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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come.

Most likely. I doubt there is going to be any serious investment in astronomy over the next decade given economic headwinds and a deteriorating strategic situation. The big money will be going into defense and economic sovereignty and building/launching new high powered telescopes will not be a priority. Optical/sensor advances will be prioritized for earth observation (commercial, military, or weather/climate) and it maybe that we're in an era of diminishing technological returns already. I do expect a lot of analytical advances thanks to the combination of open datasets and AI, although it seems more likely that most of these will be in stamp collecting - interesting astronomical facts for people who are already interested in astronomy. Hard to guess if we will see challenges to prevailing cosmological theories.

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Telescope design, funding, and construction is a long long process, longer than any administration, and there are some truly wonderful telescopes coming online right now.

The Nancy Grace Roman telescope is scheduled to launch in 9 days, on August 30. She was known as the Mother of the Hubble telescope, and the Roman telescope will be able to cover something like 100x the area of sky at the same detail as the Hubble. This will allow surveying a huge fraction of the sky compared to what Hubble could do. (Great video summary here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8 )

The European Space Agency also launched Euclid last year, which is super focused on surveying huge amounts of the sky.

The damage being done to the US will take about a decade to fully play out. We are eating our seed corn right now, because management is a rentier who doesn't understand productive expansion of the economy through innovation. If the damage persists, we will be lapped by other nations. Europe isn't quite ready to zoom forward, but China and India are very happy to.

> Researchers expect it will remain the most comprehensive 2D map of our universe for years to come.

This is Rubin Observatory erasure

Telescopes are related to spy satellites, something that will remain in high demand. The telescopes provide a good cover story for international press.

Wasn't the Hubble telescope a spare from the surveillance satellite program that they basically just turned towards space?

Not quite. It was developed using some shared technology from the KH-11. Very different optics and sensors, for sure, looking out into space is a lot different from looking at something a couple hundred miles away.

The type of telescopes you would use to look at the earth from space are not at all the same as the types of telescopes you would use to look back into deep time. I think the two use cases would compete for funding rather than complement each other.

Maybe there is some technological overlap in the optical telescope space, but that is only a subset of the types of telescopes that you would use to study what the universe looked like when the first stars were forming.

The overlap is very well known and i don’t get why your arguing this point since it’s literally been a source of space telescope tech in the past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KH-11_KENNEN

> Maybe there is some technological overlap in the optical telescope space

So I never disagreed with you. I think the overlap will diverge. Optical telescopes are of limited utility for eg observing gravitational waves or neutrinos

Roman was literally donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_National_Reconnaissance_O...

It was donated without CCDs or electronics, which is what makes the difference between earth and space observation satellites. NASA only got the body and optics (mirrors), they had to provide their own sensors.

> deteriorating strategic situation. The big money will be going into defense and economic sovereignty

That's not incidental, but a situation pushed for by people that will benefit from defense spending and from giving ordinary people's money (via taxes and protectionism) to wealthy, second-rate corporations.

It's obviously undesirable to the great majority, and we can make a different situation if we want to.

Is this based off anything other than feelings?

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