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Comment by zappb | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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