Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I’m afraid I don’t understand how Starship could help proliferate JWST. It was launched with Ariana 5 which is a mature launch system.

The bottleneck is actual manufacturing of JWST - the folding mirror was especially fraught; I think the sunshield as well.



So many ways. The current paradigm is that it gets one chance and it has to be perfect. Starship (which I'm only referencing as the bleeding-edge launch vehicle) compared to Ariane 5 could be a fraction of half the cost, with double the volume and 4x the mass. With those constraints removed the science missions had a lot more flexibility in their design.


JWST cost $10B. The launch was expensive at $1.5B; but getting that down to $750M won’t really change the availability.


I'm a firm believer that if the mass and volume constraints were relaxed the design of such an instrument could be greatly simplified.


Hmm, I didn’t consider that, very good point. With 10x the volume, maybe the mirror and sunshine origami could have been avoided or much simpler. I wonder how to figure out how much the cost was because of that complicated mechanics…


The Europa Clipper mission saved $3B+ just by switching from SLS to Falcon Heavy.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: