space. However none of those advantages offset the greater cost, e.g. your "expensive structure to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity" is simply a steel scaffolding. Admittedly to higher precision than an office building, but not extraordinarily so. I think perhaps you are not respecting the challenges of space and the cost to operate reliably in it, even if launch costs were zero and mass unlimited, so I'd encourage you do do a little more research.
  - kabdib 5y ago
    > vastly more capable than JWST ... not at the same wavelengths. The earth's atmosphere is largely opaque to IR, for instance.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      And even if not opaque, the thermal signature of the atmosphere itself would degrade signal from distant objects. There are some things you can only do beyond the atmosphere.
      - dlp211 5y ago
        Dust also greatly degrades earth based telescopes abilities.
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Skyglow, atmospheric distortion, atmospheric absorption of specific frequencies, wind, the Earth's inclination, orbit, and rotation (limits time-on-target for any specific target of interest), local conditions (static electricity being a major issue for the ESO in Chile, given elevation and lack of humidity, all electronics must be static-tolerant or resistant), etc., etc. Not that space isn't also hard, but each environment has both affordances and limitations.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - soperj 5y ago
    really though, if Starship is that capable, and JWST is still usable, I think you do both. If only to test really crazy things that you haven't been able to look at before because the time was too valuable.
- kemiller 5y ago
  Lower launch costs could enable cheaper R&D for the satellite itself by enabling more testing of components in orbit rather than trying to nail the calculations ahead of time.
jofer 5y ago
Refuelling satellites is currently a hot topic in the aerospace world. No matter how cheap launch gets (and there are some very real limits to how cheap it can get for orbits like what the JWT is in), the hardware itself is quite expensive and it's often worth maintaining older scientific missions for continuity. Propellant is often a key limitation to life of a satellite, especially for earth-observations sats in low earth orbit (the opposite of the JWT), and it's well worth refuelling a satellite in principle. The JWT is a _lot_ of expensive hardware. It's not crazy at all to think about refuelling, especially if it's expending significant propellant to say in a stable orbit +/- maneuver for imaging operations. All that having been said, refuelling is still a long way from reality, and despite a lot of companies marketing refuelling ports and similar things, it will be a long while time until it's a realistic solution. Over the lifetime of the JWT, it probably will become feasible, though.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago
  Refuelling seems to be more like to be done by bolting another engine + propellant, than actually refuelling the in-service engine, based on current concepts.
  - jofer 5y ago
    Some commercial companies (e.g. Orbit Fab) are selling refuelling ports for satellites, FWIW. NASA put a lot of research into it as well, IIRC. For the JWT it's probably quite different, but for commercial earth observation sats, there are lots of folks considering including some of the refuelling port designs in current hardware even though the actually "refuel in space" service isn't available yet.
gameswithgo 5y ago
I too am a big fan of SpaceX but I think it is fair to say things like "If SpaceX Starship" rather than assume it is going to work and work affordably.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  Agreed. Also a fan of SpaceX, but I think NASA's approach is 100% reasonable: quietly prepare plans to take advantage of starship (see: LUVOIR) but wait until Starship is proven to do the high level push to switch.
dredmorbius 5y ago
I suspect you're being excessively dinged for the absolute statement that refueling will be completely unneeded. It's fair to say that over two decades, additional capabilities will exist. Given the advances in launch systems, both in situ assembly (large structures w/o complex packaging and deployments), and planned servicing and replaceability could mean that both arguments are true: - We'll have bigger, more capable, and/or simply more observatories. - Those themselves will be capable of being serviced and upgraded over their own lifetimes. Keep in mind that one element of science that's advanced by such projects is engineering systems for space environments themselves. Vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, station-keeping, gravitational flux and variance, materials handling (cold-welding, lubrcation, moving parts, etc.), thermal management, and design-for-servicing itself, all factor in to considerations. It seems highly probable to me that any such servicing itself will all but certainly be robotic. At L2, speed-of-light issues are a factor as there is a one-way signal time of five seconds, long enough that direct control of physical manipulators is no longer feasible, or very slow. (Imagine that you reach for a wrench, and ten seconds later, see that your hand has actually extended and contacted it.) And putting humans in such a location, only reachable over many days or weeks, well out of Earth's magnetosphere radiation projection, would be fantastically expensive.
- shagie 5y ago
  > - We'll have bigger, more capable, and/or simply more observatories. The LUVOIR is the next generation - https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/ https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infrared_Surveyor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr... The design for it is really impressive. > LUVOIR Architecture A (LUVOIR-A) features a 15-m diameter primary telescope aperture and four serviceable instruments JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    In 20 years we might be able to spamcraft a bunch of ~3m space telescopes and be able to measure their positions with sufficient precision to enable long baseline interferometry in the IR and optical spectrum. We might never build this large of a single instrument again.
hourislate 5y ago
How dare you share your opinion and positive outlook about SpaceX. I wouldn't worry about the junks, they're fake internet points that mean nothing.
cletus 5y ago
I suspect the only "controversy" in your comment is that you said something positive about SpaceX. I believe the GP is correct: wear and tear on existing components means that fuel won't be the only issue in 20 years. Hubble has been serviced 5 times [1] for example. Part of the complexity (and thus cost) for JWST was all the issues introduced by trying to fit a 6.5m mirror on existing rockets. All those moving parts and points of failure have design costs. What you may find in 20 years is that we'll want to launch an even larger mirror and/or use interferometry between multiple telescopes to improve effective resolution. [1]: https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html#:~:text=Hubble%20has%20been%20serviced%20five,an%20internal%20optical%20correction%20system https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html#:~:t....)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- engineer_22 5y ago
  It's weird, Musk was the golden child on HN about 2 years ago when he was electrifying cars, now a pariah because of his wealth.
  - autokad 5y ago
    its very hard to build something. its really easy to tear something/someone down
  - cletus 5y ago
    There's two things that go into that IMHO: 1. People like to hate on things and people just because they're popular when there's literally no other reason; and 2. A large number of people will let their personal opinion drive their behaviour. Elon is a dick, no question. Because of that some people will just downvote or speak ill of SpaceX or Tesla. Worse, this dislike can be used to rationalize pretty antisocial behaviour (eg doxxing, swatting). What SpaceX has done is nothing short of astounding whether you like him or not. I'm not sure of the exact number but I believe SpaceX has raised <$20B and brought launch costs from >$50k/kg (Space Shuttle) to $1-2k/kg to LEO. It seems highly likely that Starship will drive that below $1k/kg, possibly by a lot. By comparison, a single SLS/Artemis launch is likely to cost more than that. And if you think it's just a question of throwing money at the problem, just look at the abject failure that is Blue Origin (fun fact: Blue Origin was founded 3-4 years before SpaceX).
autokad 5y ago
yeah, the capabilities of JWST was limited by its size which was limited by payload capacity. Also its cost was driven up by lots of things to deal with the size problems, like all of its folding stuff. We could put up something cheaper and better today if we just had the payload capacity.
Robotbeat 5y ago
Additionally, you might prefer to leverage the low launch cost to use a different approach than JWST uses. Basically, Big Spitzer. Instead of a huge sunshade, use a telescope tube and a huge amount of liquid helium (even the relatively small amount in Spitzer lasted many years, and this is one instance where mass directly translates into time). Instead of big unfolding mirror, use a monolithic one. This would actually be technically superior to Webb (colder mirror and instruments than you can get with the typical Webb cryocooler, less starlight impacting the instruments as your telescope tube with baffles shields it better, less diffraction off the mirror segment interfaces) and ought to be potentially much simpler and cheaper. And you could afford to build more than one, allowing you to reduce risk aversion slightly and increase telescope time.
spookthesunset 5y ago
I’m not sure if the launch cost was a driving factor in JWST’s price tag. Granted a lot of the engineering was constrained around how to deal with the massive forces involved in launch but I suspect those forces will still be in play with starship. Yeah you might be able to get bigger and heavier but it still needs to contend with launch forces. Now assembling it in space might change things… but I’m sure that has its own challenges. And even then you’d probably want a space elevator instead of rockets to get your people and equipment int local orbit.
- samwillis 5y ago
  I think the idea is that if the launch cost is so much lower you can take more risk with the design as you can more easily justify launching again or take a more iterative design approach. The Arian 5 costs around $185M to launch, they therefore need to make sure it works first time. Starship is estimated to be $2-10M.
  - dlp211 5y ago
    The JWST cost nearly $10 Billion and 24 years to build on earth. This is not a launch cost problem.
    - space_ghost 5y ago
      How much of that time and money was R&D and prototyping, and how much of that was the bespoke production of this single unit?
      - dr_orpheus 5y ago
        There is some previous discussion on what it would cost to manufacture a copy of JWST in this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725799 Speculation is somewhere in the 70%-90% of original cost.
        5y ago
baq 5y ago
cost to refuel JWST: $500M cost of a new JWST without a foldable mirror and a static sunshield: $2B why not do both?
YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
Please at least let it reach orbital flight before we start dreaming.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
Cost is important, certainly, but the available space inside of the payload fairing is going to be a huge boon for future telescopes. From what I recall, a tremendous amount of effort went into folding up the JWST just so it would fit in the small space provided by the biggest rocket they could get in 1997.

ericbarrett 5y ago

That's negating the cost of the telescope itself, though. JWST may be more expensive than something you could launch with e.g. Starship, due to the need to fit into an Ariane 5 payload, but it's still an insanely high-precision instrument that would surely have cost $billions even without the unfolding procedure. If you could refuel it for, say, $250 million, because Starship, why not do that instead of launching a new telescope for $5 billion?

sebzim4500 5y ago
I agree with your point but I think that $5 billion is an overestimate for a telescope as capable as JWST which is much less mass/volume constrained. ELT, a ground based telescope vastly more capable than JWST, is expected to cost €1.3 billion.
- ericbarrett 5y ago
  I don't think ground-based telescopes are really comparable to space-based. Just one of the issues with JWST is the exotic construction required for heat management, which would be an issue for any space telescope even if it was teleported into orbit. This is comparably not an issue with ground-based stuff where you have infinite power, coolant, and heat sinks; e.g. for the ELT: "ESO is aiming to implement proven technologies and commercial off-the-shelf components to build the cryogenic infrastructure for the ELT instruments. A combination of open loop Liquid Nitrogen cooling and low-vibration mechanical cryo-coolers will be installed to provide the required temperature levels and cooling capacities."[0] I grew up at Lick Observatory in the Bay Area, and really love ground-based stuff, but I'm somewhat familiar with their operations and I guarantee it's got nothing on space 'scopes. [0] https://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/SPIE2018/10706-47.pdf https://www.eso.org/sci/libraries/SPIE2018/10706-47.pdf
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    You yourself are making a good argument for why massive reduction in launch costs (like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude compared to Ariane) changes things dramatically. Heat management becomes easier when you can afford liquid cryogens like Spitzer or a larger and cheaper (more ground-like) cryocooler. You literally could have 1000 tons of liquid nitrogen delivered to your telescope if you needed to, if it saved $1 billion. I think people still aren’t understanding the ambitions of Starship. We’re not talking about a 30% improvement in cost. But a 300000% improvement in part because you could even afford human technicians…
    - ericbarrett 5y ago
      I'm well aware of the capabilities SpaceX is promising! This is why I said, "even if the telescope was teleported into orbit." If a new ground-based telescope is still $1 bil then something which has to operate in hard vacuum, high radiation, and with even greater temperature differences, with far less provision for repair (even with Starship), will be hard-pressed to come in at an even smaller budget. Then again, $1 bil ain't what it used to be.
      - Robotbeat 5y ago
        On the other hand, you don’t need a massive, expensive structure to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity, everything is already vacuum insulated for you, humidity isn’t a problem, you get 24/7 energy from the Sun using just solar panels (no diesel generators), you don’t have concerns for building on sacred land, you have like 3-4 times the observing time per day (which directly impacts cost per observing hour), independent of weather, access to both hemispheres, and no (or much less) need for expensive adaptive optics and laser systems to partially correct for the atmosphere.
        ericbarrett 5y ago
        All true! And mostly better for the ultimate purpose of a telescope, which is why we prefer to put them in space. However none of those advantages offset the greater cost, e.g. your "expensive structure to keep the mirror from deforming under gravity" is simply a steel scaffolding. Admittedly to higher precision than an office building, but not extraordinarily so. I think perhaps you are not respecting the challenges of space and the cost to operate reliably in it, even if launch costs were zero and mass unlimited, so I'd encourage you do do a little more research.
- kabdib 5y ago
  > vastly more capable than JWST ... not at the same wavelengths. The earth's atmosphere is largely opaque to IR, for instance.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    And even if not opaque, the thermal signature of the atmosphere itself would degrade signal from distant objects. There are some things you can only do beyond the atmosphere.
    - dlp211 5y ago
      Dust also greatly degrades earth based telescopes abilities.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Skyglow, atmospheric distortion, atmospheric absorption of specific frequencies, wind, the Earth's inclination, orbit, and rotation (limits time-on-target for any specific target of interest), local conditions (static electricity being a major issue for the ESO in Chile, given elevation and lack of humidity, all electronics must be static-tolerant or resistant), etc., etc. Not that space isn't also hard, but each environment has both affordances and limitations.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- soperj 5y ago
  really though, if Starship is that capable, and JWST is still usable, I think you do both. If only to test really crazy things that you haven't been able to look at before because the time was too valuable.
kemiller 5y ago
Lower launch costs could enable cheaper R&D for the satellite itself by enabling more testing of components in orbit rather than trying to nail the calculations ahead of time.

jofer 5y ago

Refuelling satellites is currently a hot topic in the aerospace world. No matter how cheap launch gets (and there are some very real limits to how cheap it can get for orbits like what the JWT is in), the hardware itself is quite expensive and it's often worth maintaining older scientific missions for continuity. Propellant is often a key limitation to life of a satellite, especially for earth-observations sats in low earth orbit (the opposite of the JWT), and it's well worth refuelling a satellite in principle. The JWT is a _lot_ of expensive hardware. It's not crazy at all to think about refuelling, especially if it's expending significant propellant to say in a stable orbit +/- maneuver for imaging operations. All that having been said, refuelling is still a long way from reality, and despite a lot of companies marketing refuelling ports and similar things, it will be a long while time until it's a realistic solution. Over the lifetime of the JWT, it probably will become feasible, though.

richardwhiuk 5y ago
Refuelling seems to be more like to be done by bolting another engine + propellant, than actually refuelling the in-service engine, based on current concepts.
- jofer 5y ago
  Some commercial companies (e.g. Orbit Fab) are selling refuelling ports for satellites, FWIW. NASA put a lot of research into it as well, IIRC. For the JWT it's probably quite different, but for commercial earth observation sats, there are lots of folks considering including some of the refuelling port designs in current hardware even though the actually "refuel in space" service isn't available yet.

gameswithgo 5y ago

I too am a big fan of SpaceX but I think it is fair to say things like "If SpaceX Starship" rather than assume it is going to work and work affordably.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Agreed. Also a fan of SpaceX, but I think NASA's approach is 100% reasonable: quietly prepare plans to take advantage of starship (see: LUVOIR) but wait until Starship is proven to do the high level push to switch.

dredmorbius 5y ago

I suspect you're being excessively dinged for the absolute statement that refueling will be completely unneeded. It's fair to say that over two decades, additional capabilities will exist. Given the advances in launch systems, both in situ assembly (large structures w/o complex packaging and deployments), and planned servicing and replaceability could mean that both arguments are true: - We'll have bigger, more capable, and/or simply more observatories. - Those themselves will be capable of being serviced and upgraded over their own lifetimes. Keep in mind that one element of science that's advanced by such projects is engineering systems for space environments themselves. Vacuum, radiation, micrometeorites, station-keeping, gravitational flux and variance, materials handling (cold-welding, lubrcation, moving parts, etc.), thermal management, and design-for-servicing itself, all factor in to considerations. It seems highly probable to me that any such servicing itself will all but certainly be robotic. At L2, speed-of-light issues are a factor as there is a one-way signal time of five seconds, long enough that direct control of physical manipulators is no longer feasible, or very slow. (Imagine that you reach for a wrench, and ten seconds later, see that your hand has actually extended and contacted it.) And putting humans in such a location, only reachable over many days or weeks, well out of Earth's magnetosphere radiation projection, would be fantastically expensive.

shagie 5y ago
> - We'll have bigger, more capable, and/or simply more observatories. The LUVOIR is the next generation - https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/ https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infrared_Surveyor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Ultraviolet_Optical_Infr... The design for it is really impressive. > LUVOIR Architecture A (LUVOIR-A) features a 15-m diameter primary telescope aperture and four serviceable instruments JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  In 20 years we might be able to spamcraft a bunch of ~3m space telescopes and be able to measure their positions with sufficient precision to enable long baseline interferometry in the IR and optical spectrum. We might never build this large of a single instrument again.

hourislate 5y ago

How dare you share your opinion and positive outlook about SpaceX. I wouldn't worry about the junks, they're fake internet points that mean nothing.

cletus 5y ago

I suspect the only "controversy" in your comment is that you said something positive about SpaceX. I believe the GP is correct: wear and tear on existing components means that fuel won't be the only issue in 20 years. Hubble has been serviced 5 times [1] for example. Part of the complexity (and thus cost) for JWST was all the issues introduced by trying to fit a 6.5m mirror on existing rockets. All those moving parts and points of failure have design costs. What you may find in 20 years is that we'll want to launch an even larger mirror and/or use interferometry between multiple telescopes to improve effective resolution. [1]: https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html#:~:text=Hubble%20has%20been%20serviced%20five,an%20internal%20optical%20correction%20system https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html#:~:t....)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
engineer_22 5y ago
It's weird, Musk was the golden child on HN about 2 years ago when he was electrifying cars, now a pariah because of his wealth.
- autokad 5y ago
  its very hard to build something. its really easy to tear something/someone down
- cletus 5y ago
  There's two things that go into that IMHO: 1. People like to hate on things and people just because they're popular when there's literally no other reason; and 2. A large number of people will let their personal opinion drive their behaviour. Elon is a dick, no question. Because of that some people will just downvote or speak ill of SpaceX or Tesla. Worse, this dislike can be used to rationalize pretty antisocial behaviour (eg doxxing, swatting). What SpaceX has done is nothing short of astounding whether you like him or not. I'm not sure of the exact number but I believe SpaceX has raised <$20B and brought launch costs from >$50k/kg (Space Shuttle) to $1-2k/kg to LEO. It seems highly likely that Starship will drive that below $1k/kg, possibly by a lot. By comparison, a single SLS/Artemis launch is likely to cost more than that. And if you think it's just a question of throwing money at the problem, just look at the abject failure that is Blue Origin (fun fact: Blue Origin was founded 3-4 years before SpaceX).

autokad 5y ago

yeah, the capabilities of JWST was limited by its size which was limited by payload capacity. Also its cost was driven up by lots of things to deal with the size problems, like all of its folding stuff. We could put up something cheaper and better today if we just had the payload capacity.

Robotbeat 5y ago

Additionally, you might prefer to leverage the low launch cost to use a different approach than JWST uses. Basically, Big Spitzer. Instead of a huge sunshade, use a telescope tube and a huge amount of liquid helium (even the relatively small amount in Spitzer lasted many years, and this is one instance where mass directly translates into time). Instead of big unfolding mirror, use a monolithic one. This would actually be technically superior to Webb (colder mirror and instruments than you can get with the typical Webb cryocooler, less starlight impacting the instruments as your telescope tube with baffles shields it better, less diffraction off the mirror segment interfaces) and ought to be potentially much simpler and cheaper. And you could afford to build more than one, allowing you to reduce risk aversion slightly and increase telescope time.

spookthesunset 5y ago

I’m not sure if the launch cost was a driving factor in JWST’s price tag. Granted a lot of the engineering was constrained around how to deal with the massive forces involved in launch but I suspect those forces will still be in play with starship. Yeah you might be able to get bigger and heavier but it still needs to contend with launch forces. Now assembling it in space might change things… but I’m sure that has its own challenges. And even then you’d probably want a space elevator instead of rockets to get your people and equipment int local orbit.

samwillis 5y ago
I think the idea is that if the launch cost is so much lower you can take more risk with the design as you can more easily justify launching again or take a more iterative design approach. The Arian 5 costs around $185M to launch, they therefore need to make sure it works first time. Starship is estimated to be $2-10M.
- dlp211 5y ago
  The JWST cost nearly $10 Billion and 24 years to build on earth. This is not a launch cost problem.
  - space_ghost 5y ago
    How much of that time and money was R&D and prototyping, and how much of that was the bespoke production of this single unit?
    - dr_orpheus 5y ago
      There is some previous discussion on what it would cost to manufacture a copy of JWST in this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29725799 Speculation is somewhere in the 70%-90% of original cost.
      - 5y ago

baq 5y ago

cost to refuel JWST: $500M cost of a new JWST without a foldable mirror and a static sunshield: $2B why not do both?

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago

Please at least let it reach orbital flight before we start dreaming.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

Cost is important, certainly, but the available space inside of the payload fairing is going to be a huge boon for future telescopes. From what I recall, a tremendous amount of effort went into folding up the JWST just so it would fit in the small space provided by the biggest rocket they could get in 1997.