alt Hacker NewsI get where you're coming from but we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs that take advantage of the Falcon launch paradigm of cheap and reliable launches.
Some sort of modular telescope array that could be launched in pieces and self-assemble in orbit. Something that improves in capacity as more pieces are added.
Everything seems to have stalled in this field, as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come.
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> we haven't really seen any sort of space based telescope designs
We’re only starting to truly mass manufacture satellites. A world with millions of satellites means one with lots of satellite production and design economies of scale. (Same for all manner of sensors and optics.)
> as if it's just waiting for a Starship which may never come
Or it may. We’ll know in a couple years. Building a scaling production system for Falcon right now would be silly.
And if Starship never works out, we probably don’t see millions of satellites. It’s a fundamentally tied problem, which is why I say the analysis is incomplete.
There are hundreds of Dove Satellites with telescopes in the Flock constellations from Planet Lab: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs
Most of them launched on the Falcon 9. They just point down to the Earth by default. ;-)
And there are other cubesats testing stuff for x-ray astronomy or gamma ray burst detection, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VZLUSAT-2