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Comment by wrsh07 | Hacker News Reader

Ok so here's the paragraph:

> Last month, the U.S. Space Force announced a series of 21 launch contracts awarded to both SpaceX and ULA. Totaling $2.5 billion in value, the contracts were split between the leading space companies, with ULA winning 11 launches for $1.3 billion, and SpaceX bagging 10 launches for $1.2 billion.

They clarify that space x is launching some heavies in there, if it were just falcon 9 space x might expect to charge 1.1 billion which is cheaper. But good news to be in the right ballpark

Competition is good for consumer pricing! Should be fun when starship is in the mix (iirc you can fit an unfolded jwst in there. No origami necessary)

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James Webb's mirror can fit unfolded in Starship. The sun shield is too big though.

I wonder how hard it would be to make a scaled up version of JWST to take advantage of the extra space? Exact same design, but with an origami mirror 5x (?) the size.

If we're still unfolding telescopes I'll be surprised. Seems a lot easier to send segments and just assemble them robotically. Just a bit of actuation in each mirror segment, a scaffold, and then you pick and place your way to a 250m telescope that can pick out continents on exoplanets. (I have not done the math to determine if that's the right scale, but clearly multi launch and assemble scales better than bigger rocket and origami.)

Who do you think you are, some kinda JPL engineer ;) Downvoted /s

Maybe this kind of delusional thinking is why he's no longer at NASA...

I picked up these ideas at NASA. Or rather, JPL. They tolerate some crazy talk if you have a decent value proposition.

Define easier :) if it really were easier I think it would have been done that way.

We can't even assemble JWST robotically on earth in a lab at 1G. On orbit manufacturing is not mature enough yet to assemble something like JWST. There are too many problems that need to be solved.

There was never an era until now (well after JWST design was finalized) that multi-launch was an option. We're referring to the next launch.

> We can't even assemble JWST robotically on earth in a lab at 1G.

> On orbit manufacturing is not mature enough yet to assemble something like JWST.

You may have missed the future-tense-ness of the post.

Ahh I see. Not just an armchair rocket scientist but an armchair futurist rocket scientist to bat!

Oh a straw man! Let's get it!

I drew part of my salary from NASA helping define the roadmaps for in space assembly of telescopes, costs, benefits, and required technology. The pick and place concept is well described in NASA report outs.

Thats the only reason I mention it. It's an interesting concept with well established merits.

https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/science-enabling-t...

I'm standing on the upper right of that photo. It was a fun study and I'm lucky to have been in the room at the time

Are there good companies focused on robotic assembly in space?

Would we expect this to be something space x develops?

Made in Space is working on in-space manufacturing. in-space servicing is the closest angle, and there's a few players I can't recall at the moment.

It won’t actually built but a larger folding mirror design was explored in the LUVOIR (Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared Surveyor) mission concept. Scroll down the wiki article for a comparison of the JWST and LUVOIR-A mirror size.

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

Parts of that research could end up incorporated into the Habitable Worlds Observatory project.

https://www.keckobservatory.org/hwo/

The unrolling of the mirrors is rather neat - https://asd.gsfc.nasa.gov/luvoir/design/

You would need to increase the size of the sun shield, structures, mechanisms, etc. A scaling up would cascade into a massive amount of design changes. For all we know, if JWST had been allotted 5x the volume they might not have gone with the current design.

If we wanted to naively scale it up and "patch" what needed patching we might end up with an incredibly heavy spacecraft that isn't as good as it could be.

> iirc you can fit an unfolded jwst in there. No origami necessary

I think starship largest cargo dimension is 17m, jwst longest axis is >20m?

Close, but still pretty cool. Will be hard to resist the urge to go play KSP again

That doesn't preclude it fitting diagonally.

Generally no, but in this case I think yes it precludes it. The second biggest cargo bay axis is like 8m, so you get like <19m on a diagonal. And the third axis doesn't buy you the remaining 2m+ left

Anyways you could fit the mirror unfolded, but not the sunshield with it. Something like that

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