alt Hacker NewsThe article doesn’t consider that in a world with a million satellites in orbit, launching space-based telescopes—including into deep space—becomes an order of magnitude cheaper.
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Google says that James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn. That's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. Private citizens could afford to put similar things into space if they chose to. We don't need them to be cheaper.
Currently writing a draft blog post on all the issues (and non-issues) with these things, it is now long enough (7k words) I'm slightly wondering if it's less "a blog post" and more "one section of a decent sized book on why we can't have nice things".
Here's a visual to consider the implications of things you can do with actually one million satellites of the kind of size scale being discussed:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/BenWheatley/blog/refs/head...
Does it? My understanding was that it’s less helpful for anything which isn’t in low-earth orbit because the commercial launch engineers are optimizing for the lucrative satellite business, not larger and higher payloads.