On 09/02/18 15:28, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, John Stoffel wrote:
Or heck, how big a SAR do you think you could put up on FH? Or
telescope? Or bunches of telescopes? Just think of what you could do
with 10 hubbles in orbit, instead of just one... more command and
control issues... but lots more science time across a range of
subjects. And if one fails, it's not the end of the world.
Uh, in case it hasn't come to your attention, building Hubble cost vastly more than launching it. The same is true of JWST. Cheaper launches would have made almost no difference to those projects.
The same ecstatic burbling about launching zillions of cheap payloads was heard in the early days of the shuttle. It didn't happen, *NOT* because the launches didn't turn out to be as cheap as expected, but because *launch was not the key problem*. It sure helps if you have cheap launch, yes, but then you've got to reform the *payload* builders, which is, if anything, even more difficult. And it's not something Elon can help with.