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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

Launching a fleet of space telescopes is not the solution to the Starlink problem [scientificamerican.com]:

The sky is rapidly filling [scientificamerican.com] with fast-moving satellites reflecting sunlight and zapping astronomers' detectors. It is, after all, exceedingly difficult to see faint galaxies in the distant cosmos when someone is shining a flashlight down your telescope.

The biggest culprit is SpaceX [scientificamerican.com], which has launched a massive and growing fleet of Starlink Internet satellites [scientificamerican.com] since 2018. Of the more than 7,500 total working satellites in orbit around the Earth, over 3,900 are Starlinks—meaning more than half of the birds circling our planet fly the SpaceX flag.

These satellites are already menacing astronomy [scientificamerican.com]. Many telescopes, especially those doing wide-angle surveys of the sky to search for Earth-threatening asteroids, are seeing observations ruined by bright satellites [scientificamerican.com] streaking across their field of view. If not caught, these can cause false positives: things at first assumed to be real but that can take exhaustive efforts to discover [pcmag.com] are not. This will only get worse as more Starlinks are flown; 12,000 are planned, and SpaceX has filed paperwork for an additional 30,000 beyond that [spacenews.com]. If this comes to pass, the sky will be filled with satellites zipping across it.

But, in a potential irony, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that the cause of this woe may also be its cure. The company is currently testing its huge Starship rocket [nature.com], which, if it works as planned, will have the capability to launch extremely large and heavy payloads. This, Musk said [cnet.com], can be used to send large telescopes into space [nature.com] above the fleet of Starlink satellites, potentially alleviating the contamination issue and ushering in a new era of widespread space-based astronomy.

[...] Clearly Starship can lower the launch cost considerably. However, for most space telescopes, especially large ones, launch costs are not a huge fraction of their lifetime costs. Hubble, for example, has cost north of $16 billion (in 2021 dollars) over the years [nasa.gov], and its space shuttle launch was about a billion dollars. JWST has a projected price tag of about the same amount [planetary.org], with a launch cost of about $200 million [flightglobal.com].

[...] There is clearly a very exciting future for astronomy in space [scientificamerican.com], assuming Starship works as promised [scientificamerican.com] (the first test flight had some serious issues [scientificamerican.com]; the loss of the vehicle wasn't unexpected, but it's not clear yet if that was a result of it simply being an untested rocket or if some serious design and launch flaws doomed it). However, Starship is a double-edged sword, capable of launching big telescopes but also deploying vast numbers of Starlink satellites.

Space telescopes were never meant to replace ground-based observatories, nor can they. They work together, complementarily, but we need both. Whatever benefits Starship provides for telescopes, it is literally not the one-size-fits-all solution to the growing Starlink problem.

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