5 ms·

Hubble weighs 11 tons, well within the capacity to LEO of a single $70M reusable Falcon 9 launch (probably around half that cost for SpaceX). I wonder how exp

Hubble weighs 11 tons, well within the capacity to LEO of a single $70M reusable Falcon 9 launch (probably around half that cost for SpaceX). I wonder how expensive a telescope like this would be today, both the design and actual manufacturing, and whether it would be feasible for SpaceX to shut up all the "Starlink satellites are blocking my view of the sky" complaints by launching a Hubble-equivalent space telescope (not more capable, just more modern and presumably much cheaper) and then giving out observation time on it. Of course, it would not be easily maintainable given we no longer have the space shuttle, but if the majority of the cost was development, the manufacturing + launch costs today might make replacement cheaper than on-orbit repairs. https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html claims "Getting Hubble developed and launched cost $1.5 billion".

fooqux 2y ago
It's not just people trying to use telescopes to do science, it's also people like me trying to do astrophotography. Time on a LEO telescope, while cool, would not help my photography.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  As an astrophotographer myself, Starlink has caused me 0 issues. I'm not sure if that's what you're trying to imply. Airplanes are the biggest issue but are easily edited out.
- dylan604 2y ago
  Um, how in the world would a LEO telescope not be the ultimate series in your photography collection?
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    The hobby is the process, not the photograph. That said, Starlink affects the process only for about an hour after sunset and another hour before sunrise. And there are so many other things affecting that process that Starlink is neigh negligible. Well, actually, photographing Starlink itself is very satisfying and beautiful and a challenge in itself. I don't think that people actually making these complaints are in the hobby.
    - dylan604 2y ago
      So, the process of deciding what to image, pitching the idea as worthwhile, getting approved for scope time, and then getting the results to present how you want to would be underwhelming for you? As an amateur? You've got some pretty high standards if so. You and I both know that if this were to happen, it would be the first gallery of where ever you host your results. It would be framed on your wall somewhere. It would be the story you told everyone about. I love the "hobby" as well as it pretty much forces me to get out into nature well away from city lights. But I would absolutely do all of the things above and behold it as the crown jewel of hobby achievements.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        That's a completely different hobby. "Oh, you like golf? Have you considered paying a pro to give you one of their old scorecards? It'd be the best score in your collection!"
        dylan604 2y ago
        No, it's more like you got permission to play on course you don't normally play having Tiger Woods as your caddy using his clubs and then you get to make the score card say whatever you want. But only if you really want to buy into the premise your response made any sense in the conversation
        itishappy 2y ago
        Do you... not buy into that premise that my comment makes sense in context? I thought it was pretty clear. The issue I take with your new scenario is that you're not the one swinging the club. You've been working on your stance, grip, and follow-through, but none of that is relevant because the clubs Tiger uses are 400 feet long and in space.
        dylan604 2y ago
        And how is this any different from people that are more advanced in their hobby with a setup in a remote location[0] with better viewing that your home so that just type in a few commands for their gear to start working and then receive an email/notification when things are done? Again, your premise is just strange. If you are using an auto-guide setup tracking on its own, then you're really not working the hobby as if you had your eyeball on the eyepiece manually tracking a guide star on an alt/az mount instead of equatorial mount. At this point "hobby" is really undefined in context, so saying that someone with more expensive toys is any less of a hobby than someone with less expensive gear is just moving the hole while someone is on the tee box to continue with this wild comparison [0] https://nmskies.com/ https://nmskies.com/
- Manabu-eo 2y ago
  One thing that is possible to do is to take multiple photos instead of a single long exposure and then merge them filtering satellites out. The quality overal will likely be better to, as the noise level can be lowered. It's possible to do a better denoise with temporal info than simply averaging the noise like a long exposure does.
sidewndr46 2y ago
Now that we don't have the Space Shuttle maintenance would be trivial. There would be no more involvement of the manned space flight division of NASA at all. The telescope designers would just need to launch something that actually worked, since there is no longer a need to justify a manned spaceflight program.
rtkwe 2y ago
There's a lot of limitations with an on orbit satellite you don't run into with ground based systems. Hubble is pretty old and it's mirror pretty small at this point so there are hard limits on it's usefulness for viewing very faint objects, it's mirror simply doesn't gather as much light because it's relatively small at just under 8 feet. Another thing you can't do anywhere nearly as easily are upgrades or adding new experiments. With ground based telescopes it's relatively easy to add new experiments on the side mirror to measure new spectra or measure in a different way. That just can't be done with a space based telescope, even if the design allowed for it the costs sky rocket.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  It doesn't gather as much light as ground based telescopes, but the background (for example, from airglow) is also much lower, so the SNR is pretty good.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    That's one of the reasons for building in the Atacama desert. Also, the adaptive optics technology has pretty much removed the majority of the negatives from the atmosphere.
  - derlvative 2y ago
    What's SNR?
    - ludwigschubert 2y ago
      An abbreviation for “signal-to-noise ratio” that imo should have been StNR or simply S/N. (Thus I sympathize with not parsing it immediately — it is widely used, though, so it is good to know.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio_(imaging) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio_(imaging...
- minetest2048 2y ago
  With a telescope integrated into Starship, you could potentially land the whole telescope from orbit and do repairs and upgrades on the ground. Whether the main mirror can withstand launch and reentry is a question though EDIT: found a counterargument: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-starship-wont-save-astronomy-from-satellites-cluttering-the-sky/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-starsh...
bane 2y ago
I've written here before with some back of the envelope numbers for a hubble 2.0 + starship as the LV. It gets more interesting if you set up an assembly line for cameras in a tube like the hubble to spread the costs out, and use newer guts for the sensor payloads and on board compute. Make some assumptions about the telescopes, such as being okay to fail since we have so many up tWebb. You could even do experiments in computational photography like the Keck or the VLA to overcome the light collection limits of the mirror size. I forget the numbers I came up with but it's a lot of orbital sensors for the cost of one hubble program and like an entire space station with sensors for the James webb.
- nick3443 2y ago
  What computational photography are you referring to? I've read a fair bit about them but only seen adaptive mirrors and interferometry as some of the great improvements in imaging
tjoff 2y ago
Reminded me of this, not sure if anything came out of it. US military gives NASA two better-than-Hubble telescopes (2012): https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/military_gives_telescopes_to_nasa/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/military_gives_telesc...
- WithinReason 2y ago
  Some more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O... They might launch one of them in 2 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
ianburrell 2y ago
We know how much new Hubble would cost. The Roman telescope is based on donated donated spy satellite of similar size and design. It will cost estimated $3.2 billion and that doesn't include the mirror and structure. New Hubble telescope wouldn't solve the Starlink problem. There are lots of smaller ground telescopes that have view blocked. We would need to launch a bunch of smaller, like 1m ones, to compensate. Also, there are a lot of larger telescopes that are only feasible on Earth. Good example is the 8.4m Rubin survey telescope which is only going to cost $700 million but would be lots of billions in space. That might fit in Starship but the Extremely Large Telescope won't.
- rasz 2y ago
  >The Roman telescope is based on donated donated spy satellite of similar size and design. It will cost estimated $3.2 billion and that doesn't include the mirror and structure. Is that using same company that is refurbishing $40m SSME engines at $420m per engine? 10x the cost of new one 24 years ago, or 20x the cost of whole Raptor launch? Or the company building $2.7b launch tower, a Launch Tower at twice the cost of Burj Khalifa? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a...
nativeit 2y ago
I’d rather just de-orbit every StarLink satellite, stick next gen data satellites in geostationary orbits, and outlaw more any more space trash at that scale in LEO, full-stop.
- fencepost 2y ago
  Latency's not going to stop being a problem for geostationary orbits, which is why lower altitudes get used.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  It's a good thing we don't have even more ignorant tyrants in power then
  - nativeit 2y ago
    Well, the smart tyrants are certainly making productive use of StarLink, to be sure.
- outworlder 2y ago
  > I’d rather just de-orbit every StarLink satellite, stick next gen data satellites in geostationary orbits, and outlaw more any more space trash at that scale in LEO, full-stop. Flip side is that stuff in LEO deorbits pretty quicky, while geostationary junk doesn't deorbit in any timeframes humans care about.
akira2501 2y ago
> shut up all the "Starlink satellites are blocking my view of the sky" complaints These complaints make a lot more sense when you project forward by just a few decades. We're talking about _one_ provider already causing minor hassles. What do you think an entire commercialized segment is going to do? Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  > We're talking about _one_ provider already causing minor hassles We are already at two providers (SpaceX and OneWeb), soon three (Amazon's Kuiper). But I guess that's your point > Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first. Didn't we already try that for the last ~200 years? With intensified focus towards internet specifically since the dotcom bubble. All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors that are unlikely to be swayed by astronomers
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > Didn't we already try that for the last ~200 years? A significant portion of this time was spent with humans using horses to travel. > All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors What evidence is that? This is purely anecdotal. Here's a better question, why are there so few cellular providers in the USA? Does 4 seem correct to you? Does it really seem like we've exhausted all our terrestrial options?
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
A democratic space telescope could be an interesting experiment. Imagine if paying $5/month got you access to all the telescope's observations, and also the ability to vote on where it points next.

fooqux 2y ago

It's not just people trying to use telescopes to do science, it's also people like me trying to do astrophotography. Time on a LEO telescope, while cool, would not help my photography.

bongodongobob 2y ago
As an astrophotographer myself, Starlink has caused me 0 issues. I'm not sure if that's what you're trying to imply. Airplanes are the biggest issue but are easily edited out.
dylan604 2y ago
Um, how in the world would a LEO telescope not be the ultimate series in your photography collection?
- dotancohen 2y ago
  The hobby is the process, not the photograph. That said, Starlink affects the process only for about an hour after sunset and another hour before sunrise. And there are so many other things affecting that process that Starlink is neigh negligible. Well, actually, photographing Starlink itself is very satisfying and beautiful and a challenge in itself. I don't think that people actually making these complaints are in the hobby.
  - dylan604 2y ago
    So, the process of deciding what to image, pitching the idea as worthwhile, getting approved for scope time, and then getting the results to present how you want to would be underwhelming for you? As an amateur? You've got some pretty high standards if so. You and I both know that if this were to happen, it would be the first gallery of where ever you host your results. It would be framed on your wall somewhere. It would be the story you told everyone about. I love the "hobby" as well as it pretty much forces me to get out into nature well away from city lights. But I would absolutely do all of the things above and behold it as the crown jewel of hobby achievements.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      That's a completely different hobby. "Oh, you like golf? Have you considered paying a pro to give you one of their old scorecards? It'd be the best score in your collection!"
      - dylan604 2y ago
        No, it's more like you got permission to play on course you don't normally play having Tiger Woods as your caddy using his clubs and then you get to make the score card say whatever you want. But only if you really want to buy into the premise your response made any sense in the conversation
        itishappy 2y ago
        Do you... not buy into that premise that my comment makes sense in context? I thought it was pretty clear. The issue I take with your new scenario is that you're not the one swinging the club. You've been working on your stance, grip, and follow-through, but none of that is relevant because the clubs Tiger uses are 400 feet long and in space.
        dylan604 2y ago
        And how is this any different from people that are more advanced in their hobby with a setup in a remote location[0] with better viewing that your home so that just type in a few commands for their gear to start working and then receive an email/notification when things are done? Again, your premise is just strange. If you are using an auto-guide setup tracking on its own, then you're really not working the hobby as if you had your eyeball on the eyepiece manually tracking a guide star on an alt/az mount instead of equatorial mount. At this point "hobby" is really undefined in context, so saying that someone with more expensive toys is any less of a hobby than someone with less expensive gear is just moving the hole while someone is on the tee box to continue with this wild comparison [0] https://nmskies.com/ https://nmskies.com/
Manabu-eo 2y ago
One thing that is possible to do is to take multiple photos instead of a single long exposure and then merge them filtering satellites out. The quality overal will likely be better to, as the noise level can be lowered. It's possible to do a better denoise with temporal info than simply averaging the noise like a long exposure does.

sidewndr46 2y ago

Now that we don't have the Space Shuttle maintenance would be trivial. There would be no more involvement of the manned space flight division of NASA at all. The telescope designers would just need to launch something that actually worked, since there is no longer a need to justify a manned spaceflight program.

rtkwe 2y ago

There's a lot of limitations with an on orbit satellite you don't run into with ground based systems. Hubble is pretty old and it's mirror pretty small at this point so there are hard limits on it's usefulness for viewing very faint objects, it's mirror simply doesn't gather as much light because it's relatively small at just under 8 feet. Another thing you can't do anywhere nearly as easily are upgrades or adding new experiments. With ground based telescopes it's relatively easy to add new experiments on the side mirror to measure new spectra or measure in a different way. That just can't be done with a space based telescope, even if the design allowed for it the costs sky rocket.

pfdietz 2y ago
It doesn't gather as much light as ground based telescopes, but the background (for example, from airglow) is also much lower, so the SNR is pretty good.
- dylan604 2y ago
  That's one of the reasons for building in the Atacama desert. Also, the adaptive optics technology has pretty much removed the majority of the negatives from the atmosphere.
- derlvative 2y ago
  What's SNR?
  - ludwigschubert 2y ago
    An abbreviation for “signal-to-noise ratio” that imo should have been StNR or simply S/N. (Thus I sympathize with not parsing it immediately — it is widely used, though, so it is good to know.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio_(imaging) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio_(imaging...
minetest2048 2y ago
With a telescope integrated into Starship, you could potentially land the whole telescope from orbit and do repairs and upgrades on the ground. Whether the main mirror can withstand launch and reentry is a question though EDIT: found a counterargument: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-starship-wont-save-astronomy-from-satellites-cluttering-the-sky/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-starsh...

bane 2y ago

I've written here before with some back of the envelope numbers for a hubble 2.0 + starship as the LV. It gets more interesting if you set up an assembly line for cameras in a tube like the hubble to spread the costs out, and use newer guts for the sensor payloads and on board compute. Make some assumptions about the telescopes, such as being okay to fail since we have so many up tWebb. You could even do experiments in computational photography like the Keck or the VLA to overcome the light collection limits of the mirror size. I forget the numbers I came up with but it's a lot of orbital sensors for the cost of one hubble program and like an entire space station with sensors for the James webb.

nick3443 2y ago
What computational photography are you referring to? I've read a fair bit about them but only seen adaptive mirrors and interferometry as some of the great improvements in imaging

tjoff 2y ago

Reminded me of this, not sure if anything came out of it. US military gives NASA two better-than-Hubble telescopes (2012): https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/military_gives_telescopes_to_nasa/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/military_gives_telesc...

WithinReason 2y ago
Some more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_Office_space_telescope_donation_to_NASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O... They might launch one of them in 2 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...

ianburrell 2y ago

We know how much new Hubble would cost. The Roman telescope is based on donated donated spy satellite of similar size and design. It will cost estimated $3.2 billion and that doesn't include the mirror and structure. New Hubble telescope wouldn't solve the Starlink problem. There are lots of smaller ground telescopes that have view blocked. We would need to launch a bunch of smaller, like 1m ones, to compensate. Also, there are a lot of larger telescopes that are only feasible on Earth. Good example is the 8.4m Rubin survey telescope which is only going to cost $700 million but would be lots of billions in space. That might fit in Starship but the Extremely Large Telescope won't.

rasz 2y ago
>The Roman telescope is based on donated donated spy satellite of similar size and design. It will cost estimated $3.2 billion and that doesn't include the mirror and structure. Is that using same company that is refurbishing $40m SSME engines at $420m per engine? 10x the cost of new one 24 years ago, or 20x the cost of whole Raptor launch? Or the company building $2.7b launch tower, a Launch Tower at twice the cost of Burj Khalifa? https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a-national-disgrace/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a...

nativeit 2y ago

I’d rather just de-orbit every StarLink satellite, stick next gen data satellites in geostationary orbits, and outlaw more any more space trash at that scale in LEO, full-stop.

fencepost 2y ago
Latency's not going to stop being a problem for geostationary orbits, which is why lower altitudes get used.
dotnet00 2y ago
It's a good thing we don't have even more ignorant tyrants in power then
- nativeit 2y ago
  Well, the smart tyrants are certainly making productive use of StarLink, to be sure.
outworlder 2y ago
> I’d rather just de-orbit every StarLink satellite, stick next gen data satellites in geostationary orbits, and outlaw more any more space trash at that scale in LEO, full-stop. Flip side is that stuff in LEO deorbits pretty quicky, while geostationary junk doesn't deorbit in any timeframes humans care about.

akira2501 2y ago

> shut up all the "Starlink satellites are blocking my view of the sky" complaints These complaints make a lot more sense when you project forward by just a few decades. We're talking about _one_ provider already causing minor hassles. What do you think an entire commercialized segment is going to do? Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first.

wongarsu 2y ago
> We're talking about _one_ provider already causing minor hassles We are already at two providers (SpaceX and OneWeb), soon three (Amazon's Kuiper). But I guess that's your point > Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first. Didn't we already try that for the last ~200 years? With intensified focus towards internet specifically since the dotcom bubble. All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors that are unlikely to be swayed by astronomers
- akira2501 2y ago
  > Didn't we already try that for the last ~200 years? A significant portion of this time was spent with humans using horses to travel. > All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors What evidence is that? This is purely anecdotal. Here's a better question, why are there so few cellular providers in the USA? Does 4 seem correct to you? Does it really seem like we've exhausted all our terrestrial options?

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

A democratic space telescope could be an interesting experiment. Imagine if paying $5/month got you access to all the telescope's observations, and also the ability to vote on where it points next.