Just think what space telescopes will be like if the Starship reduces cost/kg to orbit to 1/10th or less of Falcon 9's already low cost. They'd get very big, and it would likely make sense to assemble and maintain them in space by workers in space suits. It might even make sense to have telescopes in high Earth orbit with a maintenance station located nearby.
Webb isn't in an earth orbit though, it's at a Lagrange point that humans have never visited, and it's there because that's where it can get the best images. I don't think Starship can even get there at all without orbital refueling.
Sure, and it's also there because there was no plan to ever repair or service it. And that was because as it was being planned, launch was very expensive, so no satellite beyond LEO (where it could not be, for heating reasons) could reasonably be serviced.
That's not the main reason. Webb is viewing wavelengths where it has better viewing by being that distance away from the Earth. Putting Webb in similar Hubble orbit would diminish its abilities. If you want to build bigger visible wavelength platforms, then this might be a discussion to have with Starship capabilities.
WISE was another infrared telescope but in a low-ish Earth orbit (480km).
Putting it at L2 gives a more consistent thermal environment and means it doesn't have to repoint as often, but doesn't really make it any cooler. (After all, it's just barely past the Earth) At equilibrium the hot side of the Webb is around 300K. (80F)
Because it is an infrared telescope, and in earth orbit there are three very bright infrared sources that would mess up the instruments or heat up the telescope too much if they ever shone on the sensitive parts. (Sun, Moon and Earth.) When the telescope is placed in the Sun-Earth L2, all three sources are always very close to each other in the sky, and you can shield against all three with a single directional sunshield.
Because the JWST is not at the L2, but in a halo orbit around it, Earth in fact never covers the Sun at all from its point of view. They are just always fairly close to each other.
The coldhead of one of these sensors (MIRI) functions optimally at temperatures less than 7˚K (i.e. 7˚ above absolute 0). The other sensors run at temperatures under 40˚K.
For reference, the melting point of nitrogen is, 63˚K.
Any sunlight at all would overwhelm this sensor and severely reduce the operational lifetime (and results!) of the telescope.
At L2, the telescope has the sun and the Earth behind a layered sunshield. It's easier to maintain position there and to have both objects always in the sol-ward direction while looking outwards.
There are telescopes on Earth that cool their detectors (not optics, though) well below that temperature. The SPT-3G at the South Pole, for example, has detectors at 3K.
I can't find it now, but about a year ago there was an article by some professors with an extensive analysis what Starship could do for space science.
Their point was that Starship has a big potential to significantly reduce cost by enabling the development of devices that are less optimized for size and weight. For example, the extremely expensive JWST could have been built with a much cheaper, non-foldable mirror, since the Starship fairing has a quite large diameter.
But they also argued that there is an unfortunate tendency in science to overoptimize everything, which leads to exploding cost. So it is well possible that scientists won't use Starship to reduce the cost of their spacecrafts, but to optimize them for maximum performance like they did before, e.g. by designing complex foldable mirrors which barely fit into the Starship fairing.
So I guess if they do that, Starship would enable an even stronger cost explosion than in the past, not a cost reduction. More available mass and size means more opportunity to spend money on complex engineering. The launch costs themselves are not a significant factor here.
> The Starship payload fairing is a clamshell structure in
which the payload is integrated. Once integrated, the
clamshell fairing remains closed through launch up
until the payload is ready to deploy. An example
sequence of payload deployment is shown in Figure 3.
To deploy the payload, the clamshell fairing door is
opened, and the payload adapter and payload are tilted
at an angle in preparation for separation. The payload
is then separated using the mission-unique payload
adapter. If there are multiple payloads on a single
mission, a rotating mechanism can be provided to
allow each satellite to separate with maximum
clearance. Once separation is confirmed and the
payload(s) have cleared the fairing, the payload fairing
door is closed in preparation for Starship’s return to
Earth.
Currently NASA makes most space based discoveries, while not at all being able to control cost, as JWST has shown. The reason NASA isn't weeded out is that they have a quite large budget and only competition that is also bad at controlling cost: other space agencies.
Cost control is largely about correctly predicting costs. So teams that correctly predict costs will select lower performing but affordable instruments. Teams that fail at that may well under predict costs, over engineer their systems and end up with super expensive but super capable systems.
A telescope array that can use our sun's gravitational lens would enable us to resolve the surfaces of extrasolar planets. We could resolve surface features as small as 10 km across at a distance of 100 light years.
JPL is actively investigating this. It's incredibly promising.
Yeah, though I have some doubts as to how certain it is that it would really produce results that impressive. Maybe this is quite speculative. There could be tiny inaccuracies which reduce the image quality substantially.
It would make sense to have telescopes in orbit at Lagrange points around various gas giants and in far corners of space. The maximum definition of the Event Horizon telescope is based on the physical distance of each of the observatories on Earth. Moving observatories to all parts of our system will allow us to have vastly higher resolution.
Orbital dockyards and asteroid mining would be in reach if Starship delivers on its (admittedly pretty steep) promises.
High cost of launch prevents economical repair (especially in high orbits), which requires extreme reliability. It also creates incentive for extreme weight reduction. Both these drive up the cost of a satellite. At low launch cost, there's no reason a space telescope should be much more expensive than a terrestrial telescope of the same size.
Do you work in the field of space? I don't mean to be dismissive but claiming that space telescopes cost about the same as terrestrial scopes if you subtract out the launch costs and can maintain them with crews, isn't really consistent with what I've heard from space telescope astronomers.
With sufficiently cheap launch, you get radiation hardening with shielding. The goal is to use off the shelf hardware as much as you can. If things break, that's why we have servicing, just like on terrestrial telescopes.
Ah. So, I should have said this earlier: there's a whole different world of cubesats that are what you're looking for. We could almost certainly help the astro community by funding and launching large fleets of simple scopes that make observing time available to more researchers.
You don't service cubesats, you just learn from your past mistakes and launch more.
The cost of rolling a truck to a terrestrial telescope is several orders of magnitude smaller than the cost of servicing a telescope in space. From that difference flows a greater emphasis on reliability for a space-based scope.
No, but the mass and volume constraints are. See how much effort went into making JWST fold up and how hard they had to try to get the mirrors to be light enough.
It's kind of sad that the one real thing the Space Station demonstrated, assembly of large space structures, has been abandoned in the name of feeding the pork pipeline with SLS.
Space assembly for a telescope is way harder than the ISS. Telescope mirrors need to be aligned to within a few nanometers of each other, compared to the ISS which just needs airtight seals (so ~1mm + O-ring tolerance).
SLS is expending surplus RS-25 shuttle engines. Once they're gone they'll be paying Aerojet Rocketdyne a hundred million each for new ones. The first stage uses four.
Eventually someone with a brain is going to notice, SLS will be canceled, and decades of federal jail time will ensue for the criminals who perpetuated this fraud upon the American people.
ISS involved assembling segments that could be lifted on the Shuttle. Continuing that would involve lifting segments that could be lifted on F9 or FH. There would be no need for something as large as SLS.
Given that SLS works and Starship has failed pretty spectacularly so far (engines failing off the gate and in flight, launch site damage, failed to detonate on demand), I think it's about time to stop saying SLS is just pork.
SLS may be further ahead in development (though the version that launched is far from the final one), but it is much worse than Starship in nearly every other aspect. This is consensus in the space community, it has been discussed to death.
Edit:
The most significant thing Starship is bad at is launching and landing humans. Human launch systems like Falcon 9/Dragon or SLS/Orion have both a launch abort system and a highly reliable "blunt capsule" method of landing humans back on Earth. For Starship, both launching and landing humans is much more dangerous, as it doesn't have a launch abort system and it uses a complex maneuver ("belly flop") in order to land.
Starship will need to do a lot of unmanned satellite launches to prove a safety level acceptable for humans. Or people transfer to and from Starship in space, as in Artemis 3, and start/land with a different rocket.
SLS basically has a single purpose: funneling money to particular contractors. There is no objective in space that couldn't be done more cheaply with F9 and FH, given propellant transfer and some in-space assembly.
I think it is "just" 4 billion per launch, though of course this doesn't include the development costs. Regardless, the costs are staggering compared to Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, or Starship.
Not sure a larger fairing would be compatible with the current tower. Though they could use landing legs, then it doesn't have to be caught mid flight.
> Not sure a larger fairing would be compatible with the current tower.
I'd imagine that a hammerhead fairing would mean an expended 2nd stage. There's just too much custom work that would have to be done (for example with the heat shield) to really make it work.
But if the cost is reasonable (I'm guessing ~$25 million for an upper stage), that isn't a bad price to pay to get access to a 12m fairing.
I think 25 million USD is too optimistic, since the Starship upper stage has six raptor engines, and the Falcon 9 upper stage has only one Merlin engine, but a launch price of around 60 million US dollars.
But NASA would pay much more than that if it means they can launch a telescope with a big mirror that doesn't need to be folded in. The main problem I see is that they would likely also have to pay for the
entire development of the new upper stage, which would be much higher than the pure launch cost. Since NASA already has JWST, I'm not sure they have much interest in a big new space telescope currently. Other than that, it's not clear what a super large payload fairing would be required for.
> The main problem I see is that they would likely also have to pay for the entire development of the new upper stage
I don't see why they'd need to do a full 2nd stage.
I'm sure a limited run fairing (especially a complicated one like a hammerhead) will be expensive - certainly quite a bit more than the $5 million per unit cost of the Falcon fairings. But ultimately a fairing just isn't that complicated, and SpaceX has a lot of experience with them.
Well, the aerodynamics are different and the launch abort system would probably have to be somewhat different too. The structural integrity could also be quite different. Of course it won't be a completely new upper stage, as it is just a modification, but a few test launches are probably required.
>Just think what space telescopes will be like if the Starship reduces cost/kg to orbit to 1/10th or less of Falcon 9's already low cost.
Falcon 9 is around $60 million/launch (though when contracted by NASA or the military, launches tend to be 2x-4x the price). This is pretty much inline with what you get from Arianespace, and Roscosmos. There is no path to reduce price by another order of magnitude. We've pretty much hit the limit on what we can do with chemical rockets.
Falcon 9's price is a bit below its competitors. But remember, cost != price. There is not much reason for SpaceX to reduce the price further, if demand is sufficiently inelastic.
There is room to reduce cost much further. Discarding the second stage is a large cost. The propellants used by F9 cost $200K/launch, according to Musk. With full reusability costs should fall at least another order of magnitude.
>There is not much reason for SpaceX to reduce the price further, if demand is sufficiently inelastic.
Or they can't, because there are physical limits to the chemical rocket technology.
>There is room to reduce cost much further. Discarding the second stage is a large cost ... with full reusability costs should fall at least another order of magnitude.
Reusability is not a panacea. Falcon 9 is partially reusable and it is not significantly (if at all) cheaper than the competition. There is no evidence that full reusability will provide an order of magnitude cost decrease in prices. Fully reusable rockets imply that you're cutting into your cargo space (because you have to ship extra fuel for the decent), and maintenance is expensive and time-consuming. Don't get me wrong, there may be costs savings there, but not 10x, more like 10%.
Or, since there's no downward pressure on price, it's equally valid to say we've hit the limit of what we can do with capitalism in the current ecosystem.
Price won't approach cost until there's another competitor with similar costs. But China is heading strongly in that direction, working on a F9 clone (and perhaps more than one; there are many quasi-private launch efforts there). I'm sure Musk knows F9's life as a money-printing machine is finite.
>Or, since there's no downward pressure on price, it's equally valid to say we've hit the limit of what we can do with capitalism in the current ecosystem.
There is downward pressure, we're just hitting physical limits on what can be done with chemical rockets.
Obviously wrong how? I saw that Musk was claiming that launch costs for starship will be around $1-2 million at some point - probably after hyperloop launches as a "5th mode of transport" in Neverland.
