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Comment by runeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

It's not just "any individual with a telescope" though. It's stuff like the Simonyi Survey Telescope, a set to map the southern sky down to below 27th magnitude that's in trouble.

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How would a telescope like that compare to Webb or Hubble in its capability? Eg, if we had to trade the loss of that for many Webb scale telescopes, or presumably something much much bigger once starship can start launching - is that worth the trade?

Ok, who funds it? National Science Foundation doesn't allocate nearly enough money as it is, let alone enough to replace the tens to hundreds of active telescopes producing scientific data every night. And those telescopes are already oversubscribed with people waiting in line for available time. So unless we're slowing astronomy to a halt, we'd need similar numbers of telescopes.

And none of that takes into account that many of these telescopes are used specifically as experimenter telescopes where a given scientist can use their own equipment to perform unique observations that cannot be easily done with space-based telescopes.

It took over a decade to produce the Webb telescope and get it into space, and still is a massive feat of engineering not easily reproduced. We're not nearly to a point where we can just write off ground-based observatories in place of space-based ones.

My understanding (as a very amateur astrononer) is that it's an entirely different sort of scope - very wide field, with the ability to track extermely faint objects, rather than magnification of a much smaller field. I.e. we'd need to build and launch another immense scope to get the same sky-mapping ability.

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