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.

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JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent [-]

> James Webb telescope cost a total of $10bn

I’d love to see an estimate of what a JWST-class telescope would cost to design, build and launch in a world maintaining a million-satellite fleet. My guess is less than $2bn.

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HPsquared 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

A big part of the complexity of JWST was the way everything had to fold and fit into a small launch vehicle. With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler. The whole thing was engineered to the max to fit within tight constraints, which is very expensive.

	▲	JumpCrisscross 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> With larger vehicles (e.g. Starship) the JWST mirror could have been built in one piece, which is much simpler Not just the complexity of design, but also cost and complexity of cryo-vacuum testing hundreds of deployment mechanisms any one of whose failure critcially endangers the project. The mirror could also be conventionally manufactured versus requiring gold-plated beryllium [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Telescope_Element