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Comment by dleary | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but also, keep in mind that the JWST was insanely hard and almost cancelled a few times :)

The SGL would be much, much harder than the JWST would be, and the JWST was already stretching our capabilities.

The SGL needs to be 650AU away from us. Voyager 1 and 2 are currently 165AU and 120AU away.

The JWST is 0.01 AU from us.

And you can only look in one direction after the probe finally gets into position. Once you're 650AU away, it's not really feasible to move "sideways" far enough to look at something else.

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The ratios between 650AU, 165AU, and 0.01AU are somewhat moot.

In 1957 Sputnik 1 had an apogee of ~900km from the Earth.

By 1969 NASA was sending rockets ~385000km to the moon.

By 1979 Voyager 1 & 2 were reaching Jupiter ~5AU from Earth.

We went from 900km to 5AU in 22 years.

If SpaceX achieves their stated goals of lowering $/kg to orbit and rapid re-usability with Starship it will unlock things like asteroid/lunar mining and space based manufacturing which will allow the construction of the kind of infrastructure needed to make distances like 650AU achievable in reasonable time frames.

True but I'd be more convinced by an argument based on tech and engineering constraints than extrapolating a progress line.

Low hanging fruit is easier to pluck. It might be that we cannot progress much further without consuming so many resources that Earth is left an uninhabitable husk.

I agree totally.

That is precisely why we must transition to space based resource extraction and manufacturing.

There are practically infinite resources at our fingertips on the moon, the asteroid belts and eventually the gas giants.

What we need to unlock this are the means to economically launch a minimum viable self replicating infrastructure into space to take advantage of this.

The feedback loops that will ensue should we succeed will allow us to save Earth ecology, radically transform the human condition, and unlock the ability to explore the universe in ways that we can only imagine.

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