Serious question. Or can its interference be filtered out effectively?
Space telescopes these days are primarily being designed for observations that simply can't be done while in the atmosphere (eg the wavelengths JWST and NGR look at). The value of a space telescope in the same wavelength range as what ground based telescopes usually use would mainly benefit in terms of being able to have much longer exposures.
Disclaimer. Not a physicals or astronomer, just a enthusiastic backyard amateur astronomer who reads a lot about telescopes .
Even considering the effect of Starlink.
What starlink does is ruin part of the images, and if the thing you were interested in observing happens to be blocked by a starlink trail you're hosed: a thing literally blocked what you tried to see and you lost the nigh (because usually you get just a bit of the a night for your observation). Other things that ruins your night is clouds, so starlink effectively makes the weather at a site worse, only you find out after the night that it was all a waste.
To some extent you can plan around it, but as the mega constellations grow they'll have to avoid each other more frequently and there's no rules for how that shits coordinated, so you maybe you can know in advance that the night is wasted.
But the risk that a satellite is in an undocumented orbit by the time you try to observe will likely be very high in the future.
The length of the occlusion isn't very relevant when the thing going in front is orders of magnitudes brighter than what you are trying to observe.
Example: https://imgb.srgcdn.com/5i9W2KZAXha7p27YHHR2.png?width=1024 good luck extracting any data from behind that flash.
* LISA: LIGO In Space (Amazing!).
* LUVOIR: JWST but even bigger and UV.
https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-might-put-a-huge-telescope-...
It measures the parallax shift of stars, and is basically the one reliable way of directly measuring how far away a star is from us. Unfortunately, it's at L2, and therefore has a baseline of 1 AU. Another Gaia way out at 20AU would have capacities no Earth-based telescope could ever have.
https://www.space.com/nasa-telescope-far-side-of-moon.html
Though I'm not sure if it will ever be built.
In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively limited funding unfortunately.
How do you figure? A fleet of space telescopes research teams could interact with through an API without much cost and zero approval, would for sure advance science by a lot. I find it weird to see a statement like this, so maybe you have something else in mind. It's a stretch to go from "building a different one would give new classes of insights" to "having more people being able to use this thing we only have 1 of a kind is barely worth it".
100 % someone would point at the sun by accident and burn all the sensors within six months if access is unrestricted and the api is powerful.
In any case easy access to data will mostly result in data lying idle on disks somewhere because people are busy doing something more interesting. Analysing data is many months of work, and you don't get more months just because there is more data.
If you compare how the JWST was folded, the width of the individual segments was already close to the maximum allowable diameter of the launch vessel. Leaving the rest of that launch vessel empty won't get you a much bigger final mirror.
Starship is 9 meters wide.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside...