> every observation is public as soon as it is processed with no embargo

That's a big deal. Do you have any source for that? (I couldn't find it in the ones you linked). This is great for humanity as a whole, but... poor grad students who now need to rush to publish their papers even sooner.

> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks.

The Rubble and NGR have the same size mirror but they are constructed differently. The former is not sharp over the entire field of view, the latter is - that coupled with a much, much larger camera (nearly 300MP) lets it record images at least equal to to HST but over a very wide field of view.

As to speed, it is not just the camera view that makes NGR faster but also physical factors such as not having to wait for earth to get out of the way.

And yet the narrow-field Hubble produced this famous image

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/universe-unc...

Those are galaxies. In a field of view "about 1/13th the diameter of the full Moon."

IIRC the mirror is from a spy satellite, but the chassis and electronics are all NASA.

If we’re playing what-if, consider the contributions those spy satellites made to keep the Cold War cold and provide for decades of Pax Americana and a security umbrella over Europe that they didn’t have to pay for.

Isn't that also how Hubble started? I'd assume there's a lot of lessons learned to avoid costly research on conversion of the platform.

> I have to wonder what things would look like with different priorities.

Things aren't as simple as more money = more good.

Rapid progress requires adversity, the kind you'll find when nations compete for military power, for example.

People shouldn't be shocked that employees of the US government can deliver things ahead of schedule and under budget.

The problems are that anyone gave Musk/doge the time of day and that we're too used to the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors.

I worked briefly in a satellite lab, and we did indeed have duplicate parts for most things.

Any space telescope with a mirror, is a different story, e.g.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/webbs-mirrors/

The RST has an 8ft mirror. The mirrors have to be ground and polished in a clean room to tolerances that are the highest in the world. I vaguely recall it's a square law or worse - for radius-to-time-to-polish. So you're paying for time, and you're paying for the expertise of one or two custom built places that can manufacture them.

Because the incentives are not properly aligned. The US has historically wagered big money on singular missions, which given the cost per launch makes perfect sense. Now that costs per launch are decreasing rapidly, and critically launch availability is also increasing, the opportunity for scale is presenting itself.

why build one when you can build two for twice the price?

I guess for one thing, these launches don't tend to fail and second, they actually do make duplicate missions sometimes. See Voyagers 1 and 2, Spirit and Opportunity and Curiosity and Perseverance.

They have often indeed made “flight spare” copies of the main instruments.

When I worked for Mars Global Surveyor, one of the museum-pieces in the lobby was a glass case with the Viking spectrometer flight spare.

The flight spares were exceedingly useful when the spacecraft had some kind of trouble during its mission, because you could mock-up the flight spare in a lab and replicate many situations very closely, and propose solutions based on the mockups.

Whatever the reason, it seems specific to the intersection of space and telescope. Space probes, landers, and crewed vehicles all get made in multiples, as well as ground based telescopes like Keck or the gravitational wave observatories.

what if both of them blow up?

The primary detector is the wide-field instrument, which, believe it or not, takes pictures with a wide field of view. The secondary detector is the coronagraph instrument, which uses a bunch of funky filters to block out the light from the star to see the halo around it.

Edit: These are the detectors, which are the cameras. There is only one mirror assembly (with two mirrors) that focuses light into these instruments.

Oh, thank goodness. I greatly appreciate the link. I was confused and annoyed and now I’m happy.

The telescope will be used to film sensationalist TV about missing kids

> * https://nextspaceflight.com/launches/details/6983/

06:25 AM Window Open

06:26 AM Window Close

Is it really just a 1 minute launch window? That seems incredibly tight. If there's any hitch in the countdown, that would pretty much mean a scrubbed launch. Not being well versed in orbital mechanics, why would the window be so short?

Is it really 500 Mbps of data headed to Earth 24x7? I'd be very interested to see any available public info about the earth station infrastructure being set up for that.

> but Musk still needs to send it out of orbit without explosions, so here's hoping

The Falcon Heavy has made 12 launches and all of them have been successful. It's built using the same engines as the Falcon 9, which has become the boringly reliable workhorse of space launch, and the rocket cores are very similar in design. I'd bet on a successful launch, and probably on a successful landing of the side boosters.

(Do we really need to politicize launch vehicles, of all things?)

> except The Habitale Worlds Observatory Space Telescope HWO was scheduled for 2040 and now will not happen in my lifetime because DOGE got that one, Congress awarded it $150 Million and DOGE changed it to $5 Million

I was so excited for this. It was the one thing I really wanted to see happen in my own lifetime.

What a deeply moronic waste.

It is not 500mbps but 500Mbps. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/commu...

"mbps" is a meaningless abbreviation. You need to consistently and correctly use capital letters when communicating technical terms. You cannot "e e cummings" your way into effective writing.

500 megabits per second works out to 5.4 terabytes per day. No idea where you get 1.5, unless you were thinking of 500Mb/hour!

60 × 60 × 24 × 500 × 1000000 ÷ 8

I suppose we should be grateful he didn’t force his own name at the last minute. I suppose he still has time.

FromWikipedia:

It is named after former NASA chief of astronomy Nancy Grace Roman.

Please don't do this here.