NASA Made the Hubble Telescope to Be Remade
spectrum.ieee.org
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I wonder how expensive a telescope like this would be today, both the design and actual manufacturing, and whether it would be feasible for SpaceX to shut up all the "Starlink satellites are blocking my view of the sky" complaints by launching a Hubble-equivalent space telescope (not more capable, just more modern and presumably much cheaper) and then giving out observation time on it.
Of course, it would not be easily maintainable given we no longer have the space shuttle, but if the majority of the cost was development, the manufacturing + launch costs today might make replacement cheaper than on-orbit repairs.
https://www.space.com/15892-hubble-space-telescope.html claims "Getting Hubble developed and launched cost $1.5 billion".
That said, Starlink affects the process only for about an hour after sunset and another hour before sunrise. And there are so many other things affecting that process that Starlink is neigh negligible. Well, actually, photographing Starlink itself is very satisfying and beautiful and a challenge in itself.
I don't think that people actually making these complaints are in the hobby.
You and I both know that if this were to happen, it would be the first gallery of where ever you host your results. It would be framed on your wall somewhere. It would be the story you told everyone about.
I love the "hobby" as well as it pretty much forces me to get out into nature well away from city lights. But I would absolutely do all of the things above and behold it as the crown jewel of hobby achievements.
"Oh, you like golf? Have you considered paying a pro to give you one of their old scorecards? It'd be the best score in your collection!"
The issue I take with your new scenario is that you're not the one swinging the club. You've been working on your stance, grip, and follow-through, but none of that is relevant because the clubs Tiger uses are 400 feet long and in space.
Again, your premise is just strange. If you are using an auto-guide setup tracking on its own, then you're really not working the hobby as if you had your eyeball on the eyepiece manually tracking a guide star on an alt/az mount instead of equatorial mount. At this point "hobby" is really undefined in context, so saying that someone with more expensive toys is any less of a hobby than someone with less expensive gear is just moving the hole while someone is on the tee box to continue with this wild comparison
If you do grind your own mirrors, more power to you, I've thought of taking up the hobby myself.
Also I do happen to know at least one guy who grinds his own stuff. Legend.
The quality overal will likely be better to, as the noise level can be lowered. It's possible to do a better denoise with temporal info than simply averaging the noise like a long exposure does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio_(imaging...
EDIT: found a counterargument: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musks-starsh...
That's setting aside the costs of actually running it too as brought up in the article. Maybe that can be brought down but there's necessarily going to be more complexity and more specialized workers required to run a space telescope vs a ground telescope. It'd be interesting to see where the extra costs come from; the specialized people monitoring the satellite, downlink time, etc. Some could get brought down but seems difficult to make it cost competitive with having a similar telescope on the ground.
Starlink sats also want to keep their bottom pointed at the ground at all times because that's where all the fancy radios live while telescopes need to freely point and track their targets.
US military gives NASA two better-than-Hubble telescopes (2012): https://www.theregister.com/2012/06/05/military_gives_telesc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
They might launch one of them in 2 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
New Hubble telescope wouldn't solve the Starlink problem. There are lots of smaller ground telescopes that have view blocked. We would need to launch a bunch of smaller, like 1m ones, to compensate. Also, there are a lot of larger telescopes that are only feasible on Earth. Good example is the 8.4m Rubin survey telescope which is only going to cost $700 million but would be lots of billions in space. That might fit in Starship but the Extremely Large Telescope won't.
Is that using same company that is refurbishing $40m SSME engines at $420m per engine? 10x the cost of new one 24 years ago, or 20x the cost of whole Raptor launch? Or the company building $2.7b launch tower, a Launch Tower at twice the cost of Burj Khalifa?
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/02/sls-is-still-a...
Flip side is that stuff in LEO deorbits pretty quicky, while geostationary junk doesn't deorbit in any timeframes humans care about.
These complaints make a lot more sense when you project forward by just a few decades. We're talking about _one_ provider already causing minor hassles. What do you think an entire commercialized segment is going to do?
Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first.
We are already at two providers (SpaceX and OneWeb), soon three (Amazon's Kuiper). But I guess that's your point
> Maybe we can shut up all the "LEO satellites are the best way to build a communications network" people by building out a reasonable and fair network on the surface of the earth first.
Didn't we already try that for the last ~200 years? With intensified focus towards internet specifically since the dotcom bubble. All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors that are unlikely to be swayed by astronomers
A significant portion of this time was spent with humans using horses to travel.
> All evidence points to this being really hard for a mix of economic and political factors
What evidence is that? This is purely anecdotal. Here's a better question, why are there so few cellular providers in the USA? Does 4 seem correct to you? Does it really seem like we've exhausted all our terrestrial options?
There’s an old photo showing a Hubble mirror being ground by a technician in 1979. It’s a cute how-the-sausage-is-made photo, until you think about the timelines when Hubble was donated and realize it’s a photo of top secret work being done.
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubble_mirror_polishing...
We don't know how much of it is the same but the mirror is very similar.
> KH-11s are believed to resemble the Hubble Space Telescope in size and shape, as they were shipped in similar containers. Their length is believed to be 19.5 meters, with a diameter of up to 3 meters (120 in).[5][23] A NASA history of the Hubble,[24] in discussing the reasons for switching from a 3-meter main mirror to a 2.4-meter (94 in) design, states: "In addition, changing to a 2.4-meter mirror would lessen fabrication costs by using manufacturing technologies developed for military spy satellites".
> In January 2011, NRO donated to NASA two space Optical Telescope Assemblies with 2.4 meters (94 in) diameter primary mirrors,[53][54][55][56] similar in size to the Hubble Space Telescope, yet with steerable secondary mirrors and shorter focal length (resulting in a wider field of view). These were initially believed to be KH-11 series "extra hardware", but were later attributed to the cancelled Future Imaging Architecture program.[57] The mirrors are to be used by NASA as the primary and spare for the Roman Space Telescope.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
He was a very serious guy and would never talk about anything he shouldn't have. So yes, I believe the fact that he was willing to talk about Hubble meant it was done in the open. And also, he never expressed any sort of amazement that it was still up there, working. Why wouldn't it be?
But if we’re talking anecdotes, I worked at Lockheed as well, though not back then, and one of the stories I heard was that when the Hubble was in Sunnyvale to get tested in the vacuum chamber, one of the KH-11 workers stopped by to check it out. He spotted something that was a unique invention for the KH spy satellites and alerted the government. It took a LOT of paperwork to show that nope, it was just accidental convergent design. It was a tricky thing to sort out, but really the only way of solving that problem given the identical requirements.
The impression was that my grandfather did classified work more often than not; he probably would have been one of the crossovers if it had been the case. He was exceptionally severe if any discussion came too close to whatever line existed, not that anyone else knew if or where such a line was. My mother and her siblings did not find it to be a very happy childhood, on the subject of anecdotes :). The stuff he talked about was fascinating, but you learned quickly not to ask many questions.
Hubble was a programme dating back to the 1960s as the Large Space Telescope (LST)[0], but first given the full go ahead in 1978. It was designed and developed in the open, with the Marshall Space Flight Center as the main design location.
The donated NRO satellites were the two donated in 2012[1] and were reportedly KH-11s. Only one of those is being developed into a space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. [2]
[0] https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/overview/the-history...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telesc...
NASA initially considered a 3m main mirror for the HST, but opted for a 2.4m mirror especially to take advantage of the existing industrial base for 2.4m mirrors for the KH-11. As it was a proven industrial process that derisked the project and reduced cost compared to a 3m mirror.
It's sort of like air surveillance radar. There's only a few companies that make them, the clients are civilian or military, but the economics mean that both the vendors and customers are incentivized to align the civilian and military systems as much as possible (including through shared-use agreements) in order to make the design and purchasing more economical. Thus the civilian designs are all modifications of the military designs and the military designs are all modifications of the civilian designs, they have essentially evolved in parallel.
I used to work on the MRO 2.4 meter telescope (at a small university observatory). Its main mirror was a Hubble design competition prototype that was transferred to the Air Force for intelligence use after the design wasn't selected. The Air Force kept it in storage for a long time and then provided it as part of their incentives to build the 2.4 meter with dual scientific and military applications. A lot of large mirrors used in astronomy and intelligence have stories like this. There's a number of 2.4 meter mirrors out there and pretty much all of them were made for either Hubble, KH-11, or as a shot at both.
Radio astronomy is no exception, there's a reason I bring up radar. Most radio astronomy observatories early on incorporated microwave electronics that were designed for weapons targeting radar---sometimes extremely directly, with military radar prototypes having been "looted for parts" by the astronomy commmunity after they were retired. Microwave electronics were very costly to design at the time and it saved everyone a lot of money to reuse everything.
And yes, the Hubble official history makes it clear that NASA intentionally sought to reuse industrial capacity and tooling developed for the NRO's surveillance satellite programme.
My point was only that the Hubble was not a donated KH-11, not that it didn't share the same industrial base as the NRO's satellites.
The level of secrecy at the facility was so rigorous and taken so much to heart that even years after various NRO programs were declassified (decades after program conclusion), the retired civilian personnel I've had the privilege to know were reluctant to speak openly.
I will see if I can persuade one retired engineer I know to join this discussion!
At one of the NASA tech days at NASA Ames (Moffet field), they had a space suit glove simulator where you put your hand in it and it had the flexibility that you would expect with a partial pressure spacesuit glove in vacuum. It was super hard to do anything precisely when pushing so hard just to move your fingers around. A robotic 'waldo' type device which replicated your hand movement precisely would minimize hand fatigue and allow for doing precise alignment.
It's a NASA study on glove-induced hand trauma by spacesuit gloves.