[no1youknowz]

I know at the moment there is some controversy with the spacex satellites blocking astronomy viewing and I really hope there is a fix soon.

But I would really like to see the day when governments aren't the only ones who build telescopes like the Hubble or James webb.

That instead amateur enthusiasts crowdfund and build custom telescopes, launched on sub $250k rocket launches which then can allocate hours of control at a time at cost or at least give the telemetry for free. Imagine 25, 50, or 100 telescopes in space all looking out and mapping the night sky at ever increasing rates.

Couple this with advanced ML techniques for anyone to go over the data. I'm sure a golden age for star gazing would just be beginning.

According to [0], we have only discovered a small glass in comparison to a sea on earth.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwtC_4t2g5M

p.s If you haven't see The Age of A.I. on youtube, it's an amazing documentary consisting of 8 episodes.

[rst]

Designing and fabricating optics comparable to Hubble's is not an amateur job -- it requires engineering meter-sized objects to micrometer tolerances, with similar requirements for alignment. (This was initially botched in Hubble itself, with a 2.2-micron fabrication error in the 2.4-meter diameter primary mirror seriously compromising the instrument, until some of the other optical elements were swapped out with replacements designed to cancel out the error.)

[aaronblohowiak]

To give some sense of the difficulty in machining to that precision: the difference in a 4" block of steel at 68 degrees vs 74 degrees F is about 5 microns. Everything gets MUCH MUCH MUCH harder as you get bigger if you want to maintain precision. Truly an amazing feat of engineering.

[kragen]

It's very difficult, but it's quite common for amateur astronomers to grind mirrors to a precision of 0.1 microns or better, using century-old techniques. (Typically the mirrors are smaller, but that's a matter of the available budget for materials and man-hours, not the metrological precision.) I think it's reasonable to assert that if a company doesn't have such amateurs on staff, it will not be able to fabricate optics to such demanding precisions. There are not currently any assembly lines for such things.

The century-old techniques are a little better now that you can use a laser instead of a candle, and there are improved techniques you can use, but amateur telescope fabrication techniques are totally capable of hitting λ/8 precision.

[lozaning]

Humble brag on my alma matter which has one of the worlds largest mirror labs underneath the football stadium. Cool 'Tom Scott' video of the process involved in the glass processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP9HNVuGb-g

[deepnotderp]

I'm hopeful that adaptive optics and computational imaging techniques can help here

[strainer]

I don't believe its a big problem to either professional or amateur astronomy, but rather a publicity controversy acting on fears that night skies will be visibly tainted. The satellites are not visible to naked eyes, 240 have already been launched and no number of them can degrade dark skies as 'scare articles' suggest. Amateur astronomers may find they will appear rather too commonly in views and they may leave bothersome trails on non-digitally corrected exposures, but a very tiny percentage of people are in any position to be impacted by that (purely aesthetically).

Most of our skies both audibly and visibly feature large aircraft and contrail clouds - invisible satellites and the aesthetics of a few astronomers are of zero concern to most people. The frank reality is astronomers don't actually have any right to telescopically 'clear skies' - not even the masses have audibly and optically clear skies.

[Waterluvian]

It is so so hard to give people a real grokking sense of scales of things. It's so easy to look at a satellite map and think, "wow look at that pollution!"

Until we get better at understanding scale, it'll always be so easy to exploit human fear.

[krastanov]

I am similarly excited and hopeful, but you are somewhat misrepresenting how amazing current telescopes are. ML and other tricks are not enough to turn a bunch of cheap telescopes into a Hubble.

[themagician]

Why?

This is one thing that "governments" are really, really good at. NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered. They don't do it for profit. They do it for science.

Private business is almost always about short term gain (because it kind of has to be). I don't think I want a bunch of crowdfunded garbage just adding more crap to the skies hoping to turn a quick buck. We have enough crowdfunded garbage here on earth. The only crowdfunded thing I'd support at this point is filling a rocket with a bunch of e-scooters and shooting it into the sun.

I know it's super trendy now more than ever to hate on the "government" but space exploration is one that that all governments—the US in particular—seem to do really, really well.

[sigstoat]

> NASA routinely launches things into space designed to last a few weeks that end up lasting for a decade or more because they are so amazingly overengineered.

i worked on some of those. they're not overengineered, they're underpromised.

and no, i can't provide a source for that because the whole point is to look good to the public. there's not a line in the proposals about how long things are _actually_ supposed to last if you want to ever get another contract.

if the delivery estimates were good, we'd see a nice uniform distribution about expected lifetime. instead we see everything lasting so much longer than "expected". if we're attributing it to the engineers, then that's bad engineering. but the discrepancy isn't the fault of the engineers.

[caconym_]

Imagine a world where e.g. a moderately well-funded university science department can launch instruments into space. It sounds absolutely fucking amazing. Near-Earth space is going to fill up regardless, and I'd like to live in a world where big corporations and governments aren't the only entities that can afford to put stuff up there.

Meanwhile, our space exploration program basically exists as an excuse to rob the American taxpayer to fund massive, obsolete rockets and get politicians re-elected. That's not to say that the instruments themselves aren't examples of the finest technology ever created by the human species, but their way of doing business needs an overhaul. They need some competition, and SpaceX and other new space companies are bringing it.

[BurningFrog]

Private business has much longer term perspective than government.

Typically, governments are run to make things look good by the next election. That's a planning horizon of 2 years on average, assuming 4 year terms.

Meanwhile, forestry companies routinely plant trees that won't be harvested for 50 years.

[ThisIsTheWay]

The cost and schedule overruns on JWST are a good argument against the statements you have made. The program is ~$4B over budget, and 3 years behind schedule.

NASA does some things well, and is absolutely terrible at others.

[ShorsHammer]

If governments are so good at aerospace then why can a man with no training and some funding come along and cut the launch price per kg by 80% within a decade or so.

Governments are notoriously bad at procurement, especially in this sector.

Governments are very much about short term gain too, just with money that's not their own.

[Paddywack]

What if SpaceX attached a small outward (away from earth) facing camera to each satellite? Could he not then create the largest array of orbiting “telescopes” for crowdsourced astronomy? They already have power and comms?

[Amarok]

I see an age where our orbital space is so full of waste we can no longer leave the planet

[aaronblohowiak]

LEO has enough atmospheric drag to take care of most of it. At higher orbits it might be a problem, but humans mostly want satellites that help earth activities, which usually means LEO is preferable. This is actively monitored and worked on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

[Cogito]

Not being able to leave the planet is not really ever going to be an issue.

Space debris can make specific orbits unusable, but you can pass through those orbits no worries.

You can think of it like the asteroid belt.

If you are flying out past the asteroid belt you don't really need to worry about it, as the objects are spread out so much your chance of intercepting one is very small.

If you want to have an orbit within the asteroid belt you will definitely need active course correction and obstacle avoidance.

Of course, there is a point in which if there were truly stupid amounts of debris in a specific orbit then you might have difficulty avoiding it, but that seems incredibly unlikely - if only that we would stop throwing debris into that orbit way before we got to that point.

[black_puppydog]

Newer satellites usually have a fuel budget to de-orbit or at least go into a parking orbit. That, plus there's work on de-orbiting passive objects from earth or from cleaning satellites. I'm with GP that this has huge potential, even if it's not in the hubble class.

[newnewpdro]

> I see an age where our orbital space is so full of waste we can no longer leave the planet

If you haven't seen Wall-E, watch it.

[astro123]

Yeah, I'll second what others have said that designing (good) telescopes is not a quick/easy thing. Also, any telescope that is easy to slap together is probably so many orders of magnitudes worse that existing ones that you don't get any usable data from it.

I'll throw a couple examples out for you:

DESI[1] has 5000 individually movable fiber optic cables. It's also sitting on a 4m mirror. It is a massive engineering project, but also would make anything with similar goals that a handful of people could hack together for a few million dollars obsolete. It can get 5000 spectra every 15 mins and a small, slit based telescope can maybe do a handful per night. Large scale projects like "mapping the night sky" are going to be dominated by massive projects. See also GAIA [6]

Space based makes things way harder. Let's take JWST[2] as an example. Someone else has mentioned the tolerances on the mirror. You also need to keep everything cold (7 kelvin!). You need to be able to control this, keep it pointed in the right direction with stunning accuracy, etc, etc. And all this needs to work in space, after being shaken around through a rocket launch. You also need a really compelling reason to go to space for a telescope. Those reasons include, observing things that you can't see from the ground (X-rays for example). You need really good seeing (no atmosphere). You need really low noise observations. I'd be surprised if those were what a small operation needed. Especially when it makes all the other things (control, servicing, etc) so much harder.

In fact, there are gaps where pretty simple ground based hardware can do good scientific work. Though, it is usually for pretty specific goals. [3] is a bunch of DSLRs that is one of the best instruments for finding really diffuse galaxies which are really interesting systems at the moment.

On the ML techniques, those are definitely being used in astronomy. One recent example [4] but go to ADS and look for things with ML in the title and you'll get a lot.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1LVMox0KNc [2] https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/observatory/ote/mirrors/index.... [3] https://www.dragonflytelescope.org/ [4] https://www.kaggle.com/c/PLAsTiCC-2018 [5] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/filter_database_fq_data... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)

[badtooling]

As a homeless vet, this makes me excited about the future!!!