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?