[reedwolf]

I wish Musk/Bezos/Branson et al would spend their billions on colossal space telescopes rather than Mars vanity projects. Imagine being able to image the surface of an exoplanet...

[anchpop]

Any progress on "Mars vanity projects" directly helps the project of colossal space telescopes. The reason the James Webb Telescope is so expensive is because old spaceships didn't have enough cargo volume to hold the telescope unfolded, so they had to create an incredibly expensive and error-prone unfolding mechanism. SpaceX's Starship is big enough to hold the JWT unfolded - something that would dramatically lower costs on any future telescope of the same size or bigger.

[TeMPOraL]

That's like saying, "I wish the government was spending money on constructing stuff up the mountain, instead of vanity 'roads' that lead to it".

[Diederich]

Musk and Bezos are fundamentally focused on drastically lowering the price per kg to orbit.

It's possible that Starship could bring the cost to LEO down to the tens of dollars per kg.

> colossal space telescopes

...and that's how you do that. (: