Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Telescope' on the moon

Re:Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Teles... by peterpost2 on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @10:10AM (#25124574)

The cost of rocket launches is not the largest part of creating a lunar base, designing and manufactoring all the landers, base, electronics, software etc. is the larger part of it.

If I recall correctly, for the apollo program about 30% was for the launch vehicle.

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Re:Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Teles... by ethbr0 on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @10:17AM (#25124677)

It seems like this would be somewhat of an interrelated valuation.

If launch costs decrease by an order of magnitude, reliability of payload can be relaxed, and therefore costs of payload engineering and manufacture decrease.

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Re:Texas astronomers revive idea for 'Ultimately Large Teles... by m4rtink on Tuesday November 17, 2020 @12:42PM (#25126789)

If mass reduction is no longer super critical, you can use heavier but cheaper materials that provide the needed strength.

There could be other knock off effect of cheaper and more frequent space launch - you can send multiple versions and see which works the best, ship prototypes back for extensive evaluation, send robots or people to fix broken things.

A lot of things are done differently if you have just a couple super expensive shots per decade & everything needs to work without external help at the first time.

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