Double the James Webb Space Telescope Mirror With SpaceX Starship Telescope

by

Felix Schlang at What About It?, ercxspace on twitter and adonaisf have rendered a space telescope built inside the structure of a SpaceX Starship. Elon Musk has said SpaceX is working on designing a Space Telescope built into a Starship.

The Hubble space telescope mirror is 2.4 meters across.
The James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror is 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter and is made of 18 hexagonal segments of gold-plated beryllium. The James Webb scope cost about $10 billion. The still to be built Luvoir A space telescope design would have a 15 meter mirror. Luvoir is planned for 2039.

A 9 meter telescope mirror built into the structure of a Starship could be very affordable. The SpaceX Starship upper stage will likely soon cost $20 million or less and could drop to about $2m to $3 million. The 36 mirror segments of the 10 meter Keck telescope cost $170 million.

The cost of a SpaceX Starship space telescope with a 9 meter mirror might only be about $250-500 million each.

18 thoughts on “Double the James Webb Space Telescope Mirror With SpaceX Starship Telescope”

  1. If the Air Force buys Starships. NASA should do the same and replace the SLS.
    They need at least 2 more pads just north of 39B. What should those new pads be called?
    How about launch pads 69X and 69XXX. I’m sure Musk would approve.
    Florida Government needs to squeeze these administrative idiots that control this “wildlife protection area” and put this on a fast track to give 100-200 acres for maybe even 4 or 8 towers.
    Line them up all in a row and not create the mess of 39 A & B again.
    Build a 3 stage Starship expendable with a 40 foot fairing for really big stuff like telescopes bought and paid for by Bezos and those other clowns with more money than brains.

    • The Air Force will do it for security concerns. Both for the payload and ship. NASA doesn’t have such concerns as their missions are more predictable.

      For NASA working with SpaceX and buying individual flights seems like the way to go. If they wanted to replace SLS with Starship, they could do that just as easily without owning anything.

      More pads need to be arranged anyways. Once Starship is operational, and production hits it’s peak they’ll obviously need more than the 4 pads planned today. And only 2 of them won’t be restricted by public access to Boca Chica Beach. That obviously won’t be enough if everything goes to SpaceX plans.

  2. While we need larger and larger telescopes we also need lots of smaller telescopes. 10 to 20 9-meter space telescopes would revolutionize astronomy. Some could be used to search for transient phenomena while others could could be used to study the phenomena. Half a billion each would be dirt cheap for the capabilities.

  3. Two telescopes in the two halves opened as shown could use interferometry to create a 17M telescope. Now that would be something.

  4. About this proposed 9 m mirror. Beryllium is not cast but is hot pressed to make the mirror blanks and 9 m is larger than current capabilities so it would have to be made in segments.

  5. A main part of the reason the JWT went so overschedule and overbudget was the way the telescope unfolded itself. It required a lot of testing and had to work first time, in conditions difficult to simulate on earth.

    So yeah a single 9m mirror could be launched in a Starship. But go for broke, use the knowledge gained from the JWT to build a mirror of multiple 9m components.

    The sunshield on the JWT is also about 14m*20m. You could make that bigger, or use the body of the Starship somehow.

    • I’d personally like to see them try independent segments flying in close formation, using ultra low thrust positioning thrusters and optical feedback, to enable arbitrarily large telescopes that can grow as needed.

      But just go with the 9m fixed mirror first, it’s the low hanging fruit.

    • You are correct. But let’s not forget that producing an optically perfect 9m mirror is no easy task, and a fragile payload to take into orbit. However, a mult-segment mirror located inside Starship, borrowing from comparable instruments on Earth, would be much simpler than JWST.

      I’m a little confused by the article reference to 9m diameter mirrors, when Starship’s payload envelope is only 8m.

      • the Starship diameter is 9 meters. The interior of the bay is currently a bit over 8 meters. There are expanded fairing options for other rockets. They might only make an 8 meter mirror.

    • Speed is still 4.72 miles per second. Altitude has some variance but natural orbits have some variance in altitude. IF it is raising its orbit without changing its speed by at leasrt 0.01 miles per second it could be happening but I would not be able to check it yet. They could figure it out by publishing the orbital baselines that they were collecting for the past 80 days or so. The more obvious and unambiguous observation would be 4.73 miles per second and consistently rising speed and altitude slowly and then faster.

    • I would want to see speed increasing and orbit altitude increasing. I am not familiar enough with the baseline altitude. But my previous observations were 320-329 altitudes were normal. I want to see 330 miles and higher and better for 335-340 miles of altitude and some more speed. I want to see the speed moving up slowly and then faster consistent with consistent 0.9 millinewtons of thrust.

      • Actually, Brian, though it might seem a bit paradoxical if you’re not familiar with the physics, if this drive actually works you’d see Barry 2 slowing down and gaining altitude, not speeding up.

        Orbital velocity goes down with increasing altitude, if the cubesat were speeding up, that would be a bad sign, it would indicate that drag was exceeding any thrust.

        Now, there IS a level of thrust beyond which you wouldn’t see that happen, (Which I don’t care to sit down and calculate.) but for this sort of “gradually spiral out” situation, that’s how it works: The thrust goes into raising altitude, not ending up going faster.

            • I’m an old school space nerd, was 10 when Armstrong landed on the Moon, grew up learning orbital dynamics the hard way, deriving everything from basic physics using paper calculations. Had whole notebooks full of calculations figuring out delta V requirements for things like a trip to one of Jupiter’s moons.

              Gave me a really good feel for how this stuff works.

              Also left me really frustrated when everything just ground to a halt for decades. So much for my childhood ambition of being an engineer on a star ship, or helping colonize another planet…

Comments are closed.