Starship for Space Telescopes

Why is this better than launching a telescope into orbit?

Not sure why you are getting downvoted. The JWST is blowing through every possible budgetary limit because of the crazy lengths they have to go through to fold and unfold the sunscreen to fit a 4.5 meter fairing.Starship has a 10 meter fairing, so far less folding. It also can lift 5 times the mass of the Ariane 5, which would allow including heavier and tougher materials for the sunscreen (which has already torn once in testing), far more fuel for station keeping to extend its ten year life

I suspect the only "controversy" in your comment is that you said something positive about SpaceX.I believe the GP is correct: wear and tear on existing components means that fuel won't be the only issue in 20 years. Hubble has been serviced 5 times [1] for example.Part of the complexity (and thus cost) for JWST was all the issues introduced by trying to fit a 6.5m mirror on existing rockets. All those moving parts and points of failure have design costs.What you may find

One of the reasons JWST is expensive is its complex folding mechanism. Starship could launch a mirror bigger than JWST's in one piece.Another reason is that they're only launching one and it has to work perfectly the first and only time it's launched. That level of reliability in a one-off product is incredibly expensive to achieve. With dramatically cheaper launches it would make sense to launch a much larger number of less reliable but much less expensive telescopes.Anothe

Firstly, they aren't telescopes let alone spacecraft, they are mostly just optical assemblies. Secondly, there are plans to make use of them in space telescopes but it will cost billions and take years to get them built and launched. WFIRST has already been planned and budgeted, though there is a proposal to slow down the program to accommodate JWST cost overruns.

28 years in space is a long time, and the new JWST has a 5x larger collection area and is fundamentally capable of detecting a much larger spectrum (the mirrors are kept colder). The HST has cost more to keep operational than it did to build at this point, and its construction was not smooth. Money might be better spent elsewhere.However, there is a HUGE amount of data still to collect from space-based telescopes. Even a crippled HST is a desperately wanted resource. It benefits us to hav

Mass and volume are at a premium on any satellite. Adding attachment points and access panels would have reduced the capacity for scientific instruments. Since NASA has no repair capacity now or even seriously planned for the future, it was pointless to design for serviceability. Building and launching a whole replacement JWST would certainly be cheaper, considering that they have some experience now.

> That needs some citations. The James Webb Telescope's mirror is 6.5m in diameter. It took decades and billions of dollars of overruns and a prayer to launch and work correctly. There is no hope of most hardware repairs.Because it had to get launched folded up, because the launch vehicles were so space- and mass-constrained. The unfolding mechanism was enormously complicated and added to much of the cost.Now we can send up bigger, heavier objects for much less money. The 6.

I think they mean reliability of the satellite. The JWST is going to be parked at a Lagrange point that's going to put it out of reach of most everything. At the time it was conceived, robotic servicing was even further off. A crewed mission was right out. Costs went far up in part because unlike Hubble, servicing was going to be virtually impossible.

Hubble has had 4 servicing missions, each of which cost an entire shuttle launch. Hubble is extremely expensive to service -- and it's currently running with two broken gyroscopes, since there's no shuttle to service it and nobody has the budget to do a SpaceX launch to fix it when it's "working fine". JWST, its replacement, has been in a warehouse for thirty years. "In space" doesn't fix any of the problems!