Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfl | Hacker News Reader

The collapse of Arecibo made me sad, like our space infra is in decay. Space X is a bright light and, I hope, represents a change in direction towards positive growth.

View on HN

These two questions (Arecibo and SpaceX) are orthogonal. Arecibo is ground-based science. SpaceX is access to Earth orbit, not really anything to do with science or research.

NSF is an agency promoting research. It is continually handing old telescopes over to university consortia, and building the next generation of hardware. In this case, the handoff was bungled. A lot of technical debt had piled up. But it turns out to be really hard to get people to pay for upgrades and maintenance.

For more on the technical story of this collapse, see: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/how-famed-arecibo-te...

Yea, Arecibo aside, we're entering something of a golden age of ground-based observatories, so disagree we're in decay when it comes to such devices.

Would Starship allow for a much bigger telescope to be put in orbit?

Not really, Perseverance didn't even use spaceX. total cost is the limiting factor like it almost always is. Extremely large fairings are only needed when you need a complex piece up in a single piece.

Thanks. I imagined that for a really big telescope then a really big faring would be useful for that exact reason. Why isn’t that the case? Wouldn’t starship at least make it a lot cheaper to put a really big telescope in orbit?

Is Space X a brighter light than NASA landing a freakin' helicopter on Mars?

Yes; SpaceX is setting up Starlink, which is much brighter at night than any Mars mission.

Perseverance was ~1 ton of mass at launch, and cost ~$2.2B (plus $243M for the Atlas V rocket). SpaceX's Starship aims to deliver up to 100 tons of payload to Mars for ~tens of millions of dollars. Imagine how much science equipment that could be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com