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If Starship happens, I’m guessing JWST-class telescopes become much more approachable.
by mwint 5y ago
If Starship happens, I’m guessing JWST-class telescopes become much more approachable.
- rich_sasha 5y agoI’d imagine launch cost is a fraction of the cost. JWST is immensely complex.
- bacheaul 5y agoI believe much of the complexity comes from having to fit it in the nose cone of the Ariane 5 rocket. With a much larger launch vehicle, you can make some different design trade offs to maybe reduce that complexity.
- stavros 5y agoI guess it's a "should we build one expensive one and make sure it works, or ten cheap ones and see how many of them make it?" thing.
- tsimionescu 5y agoI very much doubt you can build a cheap 6.5m gold plated mirror aligned to a standard that it can get clear images of the farthest corners of the universe, but that can also survive a rocket launch.
- DanHulton 5y agoLaunch cost is actually a _significant_ fraction. Even more so, because a lot of the complexity arises from design and systems to get things right on the first try, since launch costs are so prohibitive. Put another way, if launch costs were cheaper, it would also have been cheaper to design and build the telescope.
- _ph_ 5y agoJWST is expensive for two reasons. One is the giant heat shield, as it is an infrared telescope. There is no real way around that. Secondly it is the space in the rocket, the mirror (and everything else) had to be folded to fit into the rocket. Getting this folding mechanism to reliably unfold was the big challenge - if anything had gone wrong, there would have been no recovery. With its 8m diameter, Starship could house larger telescopes without folding. Considering how cheap a Starship by itself is, the Starship itself could be the permanent housing of a large telescope. It would just need to jettison the tip to expose the telescope inside.
- spookthesunset 5y agoSo the constraint was physical volume and not really weight?