"The SPHEREx mission <snip> will map the entire sky four times over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the universe came to be."
So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the changes.
"designed to map the celestial sky in 102 infrared colors "
So I'm guessing the coolant used to make IR scanning possible will be the limiting factor on operational time span. This article didn't say where this satellite will be parked either, but wikipedia[0] shows it to be a geosync orbit. Would have been interesting to be able to design a replaceable coolant module to extend the observations to really make seeing the evolution possible. Obviously complexity adds to cost and design time, so of course they didn't. Just dreaming
As an example, the study of the stars orbiting around SagA* are very revealing, but have required > 10 years of observations.
- It is passively cooled rather than using an expendable coolant- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used, simplifying the spacecraft’s design and operational needs."
- It is a Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) mission - Investigations characterized by definition, development, mission operations, and data analysis costs not to exceed $180 to $200 million total cost to NASA.
I think the cost of ground support eats into the budget length. The original estimate for project was $241M, so it was a large MIDEX
- It is in a Polar orbit around Earth at the day-night (terminator) line
Possibly stupid question: how does this polar orbit stay over the terminator? And how is the terminator defined for a polar orbit here, since both the north and south poles are on the terminator only at the equinoxes?
>how does this polar orbit stay over the terminator?
Because it's launched at a angle greater than a straight north-south 90 degree orbit, so orbital precession will correctly follow the terminator. Depending on the orbital altitude this can be more than 140 degrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
ah, I misread the Orbital Parameters on the wiki. that day-night orbit is also a LEO which makes it even more possible to do a manned mission for upgrades. Oh, wait, we no longer have a shuttle for those types of missions.
Remember, it is passively cooled (a major design plus and, I assume, part of why it was able to achieve the cost it did). So there would be no need for a manned mission. And in fact, at that cost, it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.
If you're alluding to Russia, they've had them. They even failed in making their version of a shuttle. With what money would they do anything with now?
If you're alluding to China, they probably had the data from the Russians anyways.
> They even failed in making their version of a shuttle.
Nitpick: It was sort of successful. They built a shuttle, and it successfully flew a single (un-crewed) mission of a couple orbits. The collapse of the USSR / lack of funding killed it.
It's amazing how all it takes is a few threats of annexation, and for GOP thought-leaders like Ben Shapiro to start talking about enslaving you[1] to work on the Panama Canal to make another country rethink its relationship with you.
Absolute animals. As is anyone else carrying water for these politics. There's no excuse for it.
If you had anything at all to do with putting these clowns in power - reign them back in. They are supposed to work for you. Remind them of this.
I don't want to quibble just to be contrarian. Polaris Dawn was at the International Space Station's inclination, 52°, which is the most common destination for human astronauts. Isn't usually considered a polar orbit.
I want rather to clarify a really neat point, about what the other mission's doing. From KSC, you can conventionally only launch to inclinations below 62° [0] (constrained by populated landmasses). To get to a true polar orbit from Florida, that means they have to attempt a curved launch [1]—something that's pretty rare, and (to my knowledge) Falcon itself never tried before. (The parent comment was right to ask whether a polar orbit is possible: it does create interesting challenges).
A nearby (excellent) comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338459) gives further context, but: the 6-month revisit period is just an artifact of the Earth-orbit-based sky scanning strategy. In 6 months the satellite, precessing at 1 degree/day, and facing away from the sun during data collection, will scan the sky completely. (See Fig 1 of the paper [0]).
So in particular, the 6-month period is not to revisit these distant galaxies more than once to observe spectral changes. The strategy, indeed, is to “stack” the multiple exposures to beat down noise. (Fig.6 of [0], top left).
It is possible that they have designed the system so that it could produce “just good enough” results in 6 months, with one complete scan. This is called a “threshold mission” and it would only be described in the full proposal.
I looked through the rest of the science cases (which are secondary to the driving case of this mission), and none of them seem to be reliant on revisits. (But open to correction on this.)
Any chance there will be enough "parallax" in the 6-month period to get a stereo-distancing map for the galaxies? Or do we already have that from red-shift, relative luminance or some other means?
Andromeda (the nearest) is 2e19 km away and has a relative motion of 300 km/s in the radial direction. If we assume the tangential motion is similar, that's 5e9 km of tangential displacement over 6 months, for a total angular displacement of 5e-5 arcseconds (50 microarcseconds).
That's well below the precision of every telescope. (Admittedly GAIA, the one designed for parallax measurements, comes close, but its techniques only work on very bright point-source objects).
They're talking about galaxy evolution in the early universe, over timescales of millions of years. Statistics measured across the (large) sample group, not within one galaxy. Scroll down to "It will classify galaxies according to redshift accuracy..."
This is nonsensical. Do you mean a tiny movement in the field of view, which should be measured in angular distance?
Or do you mean actual motion through the universe, in which case the galaxies are moving at hundreds of kms per second, which means they would move billions of kms in 6 mos.
Most things astronomers observe do not change much over the course of 6 months. For comparison, it takes the Sun about 200 million years to orbit around the center of the Milky Way once, so a galaxy like the Milky Way would hardly change in 6 months.
However, there is an entire field of astronomy, called "time-domain astronomy," that deals with things that do change on human timescales. There are pulsating stars, supernovae, galaxies with rapidly accreting central black holes, and many other types of objects. Surveys that focus on the "time domain" have survey strategies that are tailored to whatever type of object they're looking at. For example, if you're looking for planets that transit in front of their host stars, you should look every ~30 minutes or so, because planet transits only last around that amount of time.
- "The telescope is passively cooled to below 80 K in low-Earth orbit by three nested V-groove radiators. An additional radiator cools the long wavelength focal plane temperature below 60 K to reduce detector dark current."
The Spitzer used passive cooling, but only as a method to reduce the amount of coolant required. It still needed a coolant.
"One of the most important advances of this redesign was an Earth-trailing orbit.[1] Cryogenic satellites that require liquid helium (LHe, T ≈ 4 K) temperatures in near-Earth orbit are typically exposed to a large heat load from Earth, and consequently require large amounts of LHe coolant, which then tends to dominate the total payload mass and limits mission life. Placing the satellite in solar orbit far from Earth allowed innovative passive cooling. The sun shield protected the rest of the spacecraft from the Sun's heat, the far side of the spacecraft was painted black to enhance passive radiation of heat, and the spacecraft bus was thermally isolated from the telescope. All of these design choices combined to drastically reduce the total mass of helium needed, resulting in an overall smaller and lighter payload, resulting in major cost savings, but with a mirror the same diameter as originally designed. This orbit also simplified telescope pointing, but did require the NASA Deep Space Network for communications"[0]
As another comment mentions, SPHEREx is passively cooled. But fwiw, plenty of infrared space telescopes use consumable coolant:
> Notable infrared missions that carried consumable cryogen include IRAS (1983), ISO (1995–1998), Spitzer (2003–2009 in cryo mode), Herschel (2009–2013), WISE (2009–2011 in cryo mode), and Planck (2009–2013). Each relied on a finite liquid helium (or solid hydrogen) supply to keep detectors cold and reverted to a warmer operating mode or ended once their coolant was depleted.
Every system I'm familiar with that used liquid nitrogen to cool the IR instruments has had a operational lifespan based on the coolant. JWST is one such. "The coolant will slowly vaporize, limiting the lifetime of the instrument from as short as a few months to a few years at most."[0]
Well, it doesn't apply to either JWST or the subject of the article, so kind of feels like it's worth mentioning.
It doesn't change your specific, exact point (about previous cooling systems you were aware of), but it makes the conversation a lot less likely to confuse people IMO.
It always surprises me how my enthusiasm for scientific discovery is affected by fears of a dystopian future. My understanding is that with red shift calibration here we'll get a much better idea of the 'when' in terms of various galactic structures emerged, that might give us an interesting idea of where we are in the life-cycle of the Milky Way. But the observation of water signatures will be the most interesting to me. Presumably there is a lot of water tied up in comets and such, but will SPHERE be able to detect those signatures near planets?
The galactic and extragalactic science cases (meaning, “stuff in the Milky Way” vs “everything inside the Milky Way”) are actually pretty unrelated here.
We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it’s eaten (and will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds). We’re even pretty sure that the MW merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago, sometimes called “Kraken”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1. SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like it’s galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it’s certainly not observing any exoplanets, but that’s the trade off with an all-sky mission like this.
One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and novel. Its survey design doesn’t give it great resolution, but it’s amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven’t been able to survey before. This is called intensity mapping
Hard for me to parse as well — but I think OP is talking broadly about humans being able to keep our shit together long enough to be able to reach other solar systems before we outgrow our own.
And to think I assumed Astronomy was a stagnant field some decades ago. I have no idea why I thought that. Maybe that optical resolution from ground-based telescopes was not going to advance orders of magnitudes? Maybe I didn't think the sciences would continue to get money for space telescopes?
Astronomy has been in a golden age for the last 35 years, based on:
1. Digital cameras, and the computers to analyze images.
2. Space telescopes (Hubble Space Telescope, the first large space telescope, only launched in 1990).
3. The building of massive ground-based telescopes. Before 1990, the largest telescope had a mirror diameter of 6 meters. Now, multiple 30-meter telescopes are under construction. Collecting power goes with the square of the diameter, so this is an increase of 25 times in collecting power!
4. Very recently, the development of gravitational-wave interferometers, which allow astronomers to observe a totally new type of radiation.
5. Advances in the multi-messenger observations, where apart of photons and gravitational waves, astronomers can detects also neutrinos with specialized neutrino detectors, e.g.: IceCube [a], though there are many more of those [b].
6. Advances in very-long-baseline interferometry [c] using a globe-sized array of radio-telescopes, like Event Horizon Telescope [d]
7. The LISA mission is underway to build a space-based detector for gravitational waves at the 0.1hz region, whereas LIGO is sensitive around the 500hz region. 500hz corresponds to inspiraling stellar mass black holes. 0.1hz corresponds to inspiraling supermassive black holes. Think about the most powerful subwoofer the laws of physics allow, given the maximum amount of mass density in a volume and the speed of light.
It's pretty wild how much astronomy has progressed, especially with advancements in adaptive optics, interferometry, and space telescopes. Even ground-based observatories have improved way beyond what most people would've expected a few decades ago
Yeah, same here. It's a humbling feeling... realizing how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. But also kind of amazing that, despite our smallness, we've figured out how to explore and understand the universe at this scale
450M is somewhere between .1% and 0 % of the total number of galaxies in the observable universe, so I am laying claim to 50, galaxies, which is hopefully a full set of galaxie types, but with a little haggling and trading, buying and selling galaxies I can figure that out later.
My Mom says as a child she sent away and got title to one sqare inch of the moon, but it was a much smaller universe then, especialy before inflation.
Do these missions ever build back-up hardware? What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap, or there is a malfunction during the deploy (see Viasat VS3 antenna deploy failure).
It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
Into the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then, however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to 2, (1 to n is not quite as cheap as it is with software but it's still much cheaper than 0->1), but NASA Science is in the business of answering questions. The question is, will building, launching, and operating (the expensive part) two Parker Solar Probe's and two Juno's answer more questions than building one Parker Solar Probe, one Juno, and one OSIRIS-Rex? Almost certainly the three different probes answers more questions than two copies of two different probes. So once launch vehicle reliability got to be good enough that the fear of total mission failure went down low enough (1), duplicate missions basically went away.
1: Edited to add: this is actually tied into the Space Shuttle in interesting ways. See T.A. Heppenheimer, _The Space Shuttle Decision_ for why the STS became the sole space launch system for all of the US Government. Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
> Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that thing off the ground.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
It’s possible. But if he thinks his company will benefit (like by launching the things into Space) then he probably won’t. Sad that this is where we are. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
They're working on it. NASA HQ has already cut their "Office of the Chief Scientist" (among others) and the current proposal is to cut 50% of the science budget (which would effectively kill it, it's already been squeezed).
SpaceX might be the one that takes it to orbit, but that's the end of their involvement. It would be one of the NASA run locations that would be controlling the craft, receiving the data, analyzing the data, etc. The JWST is not a French contract just because it caught a ride on an Ariane rocket.
To call that a SpaceX contract is a very myopic view.
And to add to that, DOGE has been known to cancel contracts where the money has already been paid (so we're effective paying for nothing); SpaceX already has what it needs from this contract and has nothing to lose by cancelling the mission now.
Believe me, many of us wish we were on the metric system.
I do a lot of large carpentry projects for fun and wood is produced in inch and foot dimensions—and the most common “beam”, a 2x4, is actually 1.5”x3.5”. You can buy “dimensional lumber” that’s actually 2”x4”, but that’s rare and expensive to find. So putting two 2x4s together doesn’t even make a 4x4 (you end up with 3”x3.5”; a 4x4 is 3.5”x3.5”).
Anyways, as I’m doing calculations I’m measuring things like 5/8” or 9/16” and then adding or subtracting large fractions in my head. It’s absolutely stupid.
Let alone converting between different units makes most people unable to imagine the relative size of things in distance, weight, or volume. I really believe the US education system would benefit if we switched to metric. It almost happened in the 1970s.
This is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding under Trump [1]?
Sure, the launch will go through, but SpaceX doesn't see any recurring revenue from later operations, and I wouldn't put it past the current administration to cut NASA's budget such that continuing operations are affected.
I'm not sure how to make out of comments like this. Is SpaceX actually launching customer payloads under $50m or whatever? Because, unless they are, it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA, which is already like 15t to LEO for $67m at 150 JPY/USD, which leaves F9 reusable barely competitive in price. I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price would completely destroy everything in space space, but so far the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space" scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
I'm sorry no, you should spend some time actually understanding the industry.
JAXA builds a tiny amount of rockets, almost exclusively for their own use. They have never been a significant player and its very unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Its pure fantasy to suggest otherwise. And even if they could reliably hit these prices at commercial launch scale, Falcon 9 could easily lower their prices if real competitors actually existed.
If H3 was such a dynamic thread as you suggest, why did Amazon not buy 100s of launches from them. They bought launches from every SpaceX competitor, but not Japan.
> I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
China isn't really relevant. Western stuff is just not going to fly from China.
India used to do more commercial stuff, but SpaceX Rideshare is far, far, far more popular.
The reality is, India large rockets, like Japan, is mostly build for their own program, they don't really have that much access capability.
> Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
The $67m figure is the same one I'm finding for Falcon 9 (and it can carry loads 40% heavier). That made me think they were matching each other on price to stay competitive in the market and that seems correct as the internal costs I'm seeing for SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are estimated around $15mil, meaning they have a large margin from which to come down from.
> it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA
SpaceX doesn't stand still. It's weird to think that in several years SpaceX will be in the same place (relying on Falcon 9) yet JAXA, etc will have improved dramatically.
So are they launching F9 at $67m? Or do you merely expect SpaceX to eventually price match? Not that MHI is selling a lot of slots, but still. Quoted payload figures is also within ballparks.
They are actually doing launches as low as $62 million (as of 2024). They also have enormous margin to lower this cost because even the upper-bound estimate by industry analysts on the Falcon 9 launch cost for SpaceX is only $28 million.
Costs are largely meaningless when talking about global situation and other nations and their strategic interests. Europe will move fully to ESA for anything actually important, China and India have their own stuff too.
Private satellites, sure why not if companies are OK with risking of getting their payload removed at last minute because somebody again bruised musk's ego.
Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust, doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper. That trust with spacex is gone for good.
Costs are never meaningless when you're talking about technical projects that cost billions of dollars.
> trust with spacex is gone for good.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but they launched 134 rockets with payloads last year and they all made it to their orbits successfully except for one of their own starlink payloads. This is more than 90% of all launches that occurred last year.
Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force fails it would make him look bad after all.
Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as a command. I think it is fair to say he created it.
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
> distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
Yep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly unfortunate. It’s disappointing to see that science nor innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research, education, and technological advancements that benefit everyone.
Could you please stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Trump 1 mostly targeted climate and Earth science (when it came to NASA funding). Trump 2/Musk is going after everything. They've just shut down the Office of the Chief Scientist at NASA and are planning to cut fully half of the remaining science budget.
This administration under through Elon is pushing to cut 50% of NASA's science funding. Mapping galaxies we'll never visit is a purely scientific endeavor. Trump seems to care more about military expansion or for lack of a better term more "masculine" expansion of space. The science stuff is not interesting to him, and I'm honestly not sure I think Musk cares about it that much anymore either.
I don't think it's unfounded. This mission is purely about science, in the pursuit of understanding our universe, and is unlikely to lead to any military applications (and even if it might, I doubt Trump et al. would have the foresight to see it).
From the Musk perspective, he wants to go to Mars. Anything that doesn't contribute to that goal could easily go on the chopping block.
Regarding China and the moon, this particular science experiment has nothing to do with that.
"The SPHEREx mission <snip> will map the entire sky four times over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and evolve, and providing a window into how the universe came to be."
So each object will be scanned ~6 months from the previous scan. How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run? My gut response is not much, but that's why we do the science to see the changes.
"designed to map the celestial sky in 102 infrared colors "
So I'm guessing the coolant used to make IR scanning possible will be the limiting factor on operational time span. This article didn't say where this satellite will be parked either, but wikipedia[0] shows it to be a geosync orbit. Would have been interesting to be able to design a replaceable coolant module to extend the observations to really make seeing the evolution possible. Obviously complexity adds to cost and design time, so of course they didn't. Just dreaming
As an example, the study of the stars orbiting around SagA* are very revealing, but have required > 10 years of observations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
To answer three of your questions:
- It is passively cooled rather than using an expendable coolant- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used, simplifying the spacecraft’s design and operational needs."
- It is a Medium-Class Explorers (MIDEX) mission - Investigations characterized by definition, development, mission operations, and data analysis costs not to exceed $180 to $200 million total cost to NASA. I think the cost of ground support eats into the budget length. The original estimate for project was $241M, so it was a large MIDEX
- It is in a Polar orbit around Earth at the day-night (terminator) line
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/press-kits/spherex/
https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/missions.html
https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/02/14/nasa-selects-mission-t...
Possibly stupid question: how does this polar orbit stay over the terminator? And how is the terminator defined for a polar orbit here, since both the north and south poles are on the terminator only at the equinoxes?
>how does this polar orbit stay over the terminator?
Because it's launched at a angle greater than a straight north-south 90 degree orbit, so orbital precession will correctly follow the terminator. Depending on the orbital altitude this can be more than 140 degrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit
ah, I misread the Orbital Parameters on the wiki. that day-night orbit is also a LEO which makes it even more possible to do a manned mission for upgrades. Oh, wait, we no longer have a shuttle for those types of missions.
Remember, it is passively cooled (a major design plus and, I assume, part of why it was able to achieve the cost it did). So there would be no need for a manned mission. And in fact, at that cost, it wouldn’t make sense anyway.
Even a Dragon could bring enough hardware and a crew for a small upgrade or repair (to say nothing of the upcoming Starship).
Dragon lacks a Remote Manipulator System (Robot Arm) and a airlock. things that make servicing objects in space a lot easier. Im sure somewhere at NASA or SpaceX there is rough set of specs on what a shuttle like starship would look like complete with payload bay, robot arm, and eva airlock.
The complete specs of the arm may now belong to a hostile nation.
If you're alluding to Russia, they've had them. They even failed in making their version of a shuttle. With what money would they do anything with now?
If you're alluding to China, they probably had the data from the Russians anyways.
Otherwise, I'm out of guesses to your vagueness.
Canada built the shuttle arms: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm
> They even failed in making their version of a shuttle.
Nitpick: It was sort of successful. They built a shuttle, and it successfully flew a single (un-crewed) mission of a couple orbits. The collapse of the USSR / lack of funding killed it.
It's amazing how all it takes is a few threats of annexation, and for GOP thought-leaders like Ben Shapiro to start talking about enslaving you[1] to work on the Panama Canal to make another country rethink its relationship with you.
Absolute animals. As is anyone else carrying water for these politics. There's no excuse for it.
If you had anything at all to do with putting these clowns in power - reign them back in. They are supposed to work for you. Remind them of this.
[1] https://x.com/benshapiro/status/1876800394900152483?lang=en
Sorry, "rein them in". Reign is about royal power; rein is about controlling a horse. And we definitely don't want any monarchs here.
A nation pushing back against the morons in Washington.
Hardly hostile. Unless you poke the bear.
I think it would be more rightfully described as poking the beaver
Touché!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm#
Can dragon launch to a polar orbit and safely deorbit from a polar orbit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fram2
There was also Polaris Dawn about 6 months ago. They did a highly polar orbit
I don't want to quibble just to be contrarian. Polaris Dawn was at the International Space Station's inclination, 52°, which is the most common destination for human astronauts. Isn't usually considered a polar orbit.
I want rather to clarify a really neat point, about what the other mission's doing. From KSC, you can conventionally only launch to inclinations below 62° [0] (constrained by populated landmasses). To get to a true polar orbit from Florida, that means they have to attempt a curved launch [1]—something that's pretty rare, and (to my knowledge) Falcon itself never tried before. (The parent comment was right to ask whether a polar orbit is possible: it does create interesting challenges).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Space_Center_Launch_Co...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogleg_maneuver
A nearby (excellent) comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43338459) gives further context, but: the 6-month revisit period is just an artifact of the Earth-orbit-based sky scanning strategy. In 6 months the satellite, precessing at 1 degree/day, and facing away from the sun during data collection, will scan the sky completely. (See Fig 1 of the paper [0]).
So in particular, the 6-month period is not to revisit these distant galaxies more than once to observe spectral changes. The strategy, indeed, is to “stack” the multiple exposures to beat down noise. (Fig.6 of [0], top left).
It is possible that they have designed the system so that it could produce “just good enough” results in 6 months, with one complete scan. This is called a “threshold mission” and it would only be described in the full proposal.
I looked through the rest of the science cases (which are secondary to the driving case of this mission), and none of them seem to be reliant on revisits. (But open to correction on this.)
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4872
Any chance there will be enough "parallax" in the 6-month period to get a stereo-distancing map for the galaxies? Or do we already have that from red-shift, relative luminance or some other means?
Andromeda (the nearest) is 2e19 km away and has a relative motion of 300 km/s in the radial direction. If we assume the tangential motion is similar, that's 5e9 km of tangential displacement over 6 months, for a total angular displacement of 5e-5 arcseconds (50 microarcseconds).
That's well below the precision of every telescope. (Admittedly GAIA, the one designed for parallax measurements, comes close, but its techniques only work on very bright point-source objects).
I think these articles answer your question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151943 ("Part two of Grant Sanderson's video with Terry Tao on the cosmic distance ladder (mathstodon.xyz)", 99 comments)
Thank you.
They're talking about galaxy evolution in the early universe, over timescales of millions of years. Statistics measured across the (large) sample group, not within one galaxy. Scroll down to "It will classify galaxies according to redshift accuracy..."
Right, at that scale, For a galaxy to move a fraction of a centimeter will take a thousand years. So not much will be missed in a gap of 6 months.
This is nonsensical. Do you mean a tiny movement in the field of view, which should be measured in angular distance?
Or do you mean actual motion through the universe, in which case the galaxies are moving at hundreds of kms per second, which means they would move billions of kms in 6 mos.
Yes, field of view. I am considering 1 cm to mean 2-3 light years.
>How much evolving within the universe will be noticeable within that 2 year run?
Anton Petrov had a recent episode about rapid transformations in large supergiant stars, so there are some parts of space that can rapidly evolve.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHvV9ewPY7s
Most things astronomers observe do not change much over the course of 6 months. For comparison, it takes the Sun about 200 million years to orbit around the center of the Milky Way once, so a galaxy like the Milky Way would hardly change in 6 months.
However, there is an entire field of astronomy, called "time-domain astronomy," that deals with things that do change on human timescales. There are pulsating stars, supernovae, galaxies with rapidly accreting central black holes, and many other types of objects. Surveys that focus on the "time domain" have survey strategies that are tailored to whatever type of object they're looking at. For example, if you're looking for planets that transit in front of their host stars, you should look every ~30 minutes or so, because planet transits only last around that amount of time.
Why would coolant be a consumable? These things are usually cooled with Stirling cryocoolers which are closed systems.
I did a quick search and it seems there is neither?
- "SPHEREx relies on an entirely passive cooling system — no electricity or coolants are used during normal operations"
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/6-things-to-know-about-spherex...
edit to add:
- "The telescope is passively cooled to below 80 K in low-Earth orbit by three nested V-groove radiators. An additional radiator cools the long wavelength focal plane temperature below 60 K to reduce detector dark current."
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11017v1
The Spitzer used passive cooling, but only as a method to reduce the amount of coolant required. It still needed a coolant.
"One of the most important advances of this redesign was an Earth-trailing orbit.[1] Cryogenic satellites that require liquid helium (LHe, T ≈ 4 K) temperatures in near-Earth orbit are typically exposed to a large heat load from Earth, and consequently require large amounts of LHe coolant, which then tends to dominate the total payload mass and limits mission life. Placing the satellite in solar orbit far from Earth allowed innovative passive cooling. The sun shield protected the rest of the spacecraft from the Sun's heat, the far side of the spacecraft was painted black to enhance passive radiation of heat, and the spacecraft bus was thermally isolated from the telescope. All of these design choices combined to drastically reduce the total mass of helium needed, resulting in an overall smaller and lighter payload, resulting in major cost savings, but with a mirror the same diameter as originally designed. This orbit also simplified telescope pointing, but did require the NASA Deep Space Network for communications"[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spitzer_Space_Telescope
I found an explanation of the "v-groove" radiator geometry, if anyone else was curious about it:
(.pdf) https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/71aee1e9-3...
As another comment mentions, SPHEREx is passively cooled. But fwiw, plenty of infrared space telescopes use consumable coolant:
> Notable infrared missions that carried consumable cryogen include IRAS (1983), ISO (1995–1998), Spitzer (2003–2009 in cryo mode), Herschel (2009–2013), WISE (2009–2011 in cryo mode), and Planck (2009–2013). Each relied on a finite liquid helium (or solid hydrogen) supply to keep detectors cold and reverted to a warmer operating mode or ended once their coolant was depleted.
Notably those were all far-infrared telescopes, which need even lower temperatures (liquid helium) to escape thermal noise.
Every system I'm familiar with that used liquid nitrogen to cool the IR instruments has had a operational lifespan based on the coolant. JWST is one such. "The coolant will slowly vaporize, limiting the lifetime of the instrument from as short as a few months to a few years at most."[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope
You've misread your source article—what you've quoted is not a description of Webb.
Does that really change anything?
Well, it doesn't apply to either JWST or the subject of the article, so kind of feels like it's worth mentioning.
It doesn't change your specific, exact point (about previous cooling systems you were aware of), but it makes the conversation a lot less likely to confuse people IMO.
Thank you for awesome information!
It always surprises me how my enthusiasm for scientific discovery is affected by fears of a dystopian future. My understanding is that with red shift calibration here we'll get a much better idea of the 'when' in terms of various galactic structures emerged, that might give us an interesting idea of where we are in the life-cycle of the Milky Way. But the observation of water signatures will be the most interesting to me. Presumably there is a lot of water tied up in comets and such, but will SPHERE be able to detect those signatures near planets?
The galactic and extragalactic science cases (meaning, “stuff in the Milky Way” vs “everything inside the Milky Way”) are actually pretty unrelated here.
We actually have quite a good idea about the history of the Milky Way and all the smaller galaxies that it’s eaten (and will eat, such as our main current satellites the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds). We’re even pretty sure that the MW merged with another large galaxy about 11bil year ago, sometimes called “Kraken” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken_galaxy?wprov=sfti1. SPHEREx is not interested in any of that, and it looks like it’s galactic science will mostly be mapping out where clouds of ice crystals are in the Milky Way. SPHEREx has very low spatial resolution (about 6 arcsec), so it’s certainly not observing any exoplanets, but that’s the trade off with an all-sky mission like this.
One of the big drivers of the extragalactic science, though, is looking for signatures of cosmic inflation in the distribution of galaxies on large scales. IMO this is by far the most interesting science case, and will be genuinely exciting and novel. Its survey design doesn’t give it great resolution, but it’s amazing IR spectrophometry will let it map the rough distribution of galaxies at redshifts we haven’t been able to survey before. This is called intensity mapping
I can't really get what you meant by "dystopian future" in this context. In my understanding that is a human caused concept.
Hard for me to parse as well — but I think OP is talking broadly about humans being able to keep our shit together long enough to be able to reach other solar systems before we outgrow our own.
As for water detection, I'd imagine SPHEREx will be better suited for large-scale mapping rather than pinpointing water on specific planets
It's pretty incredible to think that we're at a point in human history where we can map 450 million galaxies and probe the origins of the universe
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey has recorded more than one billion galaxies.
But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
> But there are many more galaxies in the observable universe … somewhere between 2 and 20 trillion
A bit less officially, need to remove one zero [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy#:~:text=It%20is%20estim...
There are more recent estimates going from 6-20 trillion now: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/galaxies-in-universe...
That article is going beyond the observable universe, other comments were talking about within it.
Yeah, the scale of it is absolutely mind-blowing
And to think I assumed Astronomy was a stagnant field some decades ago. I have no idea why I thought that. Maybe that optical resolution from ground-based telescopes was not going to advance orders of magnitudes? Maybe I didn't think the sciences would continue to get money for space telescopes?
Astronomy has been in a golden age for the last 35 years, based on:
1. Digital cameras, and the computers to analyze images.
2. Space telescopes (Hubble Space Telescope, the first large space telescope, only launched in 1990).
3. The building of massive ground-based telescopes. Before 1990, the largest telescope had a mirror diameter of 6 meters. Now, multiple 30-meter telescopes are under construction. Collecting power goes with the square of the diameter, so this is an increase of 25 times in collecting power!
4. Very recently, the development of gravitational-wave interferometers, which allow astronomers to observe a totally new type of radiation.
To add to the list (the order is arbitrary):
5. Advances in the multi-messenger observations, where apart of photons and gravitational waves, astronomers can detects also neutrinos with specialized neutrino detectors, e.g.: IceCube [a], though there are many more of those [b].
6. Advances in very-long-baseline interferometry [c] using a globe-sized array of radio-telescopes, like Event Horizon Telescope [d]
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector or here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neutrino_experiments
[c] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...
[d] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
And one more:
7. The LISA mission is underway to build a space-based detector for gravitational waves at the 0.1hz region, whereas LIGO is sensitive around the 500hz region. 500hz corresponds to inspiraling stellar mass black holes. 0.1hz corresponds to inspiraling supermassive black holes. Think about the most powerful subwoofer the laws of physics allow, given the maximum amount of mass density in a volume and the speed of light.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...
It's pretty wild how much astronomy has progressed, especially with advancements in adaptive optics, interferometry, and space telescopes. Even ground-based observatories have improved way beyond what most people would've expected a few decades ago
I feel infinitesimally small.
Yeah, same here. It's a humbling feeling... realizing how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. But also kind of amazing that, despite our smallness, we've figured out how to explore and understand the universe at this scale
me too, but big things have small beginnings!
The Wikipedia article has more useful information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHEREx
450M is somewhere between .1% and 0 % of the total number of galaxies in the observable universe, so I am laying claim to 50, galaxies, which is hopefully a full set of galaxie types, but with a little haggling and trading, buying and selling galaxies I can figure that out later. My Mom says as a child she sent away and got title to one sqare inch of the moon, but it was a much smaller universe then, especialy before inflation.
Imagine the value after cosmic inflation kicks in
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/12/signal-acquired-na... ("Signal Acquired: NASA’s SPHEREx Begins Science Mission")
Success!
Do these missions ever build back-up hardware? What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap, or there is a malfunction during the deploy (see Viasat VS3 antenna deploy failure).
It is an added cost, but it cannot be that much compared to the overall R&D/tooling/launch/ect cost.
Into the 1970's, NASA did that. That was why there was Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, etc. Since then, however, NASA has stopped doing that. It became a balancing act- yes, 0 to 1 is much more expensive than 1 to 2, (1 to n is not quite as cheap as it is with software but it's still much cheaper than 0->1), but NASA Science is in the business of answering questions. The question is, will building, launching, and operating (the expensive part) two Parker Solar Probe's and two Juno's answer more questions than building one Parker Solar Probe, one Juno, and one OSIRIS-Rex? Almost certainly the three different probes answers more questions than two copies of two different probes. So once launch vehicle reliability got to be good enough that the fear of total mission failure went down low enough (1), duplicate missions basically went away.
1: Edited to add: this is actually tied into the Space Shuttle in interesting ways. See T.A. Heppenheimer, _The Space Shuttle Decision_ for why the STS became the sole space launch system for all of the US Government. Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
Great answer.
> Of course if it's manned it's reliability has to be so high that you don't have to worry about loss of payload, so building two copies of it was no longer necessary.
I wasn't expecting a space shuttle tie in, but of course there would be. They sure had to promise a lot to get that thing off the ground.
> What if the probe is lost because of a lunch mishap
Well, hopefully the people who are building the probe aren't eating their lunches on top of it.
(Yes, I know. Fun typo nonetheless.)
Like the myth Inuit have 100 words for snow, how many words do astronomers have for big?
aquisition of signal! https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-launches-missions-to-...
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
I call it here, Musk will cut it before they do it
I highly doubt it, but is that plausible?
It’s possible. But if he thinks his company will benefit (like by launching the things into Space) then he probably won’t. Sad that this is where we are. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
To be honest, I was expecting Elon and DOGE to have completely gutted NASA by now, while at the same time allocating more contracts to SpaceX.
They're working on it. NASA HQ has already cut their "Office of the Chief Scientist" (among others) and the current proposal is to cut 50% of the science budget (which would effectively kill it, it's already been squeezed).
I'd imagine he's currently more focused on FAA to get them off his back about Starship issues.
Awarding new contracts doesn't require gutting NASA first, so he can get to it later once the FAA has bent the knee
This is a SpaceX contract
SpaceX might be the one that takes it to orbit, but that's the end of their involvement. It would be one of the NASA run locations that would be controlling the craft, receiving the data, analyzing the data, etc. The JWST is not a French contract just because it caught a ride on an Ariane rocket.
To call that a SpaceX contract is a very myopic view.
The launch vehicle is SpaceX, but the science and mission operations are NASA/JPL.
And to add to that, DOGE has been known to cancel contracts where the money has already been paid (so we're effective paying for nothing); SpaceX already has what it needs from this contract and has nothing to lose by cancelling the mission now.
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> four suitcase-sized satellites
Americans will use anything else but the metric system :)
Wait, is this carry on sized or checked size?
Is it delta's size limits, or are we following united or American Airlines? Or heaven forbid, alligent?
Believe me, many of us wish we were on the metric system.
I do a lot of large carpentry projects for fun and wood is produced in inch and foot dimensions—and the most common “beam”, a 2x4, is actually 1.5”x3.5”. You can buy “dimensional lumber” that’s actually 2”x4”, but that’s rare and expensive to find. So putting two 2x4s together doesn’t even make a 4x4 (you end up with 3”x3.5”; a 4x4 is 3.5”x3.5”).
Anyways, as I’m doing calculations I’m measuring things like 5/8” or 9/16” and then adding or subtracting large fractions in my head. It’s absolutely stupid.
Let alone converting between different units makes most people unable to imagine the relative size of things in distance, weight, or volume. I really believe the US education system would benefit if we switched to metric. It almost happened in the 1970s.
Hey! I know exactly how many Stanley cups fit in four suitcases, you don't have to tell me twice.
</s>
The PUNCH mission features four 140-pound small satellites, each about 1-by-2-by-3 feet in size.
Or
The PUNCH mission features four 63.5 kg small satellites, each about 0.3048 m × 0.6096 m × 0.9144 m in size.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spherex/2025/03/04/nasas-spherex-punc...
About 30x60x90cm in size.
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This is so cool, but I did not see a key piece of info in the article: does the ongoing operation of this mission fall under NASA's science budget and therefore at risk of cuts and defunding under Trump [1]?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/white-house-may-seek-t...
This one is planned to launch on Falcon so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's one project the administration spares.
Sure, the launch will go through, but SpaceX doesn't see any recurring revenue from later operations, and I wouldn't put it past the current administration to cut NASA's budget such that continuing operations are affected.
Everything launches on a Falcon these days. No one else can catch up in terms of safety cost or speed.
I'm not sure how to make out of comments like this. Is SpaceX actually launching customer payloads under $50m or whatever? Because, unless they are, it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA, which is already like 15t to LEO for $67m at 150 JPY/USD, which leaves F9 reusable barely competitive in price. I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
Superheavy-Starship reusable launches at F9 price would completely destroy everything in space space, but so far the only things it had disrupted are itself and airline services under its flightpath. And even F9 is starting to show increasingly clear signs of repetitive "old space" scrubs as NASA gets more disrupted.
Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
I'm sorry no, you should spend some time actually understanding the industry.
JAXA builds a tiny amount of rockets, almost exclusively for their own use. They have never been a significant player and its very unlikely that will change anytime soon.
Its pure fantasy to suggest otherwise. And even if they could reliably hit these prices at commercial launch scale, Falcon 9 could easily lower their prices if real competitors actually existed.
If H3 was such a dynamic thread as you suggest, why did Amazon not buy 100s of launches from them. They bought launches from every SpaceX competitor, but not Japan.
> I don't know what India or China charge for foreign customers, but is it really reasonable to expect worse deal than Mitsubishi from them? ...
China isn't really relevant. Western stuff is just not going to fly from China.
India used to do more commercial stuff, but SpaceX Rideshare is far, far, far more popular.
The reality is, India large rockets, like Japan, is mostly build for their own program, they don't really have that much access capability.
> Is that really a meaningful statement that stands, or it that just hand wavy glance away one now?
The $67m figure is the same one I'm finding for Falcon 9 (and it can carry loads 40% heavier). That made me think they were matching each other on price to stay competitive in the market and that seems correct as the internal costs I'm seeing for SpaceX Falcon 9 launches are estimated around $15mil, meaning they have a large margin from which to come down from.
> it won't be long before JAXA/MHI starts selling H3 at half the cost of H-IIA
SpaceX doesn't stand still. It's weird to think that in several years SpaceX will be in the same place (relying on Falcon 9) yet JAXA, etc will have improved dramatically.
> SpaceX doesn't stand still.
So are they launching F9 at $67m? Or do you merely expect SpaceX to eventually price match? Not that MHI is selling a lot of slots, but still. Quoted payload figures is also within ballparks.
They are actually doing launches as low as $62 million (as of 2024). They also have enormous margin to lower this cost because even the upper-bound estimate by industry analysts on the Falcon 9 launch cost for SpaceX is only $28 million.
Source: https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#elemento...
Costs are largely meaningless when talking about global situation and other nations and their strategic interests. Europe will move fully to ESA for anything actually important, China and India have their own stuff too. Private satellites, sure why not if companies are OK with risking of getting their payload removed at last minute because somebody again bruised musk's ego.
Business can't be done in an environment with zero trust, doesn't matter how much better the offer looks on paper. That trust with spacex is gone for good.
> Costs are largely meaningless
Costs are never meaningless when you're talking about technical projects that cost billions of dollars.
> trust with spacex is gone for good.
Sorry to pop your bubble, but they launched 134 rockets with payloads last year and they all made it to their orbits successfully except for one of their own starlink payloads. This is more than 90% of all launches that occurred last year.
> 90%
You mean 50%, there were 253 successful orbital launches last year
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_in_spaceflight
SpaceX is going to pass whatever company is launching Falcon in short order, leaving them in the dust
The Falcon 9 is a SpaceX rocket
That was the joke. They are making their main product obsolete
That's a good question. Given how frequently NASA's science budget gets caught in political crosswinds, it's definitely a concern
Trump created the Space Force so he will presumably want some amount of funding for rockets and what not. If Space Force fails it would make him look bad after all.
Notwithstanding what you said, it is worth noting that the US Space Force has been a long time in the making: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
Trump is the one who actually decided to go through with the creation of a distinct branch rather than having it as a command. I think it is fair to say he created it.
There are all sorts of politicians and military members who advocate for a distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command. If a politician ends up doing that, then he should get credit for creating it even though it has been a long time coming.
> distinct Cyber branch of the military instead of Cyber Command
It's not 'instead', it's adding a cyber branch to a different org chart. There are two major org charts in the US military:
The services, such as Army, Navy, Space Force, etc., which are generally defined by domain (land, sea, orbit) and whose role is to recruit, organize, train, and equip forces - to prepare them, but not to deploy or command them in operations.
The combatant commands, which are defined by geography - such as Africa Command, Indo-Pacific Command - and sometimes by geography-independent domains, such as as Space Command or Cyber Command. The combatant commands deploy the resources provided by the services in various combinations. Modern conflicts generally require resources from multiple services/domains working jointly.
It makes some sense - you want domain experts to train and equip them for their domain, then you must necessarily deploy them jointly. Who should organize, train, and equip sea-born forces? Probably you want the Navy to do that, not the Army. Who should organize, train, and equip electronic domain forces (I hate the term 'cyber')? Do you want your IT organization organized, trained, and equipped (think of the importance of each step) by the US Marine Corps, or maybe by some actual researchers, engineers, and experienced managers?
That really has nothing to do with whether or not operations for this project will be funded over the next several years.
Yep, it looks like it will be cut and closed, which is truly unfortunate. It’s disappointing to see that science nor innovation are not a priority for this administration. And this doge cutting of funding or even shutting down important projects will have long-term consequences, impacting research, education, and technological advancements that benefit everyone.
This is a proposal (not final) budget to be sent to congress. What congress eventually allocates is what matters.
Not according to the current presidential administration. Impoundment is their stated goal.
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Could you please stop taking HN threads on generic flamewar tangents? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Unfounded, IMHO:
Musk is obviously a factor in space exploration.
Trump founded the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force
Also, as soon as China starts to put people on the Moon before Artemis can, I doubt POTUS would let that slide...
Trump 1 mostly targeted climate and Earth science (when it came to NASA funding). Trump 2/Musk is going after everything. They've just shut down the Office of the Chief Scientist at NASA and are planning to cut fully half of the remaining science budget.
This administration under through Elon is pushing to cut 50% of NASA's science funding. Mapping galaxies we'll never visit is a purely scientific endeavor. Trump seems to care more about military expansion or for lack of a better term more "masculine" expansion of space. The science stuff is not interesting to him, and I'm honestly not sure I think Musk cares about it that much anymore either.
I don't think it's unfounded. This mission is purely about science, in the pursuit of understanding our universe, and is unlikely to lead to any military applications (and even if it might, I doubt Trump et al. would have the foresight to see it).
From the Musk perspective, he wants to go to Mars. Anything that doesn't contribute to that goal could easily go on the chopping block.
Regarding China and the moon, this particular science experiment has nothing to do with that.
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Rule #1 of government spending is why build one when you can build two at twice the price
Great movie