Comment by raisin_churn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raisin_churn | Hacker News Reader

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This has nothing to do with Musk. A larger payload fairing diameter means fewer/no elements of the mirror have to be folded up for launch, means reducing or completely avoiding the multi-hundred step deployment procedure, the design of which was both an enormous engineering undertaking and most of the over 300 single-points-of-failure[0] in the final design. It doesn't have to be the SpaceX Starship, but there's no other launch vehicle currently in development with a comparable payload diameter. Since it's a purely hypothetical as the entire design process took place with launching on Ariane 5 in mind, I have no idea what the cost savings would be, but it is self-evident they would be considerable. The thing isn't made of $8B worth of metal, the cost was in engineering it.

[0] https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-deployment-...

> it is self-evident

Nope! It doesn't cost 8 billion to unfold a mirror. Seems like a rather straightforward mechanical problem to me. And your baseless theories and mine are worth nothing without evidence. That's the reason we built the JWST - we need evidence. Baseless nonsense is the stuff of cults of personality, not knowledge. We need much more of the latter and much less (i.e., none) of the former in our society.

Okay, engineering time costs money. Absolutely staggering amounts of engineering time were spent ensuring that the extremely intricate, highly prone-to-failure deployment process would be successful. With a larger payload diameter, the mirror deployment process could have been dramatically simplified, thus saving some percentage of the staggering amounts of engineering time expended, thus saving some percentage of the billions of dollars spent to get the telescope to the launchpad. I do not care what company produces the launcher with the bigger payload diameter, OP specifically asked about Starship, and the answer is YES, a launcher with a significantly larger payload diameter than what is currently available, like Starship if it is ever successful, would make an undertaking like the JWST easier to design, and thus cheaper to design. I dislike Musk as much as any disinterested party (I'm sure people he's scammed with his "FSD next year" or people he's sexually harassed, and definitely his children dislike him more), but a better launch vehicle WILL make bleeding-edge space missions cheaper, and better. That is wholly unrelated to one obnoxious egomaniac.

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