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Building a big camera and an integral field spectrophotometer and a single-objct coronograph+spectrometer so that you have three instruments to hang off of a te

by mapt 2y ago

Building a big camera and an integral field spectrophotometer and a single-objct coronograph+spectrometer so that you have three instruments to hang off of a telescope does not reduce your costs. Building ten big identical cameras, does reduce your costs. Much of the money is spent designing things, doing engineering overhead, creating novel metrology, documenting all of this, or writing software to control and interpret data off of that novel instrument design. More is spent keeping grad students housed and working; There are at least as many cases where a 10x faster instrument DECREASES their work-hours as cases where it increases their work-hours.

jerf 2y ago
As much I enjoy the quote from Contact about "Why build one when you can build two at twice the price?", and my wife and I have used it with each other as appropriate in some amusingly bizarre situations over the years, it did always bother me a bit that it wasn't true, because building a second one would be cheaper than the first. You only have to decipher the blueprints once, and anything you have to build a thing to build the thing to build the thing, which that structure probably had quite a bit of, you generally can get a second copy of the final output much more cheaply. Not a lot of construction systems involve the total, absolute destruction of everything you used to build the first one. (Although that can certainly be part of a construction process for sufficiently interesting things.)