For the sake of argument, let’s say I am one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. I am very interested into astronomy or astrophysics and I want to see mutliple (3-5 or more) JWST with at least double to triple mirror size in space in the next 15 years.
Core questions:
Could my goal be achieved with a donation of say 30 billion annualy specifically for this research? I am prepared to give away 99.9% of my wealth away. What would this mean for astrophysics and astronomy?
Challenges and further discussion:
* Oversight and resource allocation: how to manage the resources semi-efficiently?
* International cooperation: would there be issues in cooperating with international agencies and institutes? My concern is – in case of funding a gigantic research centre – that there could be some communication or mistrust issues in the scientific community.
* Political issues aside: there could be pushback on local or regional level (land use, environmental factors etc.). I am not interested in these.
Comments
How about the “Obscenely large Telescope”
Take something like the James Webb Telescope into a Lagrange point.
Add 3 every year at the same location.
Link them together
Continue
You use the Telescopes synchronized together, essentially making one big Telescope out of several smaller.
Double the telescopes doesn’t mean double the science. It would mean more proposals get awarded observing time, but because the proposal system is designed to be meritocratic, there is an element of diminishing returns as the best proposals get observed regardless.
So you would instead want your money to be spent on developing brand-new capabilities that unlock opportunities for novel science (like JWST has done, by virtue of being the first telescope of its type). But you’d need to acknowledge that you aren’t best placed to decide what that should involve, so you’d need to be willing to hand the money over to a panel of experts that could plan out a long-term strategy.
That’s already how governmental research funding is allocated, so if you hand over a bunch of extra cash the main effect would be to accelerate existing plans. That would include things like a direct HST successor (in particular one with UV observing capabilities), the SKA radio telescope, 30m-class ground-based telescopes, and space-based gravitational wave observatories. There might also be some more blue-skies funding for things like serious feasibility studies into a lunar radio telescope.
I want accessible space software first. That gets automatically enriched as new telescopes and satellites get put online – contributed in a Wikipedia-like way.
A standard of a singular, open, place of all data being stored. No more floating datasets that’s obscured away from the public due to lack of funding to even house the data.
After that, scale the number of telescopes and satellites as you want… And put them on the moon. But at least now, you have a place you can put the data.
The Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile has a set of seven giant mirrors, each one about the same size as JWST’s full set of mirrors. It’s got 15x the collecting area of JWST and 4x the resolution.
The Starship payload bay diameter is exactly the right size to hold one of the Giant Magellan Telescope mirrors. So assuming your money is spent primarily on the telescope hardware not designing a new launch vehicle, then Starship is going to be the way you get giant mirrors into orbit.
It will need multiple launches to deploy all the mirrors, control hardware, support structs, gyroscopes, reaction wheels, solar panels, radio antennae and most importantly the sensors. If you’re building a space telescope out of multiple launches then you don’t need to cut corners on what sensors you’re using, it can use visible light, IR light, multiple frequencies incredibly precise sensors.
It would take a while to build but you’d get a telescope the same step above JWST that JWST was above Hubble.
I’d be interested in exploring the theoretical idea of a Solar gravitational lens. Or to get slightly off the topic of telescopes, the “Breakthrough Starshot” project of sending tiny probes to Alpha Centauri. I don’t know nearly enough about either topic to speak authoritatively.