Absolutely launch capacity is holding back more space-based telescopes. More telescopes means more availability to researchers.

Sure, in the same way that Ferrari doubling its production means more people can get their kids to school conveniently.

Isn't Starship the cheap option for orbital launch?

But the whole point is if you ruin thousands of terrestrial telescopes used (successfully) by thousands of researchers, and in exchange you get a promise of one day maybe having tons of orbital telescopes, you aren’t really addressing the concern.

Come on, you are arguing in such bad faith its ridiculous. Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes.

Even the researches, unless very selfish, should know that ideally you want many more very powerful space based telescopes if you actually want to do research and not just marvel at the stars from your patio.

We obviously want larger launch capacity in the long run. It's not even a question. Falcon 9 is already the most successful rocket ever on almost all stats of usefulness, why shouldn't we have at least SOME faith that spacex will be able to build starship and use it?

> Everyone knows space based telescopes are orders of magnitude better, and will be better for research than thousands of earth based telescopes

Real terrestrial telescopes are better than hypothetical space-based ones.

And I didn’t say we don’t want more capacity nor that Falcon 9 isn’t the most successful rocket ever, nor that I don’t have faith in SpaceX’s ability to create Starship, nor that Starship won’t eventually add space-based telescopes.

I said that none of that actually addresses the current concerns of people who currently need to do their work, as GP implied their complaints are totally irrelevant because “someday we’ll launch more.”

It's a steam-liner in an age of sailing galleons, hopefully it will make an orbital ring (analogous to budget airlines) affordable.

I don't think I understand the analogy.

Adding capacity at the tippy top of the market, while destroying capacity at the much larger middle/bottom of the market, is very unlikely to be net positive.

Gotcha, a couple points:

- Starlink interferes with terrestrial telescopy much less than the baseline issues such as weather, atmosphere, etc.

- SpaceX has already done great work in ameliorating these issues anyway with better non-reflective coatings and design.

- Telescopes in space are orders of magnitude more useful than terrestrial ones, so it would not be a surprising net positive at all.

- Even if the previous point weren't true, telescopes are not really equivalent to taking kids to school. One is a necessity, the other is a nice to have. The truth is that most of the low-hanging astronomical fruit that can be gleaned from the "middle/bottom of the market" has already been picked anyway. Almost all new/significant astronomical discoveries/research are happening with space-based telescopes for exactly this reason. People aren't unraveling the secrets of the universe with a telescope in their backyard anymore.

- This entire situation has really nothing to do with Starship being a good thing. You can argue that Starlink is a net negative (for all the above reasons this seems hard to justify in practice), but that argument is orthogonal to whether or not Starship is good. This isn't really your fault because the parent comment is the one that initially conflated the two, but I felt this point should be made.

These seem like good points! I personally don’t have a super strong idea of how destructive Starlink is, so totally open to the idea that “the astronomers don’t know what they’re talking about.” Just that’s a very different argument than “astronomers should shut up because some day we hope to put up telescopes they’ll probably never be able to use,” which is basically GP’s argument.

In any case the degree of interference thing isn’t too comforting since I would assume these issues are additive to one another.

Thank you for the good counterpoints! Would love to hear an astronomer’s take on whether the terrestrial-hanging-fruit has been picked, so to speak. It would not surprise me for sure.

In this case, Starship is really more akin to a bus than a sports car

Compare the cost of the payload and the launch vehicle. Those aren't even comparable.

Worst case estimate for a single Ariane 5: 200 million €.

Average launch cost for Space X: 50 million € (poorly researched I know)

The cost of the James Webb space telescope?

50 worst case Ariane 5 launches or 200 Space X launches.

I don't think the launch vehicle matters here.

Great way to approach the problem. As someone else mentioned, cheaper launches might adjust the overall risk/cost dynamics but yeah, this data point makes that seem like a stretch.

A big part of the high cost of the project is that they know they only get one and they want to get the most bang per kg of payload.

Most of the cost was research, development and testing of new technologies. Building 10x JWST would not cost 10x what we paid for a single telescope. A single launch also means everything has to be perfect, there is no prototype in space, no second try and no learning from mistakes.

The project would also probably have made drastically different design and management decisions if they knew in advance they were sending >5 units instead of one.

Wouldn’t most of that cost be baked into the launch rather than the payload though?

You could probably do a swarm type of telescope. I thought the limiting factor with JWST was expertise.

When you can design space telescopes to be heavier, and they don't cost as much to launch, then you can design them cheaper. If one fails then you can more easily replace it. Initial designs of the James Webb began in 1996 and it didn't launch until 2021 and cost $10 billion. If they could use more off the shelf parts and didn't have so many design constraints it would have been quicker and cheaper.

None of which is relevant to astronomers who depend on terrestrial telescopes to do their work today, so it’s not really a meaningful response to their complaints.

I'm so sick of people acting like Starlink is the end of terrestrial telescopes. Fucking insane. Actually inform yourself. A very low number of terrestrial telescope sometimes lose a slight amount of information. Terrestrial astronomy is fine and will continue to be fine.

It would, however, be foolish to assume that Starlink will be the only constellation of low orbit satellites.

How would you recommend informing oneself? From all the searching I’ve done and the conversations I’ve had, it’s basically: space agencies and astronomy groups are saying this project (and similar) will end up destroying billions of dollars of equipment, discourage further investment, create a ton of space debris, etc etc, then on the other side mostly people who get emotional about defending every Musk project and make arguments like “that’s okay because we’ll hopefully put up space telescopes in the future that will somehow satisfy the same demand for telescope time.”

I am not an expert at all but that at first blush that seems like bullshit. I’m 100% open to sources of info I should check out on this though.

Edit: FWIW another more believable argument than hypothetical future capacity satisfying the same demand would be “global internet is more important than terrestrial astronomy.” Not quite ready to say I agree with it but it seems very compelling!

There are presentations about this from astronomers and SpaceX. Where they present their issues and SpaceX presents what they doing about it. These are public and can be found. I don't remember where but they were youtube videos for different conferences. I can try to find a video when I have more time.

I have not heard a single one claim that it will 'destroying billions of dollars of equipment'. And most don't want to stop further space craft.

What they do call for is regulation about these things in general. SpaceX is basically doing them a favor by modifying their sats, there is no legal obligation.

Here’s a single $680MM observatory that looks pretty pissed and is struggling to figure out how they’ll deal with it. Granted probably won’t drive the value to zero, but it probably will devalue the project quite substantially, from my read.

https://www.lsst.org/content/lsst-statement-regarding-increa...

And I’m not arguing for stopping further spacecraft either.

“Hey they don’t even legally need to mitigate their externalities!” is usually a good sign of “things that need regulation.”

As I said, I was not arguing about regulation being bad. My point was its completely false to say that earth based astronomy is over. A minority of telescopes are not effected or slightly effected. But even small effects now will grow if you imagine sats going exponential.

The very broad survey orient visible telescopes are most effected of course.

Regulation both for visibility and for debris is warranted. But getting their by streaming 'earth astronomy is over and Kessler syndrome' is pretty counter-productive. If we can get away from that kind of language maybe we can actually make reasonable progress on these questions.

Unfortunately I can not find the series of lectures from astronomers and SpaceX. That had really go information. But there is an active working group somewhere that is meeting regularly that can probably be found somewhere.

I don’t think I (or anyone I’ve seen in this thread) has said “earth astronomy is over” or anything similar.

They’ve said: this incurs a huge negative externality on the astronomy community.

The response was: it doesn’t matter because Starship will send up space telescopes at some point hopefully (TBD how long it’ll take, if ever, for them to reach the same availability as extant terrestrial telescopes)

That is the counterproductive response.

It's relevant because they wouldn't be relying on terrestrial telescopes in the first place if they had access to space telescopes.

Why do they not have access to space telescopes? because they are currently extremely expensive to build and launch. Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper. It would allow them to iterate the design and send more units of the same models/design and reduce the design/research cost per unit.

> Cheaper launches could also indirectly make the build cost a lot cheaper.

This seems very handwavy. It appears space telescopes are actually more expensive because space telescopes are really expensive, not because it’s hard to move them to space.

Yes better/cheaper launches would reduce the risk, but that risk is 100% baked into the design and cost of the launch. There’s nothing the payload can do to mitigate the risk of the rocket failing, so there’s no reason to think x% of the telescope’s cost is actually due to the risk of the launch itself.

When you tell a team of scientist that budget only allows for a single launch in the next three decades, the cost of that telescope will inevitably be higher because they will want to optimize it and put as many instruments as possible. They will try to get as much science per kg as possible and verify a million times that nothing could ever fail. If deep space payload was a "cheap" commodity and the team designing the JWST were told they get to send 15 units instead of one, it would have been a much different situation.

Why would they only have a single launch for the next three decades?

They could take 10% of the JWST budget (not including launch) and buy back 6+ launches. Seems to me launches are not super relevant.

> Is launch capacity the thing that holds back more space-based telescopes

Everything holds back more space-based telescopes - launch capacity, manufacturing capacity, research ideas. But the cheaper launching becomes, the more funding can be devoted to other parts (although something like Amdahl's law will apply), and may even trigger a virtuous cycle where cheaper launches mean you can get away with more standardised, less hardened hardware, which in is then lighter and can be launched more easily, and...

> are those telescopes going to have the same availability to researchers as terrestrial ones?

No, of course not, space telescopes are massively oversubscribed and difficult for even superstar researchers to get time on. That's exactly why we want to launch more of them.

Right so basically “we’ll maybe have more space telescopes someday” is not actually relevant to “you are effectively destroying terrestrial telescopes today.”

You managed to get exactly the opposite conclusion from what the parent said. This exchange should be on the wikipedia page for "confirmation bias". Funny af, honestly.

Just for fun: what exactly could the parent have said to change your mind? Because if the answer is "nothing", then you're a rock.

Sure: SpaceX projects are putting up more space-based telescope capacity than they’re removing from terrestrial capacity, with either no variation or a good variation in the types of capacity (i.e. wavelengths).

It’s actually super straightforward.

The response seems “opposite” what was said because if you read between the lines, the whole comment was about hypothetical future improvements to the cost dynamics.

But... cost dynamics are about future movements. And SpaceX is an infrastructure company.

It's perfectly fair to say that constructing a road to a remote community will mean better ... everything ... for that community, but you're blaming them for not also building a hospital and a school at the same time as the road.

I mean, yeah, technically it's possible that we lose current capacity and we never get enough space capacity to make up for it but if you argue for this particular outcome, I think it's rather improbable. The parent made a very good point: cheaper and better lift to orbit means better ... everything. It would mean you have cost and capacity improvements for the whole chain, and yet nobody bothers to use this for JWST successors. That's a very thin line of probability you'd be arguing for.

No, it’s more like while building a road, they tore down a rudimentary hospital and school and told people “don’t worry, the road will hopefully make it cheaper to build a new, better hospital and school some day!”

And no, the condition doesn’t need to be that nobody bothers to use it, it’s that it doesn’t get used at such a scale on a timeframe people care about to replace the infrastructure it destroyed.

Yes? I mean, imagining a hospital in a place without a road, it must be a pretty rough place. Having a road allows for ambulances, drives to a regional center and so on. I'd take the trade. And "tore down" is a bit of an exageration.