
The Telescope of the 2030s - dnetesn
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/14/science/space/the-telescope-of-the-2030s.html?action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
======
melling
Great article. I really enjoyed the part where he became a little more aware
of the world in which he lives. We really do spend chump change on science.

"I used to think $10 billion was a lot of money before TARP, the Troubled
Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout that saved the banks in 2008
and apparently has brought happy days back to Wall Street. Compared with this,
the science budget is chump change, "

~~~
chatmasta
TARP didn't just hand over $700 billion in cash. It was a financial
instrument. According to Wikipedia, it actually made money -- $441 billion in
revenue over $426 billion invested.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program)

~~~
melling
Yes, it was the example used in the article. There are other ways to show how
little money goes into science. Apple, for example, has more cash in the bank
than the cost of the Apollo Space Program:

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/28/by-the-numbers-
app...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/28/by-the-numbers-apples-
ludicrous-fourth-quarter)

The U.S. is one rich country. It would be beneficial if we could funnel more
money into science. It usually pays dividends.

~~~
chatmasta
Private funding pays dividends, public funding leaks money.

The problem is the lack of incentives for private funding.

~~~
icanhackit
_public funding leaks money_

Public funding's issue is that its value, while very real and substantial, is
difficult to quantify because it's not in the business of making money. It
doesn't deliver a product in the classical sense, it doesn't have a calculated
ROI. Improving the lives of humans isn't something an accountant can plot on a
spreadsheet.

Public funding is in the business of making new discoveries - many hold little
_immediate_ market value but a tonne of value when implemented by private
industry years and even decades down the track. That's hard to put a solid
number on.

Add to that, private industry leaks money as well. Any sufficiently large
organization will require more resources to communicate a
policy/directive/goal or pivot than a smaller one. Look at it like an organism
- it eats more, wastes more but leaves big tracks in the sand and can attack
the bigger problems that smaller organisms can't.

------
InclinedPlane
Right now is more or less the worst possible time to plan out a new space
telescope. There's one simple practical reason, the JWST hasn't been launched
yet. Once it has then that'll end it's budget dominance and if it succeeds
then it'll hopefully start to pump some fresh air back into the space science
community, after having sucked most of it up for the past decade with its
cost-overruns and schedule slips.

But far more important than that are the drastic changes coming to space
launch. Reusability is on the horizon, and innovative launch concepts are
being tested. Almost assuredly launch capabilities and launch prices 10 years
from now will be very different. And that is the primary driver of cost and
program complexity when it comes to orbital space telescopes. High launch
costs means that spacecraft need to eek out the utmost performance from within
tight payload margins, that raises cost. It means there's no room for
contingencies like backup missions, which raises the stakes. And because the
cost and stakes are so high that means the vehicle has to be over-engineered
so that it has a very high probability of completing its primary mission,
which further increases cost. Even though launch doesn't end up being the
majority of mission cost, it still has an enormous impact on it.

In a decade or so it may be possible to launch payloads at somewhere between
half to 1/10th of current costs. Which opens up a whole new vista of
opportunities and changes the local cost/benefit maxima sharply. It will
likely be possible to build, launch, and operate a Hubble-class telescope for
less than a billion dollars, perhaps only a few hundred million dollars. That
makes it more feasible to test innovative designs, it makes it easier to
launch a fleet of similar or identical telescopes to increase science
throughput, and it makes it feasible to simply replace failed telescopes. That
may very well change the way we design and build spacecraft, relying more on
extra mass instead of bleeding-edge over-engineering to provide longevity and
reliability. But it'll also provide new insights into orbital telescope
design, instrumentation, as well as abundant new science data, all of which
will inform next generation telescope design, likely leading in different
directions from the designs and budgets we would choose today.

------
mozumder
So why can't the ISS be used to host the telescope, however large it may be?
It seems to have all infrastructure in place already to be able to do
something like that.. except maybe the starshade.

~~~
zyxley
Probably something to do with ideal orbits for different purposes.

------
scrumper
_It could resolve objects only 300 light-years in diameter — the nucleus of a
small galaxy or a gas cloud on the way to collapsing into a star and planets,
say — anywhere in the observable universe._

The article opens talking about exoplanets rather than very distant galaxies.
What does that kind of resolving power - which is deeply impressive - mean for
looking at stuff in our immediate neighborhood?

------
nickhalfasleep
I wonder if basing such a large telescope, or group of telescopes, makes sense
on the Moon for the ease of construction and maintenance. At either pole a
large array of segmented reflectors could be constructed and added to.

I wonder if the thin atmosphere or moon-quakes make this non optimal.

~~~
sonar_un
Well, I think that the moon wouldn't be too feasible since it does rotate. If
you land telescopes on the moon, you wouldn't be able to observe the sky for a
long period of time, like the hubble did with the deep field (50 days of
time).

It also doesn't make sense to geosync the telescope behind the "dark side" of
the earth for the same reason. Long exposures wouldn't be easy since the earth
does move around the sun, so the sky moves with it. Eventually you will have
to face the sun to get the same shot of the sky.

So, the only way would to be to have the orbit around the sun so the telescope
can always face away from the sun. that way you can at least create the long
exposures they need.

------
zachrose
Is the location refered to, a million miles from Earth and orbiting the sun, a
Lagrangian point?

~~~
IvyMike
From the linked PDF report: "Nominal orbit: Halo orbit about the Sun-Earth L2
point."

The linked report also answers the "why there" question I immediately had.

> The HDST spacecraft and its operations will likely share many commonalities
> with the JWST architecture and operations. For HDST, as for JWST, an L2 halo
> orbit is preferable to a geosynchronous orbit (and most others, including
> low-earth orbit), because it is thermally stable and has lower fuel
> requirements for station-keeping

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/558adc44e4b002a448a04...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/558adc44e4b002a448a04c1a/t/55a411dee4b0543aa4ede4f2/1436815838795/hdst_report2_071315.pdf)

(if that link expires, it was from here:
[http://www.hdstvision.org/report](http://www.hdstvision.org/report) )

------
Gravityloss
If it's going to be human serviceable, it could also be assembled as well. No
need to send it up in one piece. That opens up a lot more launch opportunities
and makes everything much more flexible.

