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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

JWST is a great project and a type of project we should strive for. I'm personally just annoyed why the conversation is so defensive and negative.

I don't know much about astronomy, but from what I understand the Earth's atmosphere is hard to deal with, why aren't we talking more about what can be done with this new tech, and not how it makes current things more difficult

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Earth's atmosphere is annoying, yes, but for huge swathes of observational science it's not a deal-breaker. Not having massive telescopes on the ground where you can fiddle with your instrumentation and take advantage of apertures and construction techniques simply not possible in space _is_ a deal-breaker.

The required precision for construction of telescopes is incredible, and doesn't translate to space well, especially once you start talking about apertures that even folded won't fit into even the largest Starship SpaceX is proposing.

Ground-based astronomy is here to stay and with good reason. SpaceX needs to avoid or minimise the harms to these users of the night sky.

There is another aspect of harm, too - the casual observer. The night sky is a precious resource and shared by all. Introducing huge constellations which in many parts of the world will be visible year-round (and in some quite heavily populated areas like northern Europe, even through the night at some times of year) is like building a huge mobile phone mast outside someone's window and expecting them not to complain, but on a much larger scale.

Light pollution is a huge issue, and satellites can pollute just as well (if not more effectively) than ground based sources - it needs to be an ecological consideration of any launch.

I live in a very large city in Europe. I think the number of stars you can see is less than 20. Ground based pollution is horrible, I don't know how you can compare those two.

If you go back 100 years, you could see stars great from the middle of your very large city in Europe. Then the lights came, one by one.

This process is just starting with satellites. Can you see the connection now?

Maybe because large telescopes aren't in very large cities.

Here’s an example of a large telescope in a very large city:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/explore/great-equatorial-tele...

100 years ago, lots of them were.

Kind of. Some on mountains near cities, but even then light polution was an issue they had to mitigate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_telesc...

In general, I'm fine with scientists needing to accommodate people more than they had to 100 years ago.

That list of telescopes only goes back to 1932, and I studied astronomy at one of the institutions in question.

As an example, why is this area named Observatory Hill? https://www.google.com/maps/place/Observatory+Hill,+Cambridg...

> In general, I'm fine with scie!tists needing to accommodate people more than they had to 100 years ago.

Indeed, that's the majority opinion.

You're right, not quite 100 years.

... it's named Observatory Hill, in the middle of Cambridge Massachusetts, quite near to downtown Boston, because it has an observatory that used to work great before light pollution.

> Not having massive telescopes on the ground where you can fiddle with your instrumentation and take advantage of apertures and construction techniques simply not possible in space _is_ a deal-breaker.

Why do you think telescopes in space - where they don't need to fight gravity just to stand - can't soon, with reasonable development, surpass land-based ones in capabilities?

It's the kind of telescope we should strive for, but definitely not the sort of project we should.

It's more than a decade late and billions over budget.

I'm personally just annoyed that people are so happy to be annoyed at each other every time this discussion comes up, so there's that.

Astronomers have been talking and acting for decades to take advantage of new technologies like orbital observatories.

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