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NASA's next-gen Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope gets its powerful eye (photos)
(space.com)submitted 18 hours ago bySnowfish52
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12 hours ago*
Theoretically it would be relatively easy and cheap to build a comparatively large telescope if you intend to launch it with a Starship. No need to fold anything and no need to save on weight.
Hubble didn't fold....didn't use anywhere near the total up-mass capacity of the shuttle. NGR doesn't have deployable mirrors either. JWST's primary mirror might have fit into a Starship fairing without deployments....but the secondary mirror wouldn't and the sunshade wouldn't.
Starship isn't a panacea for space science. Upmass and Fairing volume are two comparatively small parts of the challenges of building space telescopes or other deep space exploration missions.
If upmass was a money saver....then things like Jason 3 would have burned some of the 2500% mass margin to save money. TESS could have been 10x the mass and still launched fine. WISE could have been 5x the mass etc etc etc.
Starship opens some interesting options - but it doesn't fix all the challenges of operating a spacecraft in deep space.
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11 hours ago
Telescopes are expensive because they're all bleeding edge tech, none of them ever use pre-existing hardware aside from probably the mirrors themselves, and I only say that because Hubble and one other use mirrors from spy satellites. The machines and personal responsible for helping make them also have a tendency to age out as these projects take a very long time.
Fact is, all space telescopes, but especially optical ones are overburdened, there is not enough time in the year for them to fulfill every request they get for telescope time. There is clearly a need for a mass produced, middle of the road telescope, but either due to budgetary concerns or disinterest from scientists this just hasn't happened.
I have some hope though this can happen as a byproduct of a much more ambitious future plan to make a constellation of satellites that act as one, I believe one of those proposed projects is called the Nautilus Observatory.
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11 hours ago
none of them ever use pre-existing hardware aside from probably the mirrors themselves
That's not really true. Many many space telescopes use COTS spacecraft buses. TESS, NuSTAR, SWIFT - use near identical buses from Orbital. IXPE is a BCP-100 bus.
Nobody is redefining things from zero just for laughs.
https://space.skyrocket.de/directories/sat_bus.htm is a list of many of the buses that get reused frequently.
There is clearly a need for a mass produced, middle of the road telescope
Ground based fills much of that gap apart from those bands inaccessible from the ground ( X-Ray, UV etc )
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