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I count 13 on wikipedia's list of the largest telescopes. There are 3 more currently under construction. The evocatively named "Extremely Large Telescope" is es

I count 13 on wikipedia's list of the largest telescopes. There are 3 more currently under construction. The evocatively named "Extremely Large Telescope" is estimated to cost about $1 billion USD. Who knows how much it will actually cost, but for comparison, that's about $400 million less (adjusted for inflation) than the budgeted cost of the Webb telescope, which is about 1/6 the planned size (and therefore 1/36 the light collecting capability). edit: italicized above. The Webb ended up costing $10 billion, so the savings could be even larger

mercutio2 2y ago
But the point is that Webb was vastly over-engineered because we needed to get value out of every ounce of mass at the very high costs of legacy launch providers, and even more compromised because of Ariane 5’s tiny fairing. You could build Webb for vastly, vastly less money if it launched on Starship, not just per unit of mass; volume is at much less of a premium in the new regime. You can’t quite fit ELT pre-constructed into a single Starship, it’s true. But it’s built out of segmented mirrors. It doesn’t have to arrive on station in one piece.