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Comment by db48x | Hacker News Reader

Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)

Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?

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What you call "the endowment " doesn't exist in any monolithic sense. "The endowment" is a disparate collection of donations from alumni such as scholarships, artwork, buildings, etc., governed by their respective, specifically-worded contracts. Many of these gifts aren't easily convertible to cash. In fact, a large cash gift is rarely offered at all and rarer still would any such gift come unconditionally.

> Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?

The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.

Cubesats can’t take very good pictures. You need a big mirror to get really clear imagery and you can’t cram one of those in a cubesat. Space telescopes are by nature massive, heavy satellites unless they aren’t intended to look very far or see very much. The other option is to cheaply build something absolutely massive on Earth.

I know, that’s why I said that cubesats don’t count. There are already lots of cubesats with telescopes in orbit, but they don’t count because you couldn’t do good astronomy with them.

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