NASA was developing plans for an 8 meter monolithic optical/UV space telescope concept[1]. NASA's concept videos from 17 years ago are still rattling around on YouTube[2].
All that died when the Ares program was cancelled and the intended launch platform, Ares V, went away. Starship and SLS are supposed to have a large enough fairings. So, maybe one day...
After JWST, why build an monolithic mirror? If you only want visible spectrum, you wouldn't need the complexity of the heat shield of JWST. If an 8 meter primary is so much better, why not make it multiple times 8 meters similar to JWST? I understand this was something from 17 years ago, but let's just keep pushing capabilities instead of incrementing them.
A complex unfolding mechanism makes things a lot more expensive, slower to develop and more likely to fail. If you could get an improvement over JWST delivered in 5 years at a tenth the cost that's a good option to have. Starship would theoretically allow for huge telescopes (like the 15m LUVOIR-A) but not all projects have the sort of budget or expertise for that.
But it shouldn't. Like we know we have a limitation on the size of things at launch, so why not have a tried and true method of unfolding things in space? Pretty much every thing launched into space that requires solar panels does this. JWST did it for the primary mirror. Unfolding should be something that is just part of what we do when going to space. Unfurling heat shields like JWST is not something that we would need for the vast majority of things.
So a couple of things are happening here: most important is that the budget for multiple launches and physical spacecraft to do the same mission just isn't there, hasn't been there since the 1970's. Viking and Voyager each got two bites at the apple, but since then NASA has decided that their reliability is good enough to get away with one actual launch. And so the easiest form of reuse is off the table. And then since every mission is different, you end up needing different things for components.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer is what happens when you try and reuse components without fully taking into account the differences in mission. This was an early 1990's NASA Mars mission which failed because they reused an engine from Earth orbiting satellites which would always fire the engine shortly after getting into space. Probably its fuel tank failed because it was expected to lie dormant for months of travel and then fire. So the environment that HST, JWST, the Parker Solar Probe, and Juno are expected to operate in are enormously different from each other and re-using a component and having it fail because it was designed for a different environment would be really bad.
Oh, and building a new JWST now would be pretty expensive, because a lot of the cost is in testing and certifying that it will do what it's supposed to do, and all of the people who built and tested the JWST have moved on and changed jobs, so all of that workforce would have to be re-created, and that's where the money goes, to pay people. If you wanted to build 8 JWST's at once, the cost wouldn't be that much more than building one JWST, but building a single new one now would be expensive.
This is a fact that is often overlooked in these types of forums. Quality control is an enormous expense for high reliability systems. A bolt doesn’t necessarily cost $1k because it took a lot of R&D to make it. It costs a lot because they have to maintain a chain of custody, certifications, inspections. They have to keep raw material coupons for testing. Sometimes all of them need to be shipped and/or warehoused in tightly controlled environments, with security and so on. Those quality administrative costs are what add up to $1k per bolt.
You can work harder or smarter. I’m not convinced that all the quality control isn’t harder instead of smarter. The proof point is how spacex managed to drastically reduce the cost of a space shuttle launch vs what NASA was able to do. NASA does good work and what they accomplish in their environment is impressive but culturally they seem to have stagnated a bit - not entirely their fault and having a mercurial political situation adds to the distinction but it does indicate that the costs that NASA projects take may be unnecessarily expensive and there may be cheaper ways of accomplishing this stuff. Repeatability in particular is huge in driving down costs and it’s why spacex costs are so low. Unfortunately there’s no money to be made from scientific telescopes and even national security decisions are driven by the US government which often makes incorrect cost/benefit decisions because of politics.
I’m really happy to see them exploring things like the Mars copter to do a super cheap “unreliable” robot that turns out to actually work reliably. I think people seriously overestimate how much has to “go right” to get amazing results and decoupling things from the “must succeed” parts of the mission are ways to bring down that cost by having more non-critical pieces of the project (in addition to reuse). It’s easy to point tot reuse failures one offs but the data is irrefutable that repetition drives down cost and improves reliability. So we should simply learn from the repetition failures and just keep repeating anyway.
I think this ignores some of history. The most glaring example is the strut failure that lost a launch. It is common practice in aerospace to test material coupons for structural specs for critical parts. SpaceX didn't and it cost them a rocket. Luckily it was uncrewed, but it forced them to layer on those quality requirements afterwards. They had to re-learn what much of industry was already doing but I bet if you asked them beforehand, they'd claim those weren't value-added requirements. With low probability events, it can be easy to conflate being lucky with being good.
I will say I think NASA is probably too risk adverse. This gets more into a philosophical debate, but I think that stems more from NASA being as much about national prestige as science. There are many people at NASA who think the engineerinng and quality requirements are too much, but very few people want to stick their neck out and waive them. Maybe a hot take, but I think that's a big part of CCP: it allows private companies to skirt many of those requirements so civil servants don't have to make those decisions. When civil servants have raised the flag on some CCP issues, they've been told it's not their place because NASA is just buying a ride and it's up to the contractor to drive the design. It essentially allows them to get rid of those requirements and outsource responsibility for the increased risk. (This is also a somewhat similar dynamic with JPL that made the Ingenuity copter, although it tends to be less pronouced. JPL is quasi-NASA because it's mainly managed via CalTech)
You say that, but then I counter with Boeing. Their testing and certifying are definitely not very expensive since they self-certify.
There's a large part of any government awarded contract's budget that goes into institutional largess or bureaucratic accounting practices that divert monies from intended purposes. With Boeing and the evidence showing their diversion from standard engineering into more MBA style management, I would not be surprised to learn that a small fraction of government awarded money went to actual engineering with the largest portion going to management.
Are all government contractors as bad as Boeing? I hope not, but it wouldn't be shocking if they came close. But I'm guessing that $1k bolt wasn't strictly from design/testing costs as much as managerial costs being a large factor.
>Their testing and certifying are definitely not very expensive
If you're referring to the 737-Max, that's a different animal because: 1) it's a different division than their aerospace and 2) it was taking advantage of a previously certified airframe. It doesn't mean they got rid of all the upstream quality requirements. Also, you might need to qualify what you mean by "not very expensive" because I don't think they would agree.
If you're talking about Starliner, there is no "certification" process like what the FAA requires. And NASA was heavily involved in the testing, especially after the mishaps with the Demo flight. They (NASA) felt the need to levy on many more requirements after the fact because of the (real or perceived) increase in risk.
>But I'm guessing that $1k bolt wasn't strictly from design/testing costs as much as managerial costs being a large factor.
That's my point. A large part of the cost isn't R&D but administrative. The difference I think we're making is you're considering the "managerial" costs to go to some C-suite, but I'm saying there are lots of quality requirements that would also go into the bucket of "adminstrative" or "managerial" costs. Look at what it costs to ship a flight article: you have to have a quality engineer inspect it and a photographer document it. There's all kinds of tracking documentation. You have to have special packing and labeling. Of course, the shipping itself is more expensive; it may have to have be shipped in a certified/refrigerated/climate-controlled truck and have accelerometers attached to the package to measure g-forces in transit. Then once it's received, you have to have a quality engineer open it, a photographer document it, more tracking paperwork, and a climate controlled, secured warehouse. All that paperwork has to be managed for the duration of the mission (and beyond). And this isn't just for the big items like a assembled satellite; this is often the case for the small parts too. You can get rid of all those requirements and just drop it to the UPS guy, but then you might risk being back in the same place after a mishap, like SpaceX.
I'm not an expert, but I'd imagine a lot of it was R&D work, but also much of it was precision manufacturing that made it expensive. I do like the idea of making a bunch of identical telescopes to drive down cost and allow for more astronomers to have time on the best telescopes. We wouldn't need to make another JWST though, because Starship could just fit an unfolded telescope of that size in its fairing. The LUVOIR-A telescope is sort of a scaled-up JWST, with the folded mirrors, but from what I understand it is different enough that there are many new engineering challenges.
Doubtful. In the time it took to develop, build, deploy JWST, most of the people that worked on it would probably no longer be around to build 2.0. So tribal knowledge would be lost.
"why build an monolithic mirror?"
"why not make it multiple times 8 meters"
Cheap, simple design that doesn't take 20 years and a NASA to develop.
8m is a massive gain in angular resolution over Hubble's 2.3m and an improvement on JWST's 6.5m. From the our linked article:
“Diameter is a huge lever arm,” “The larger the diameter, the better the resolution and sensitivity.”
Based on the fairing specs it looks like Starship could achieve 9m. That would be nearly double the collector area of JWST.
JWST is one, very expensive, exclusive design that perhaps only NASA is capable of delivering. What if someone other than the US wants a cutting edge "Great Observatories" class space telescope? A big, simple monolithic mirror design made feasible by super heavy lifters.
But that's not 2x the size evenly, so I don't think that would be worthwhile. That's an advantage of the hexagonal shape that JWST used so that it could unfold to increase the size evenly.
I've had a crazy thought of SpaceX taking control of this industry, similarly to StarLink. An enormous percentage (like 90%+) of requests to Hubble, JWTC, etc get denied, so the market is seemingly there. Plus, maybe the data ends up being useful for training Grok 5 or whatever.
JWST is a taxpayer funded science mission, and the science run on the observatory isn't a pay-per-use model. I don't think a second JWST available for hire would see anywhere near the demand JWST currently fields.
An enormous percentage (like 90%+) of requests to Hubble, JWTC, etc get denied, so the market is seemingly there.
What is the TAM? Would it be worth it?
However, considering that the Hubble was developed from spy satellite tech, could this also happen in reverse? What uses would a 9m mirror telescope have in terms of ground observation? Would the US government allow such a thing to go up and be available for hire?
"Preliminary design discussions have commenced, and in May, NASA awarded BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman contracts worth a combined $17.5M to advance key stabilizing tech."
Noticeably absent from that list: Boeing. The next time Boeing is awarded a contract, I will immediately wonder how much money it cost them into convincing someone. I just can't see how they would ever be considered again. As in, what does Boeing need to do to prove they have fixed the glitch?
The glitch is Boeing's focus on stock price instead of quality products. They can't seem to build an airplane correctly. They can't seem to build an orbiter correctly. I would hope all of that has been taken into consideration by the decadal survey members, and that's why they were not mentioned
Their Starliner human spacecraft has failed and astronauts are currently trapped on the ISS until they can figure out the problem. This is after billions of dollars and several years of delays.
They are not trapped on the ISS. NASA has stated that the capsule can safely bring them home if needed. The problem is that the service module with the flawed parts will burn up on entry, so before that they are trying to get as much test data out of it as they can.
Worst case, NASA would just send a SpaceX Dragon up to bring them home, but this would be a huge amount of egg on Boeing's face.
Yes, Boeing hosed up, but we don't need to exaggerate how much they hosed up.
If I drive a car across country but it breaks down, I refer to that as being stuck at whatever location until the car can be repaired. So yeah, trapped might not be the most accurate word, but it's not that far fetched in every day parlance with how common exaggeration for effect is used in daily dialog. There's only so much that can be "examined" while this thing is docked in space.
Essentially, the Starliner's astronauts are waiting for the AAA tow truck to come help them, so they're trapped from being able to do their normally scheduled itinerary. You can mince words all you want, but the egg is on Boeing's face already. Having Dragon come get them would just be the mercy killing of the wounded animal that is Boeing.
Mirrors can be made out of just about anything: glass, metal, ceramic, polymer, wood, you name it. The mirror itself is just a reflective coating (typically gold, silver, or aluminum), and it can be as thin as a few nanometers. The trick is shaping it and convincing it to hold that shape, which is why we currently use rigid materials like glass and metal. Something inflatable might work, but more likely we'll just stick with lightweight metals like JWST's beryllium mirrors.
However, there's already a lot of rock up there. Asteroids are numerous and big. What's the concern adding more?
Given the hexagonal layout of JWST's beryllium mirrors, future telescopes could 'just' increase the size of the mirror by launching multiple payloads of these mirrors and aligning them in space to form one giant layout. It doesn't seem much of a stretch beyond the complexity and single points of failure NASA managed to hurdle with JWST. How hard can it be? ;-)
I was thinking the same thing. The beryllium is just the support structure. It's the coating of gold specifically for the spectrum JWST is built for, so why not coat the beryllium with a different material for other parts of the spectrum?
Why not do something similar to VLA instead. So rather than a single "big and light" dish in orbit, you make a constellation of smaller dishes that equal a single larger dish? We know SpaceX is more than capable of that kind of deployment.
> Since 1965, humans have launched three space-based radio telescopes. The first one, KRT-10, was attached to Salyut 6 orbital space station in 1979. In 1997, Japan sent the second, HALCA. The last one was sent by Russia in 2011 called Spektr-R.
> There have been a few radio telescopes launched into space over the years, most with the purpose of linking with ground-based radio telescopes to form an array with very long baselines (distances between antennas). One such recent project, which ceased operation just a few months ago, is RadioAstron. I don’t believe that there are any currently-operating radio telescopes in space, though.
One use would be to hide behind the moon to block interference from Earth, at the L2 point in the earth-moon system. Use a laser to, say, a repeater at L4 or L5, and from there further to either LEO or directly the surface.
Lots of smaller dishes get you resolution but not sensitivity. You can image the black hole at center of galaxy, but you can't detect the red-shifted radio waves from beginning on universe.
Also, doing interferometry is much harder when the telescopes are moving.
I get it, but even on terra firma, they are having to track relative to each other in 2 axis. In space, they would have to add that 3rd dimension and I stipulate that extra dimension is not linear in complexity. However, tracking on the ground in RA and Dec per object across the distances of VLA is not "simple".
Going off the challenge that doing that for imaging the black holes was, I figure the limiter is the amount of data generated and the amount of processing needed to put it all together.
That is a fair point, but is that level required to get better data than the VLA but maybe not imaging an black hole? It would be a lot of data to receive via radio especially seeing how the signal being received was radio to start. I'm not intimately familiar with the signal loss from listening under the blanket of the Earth's atmosphere
Yup, these mirrors can only point directly up (zenith telescope). Any adjustment off horizontally to the earth deforms the curve of the mirror. Some liquid mirror telescopes exist today to track space debris. Cheap and useful.
All that died when the Ares program was cancelled and the intended launch platform, Ares V, went away. Starship and SLS are supposed to have a large enough fairings. So, maybe one day...
[1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090014194/downloads/20... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YsNvpVSzbI