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Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope
kkleiner writes "Planetary Resources, the company that set its sights on mining asteroids, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $1M to crowdsource the world's first publicly accessible space telescope. In an interview, co-founder and co-chairman Peter Diamandis stated that the ARKYD 100 telescope is a means of 'extending the optic nerve of humanity.' The company hopes that the campaign, which is supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green, will make an orbiting telescope available to the public to help schools and museums in their educational efforts to inspire great enthusiasm in space."
> supported by Richard Branson, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Seth Green
My imagination can't comprehend what a business meetting or board meeting would be like with these three, but I bet it's awesome!
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
The telescope itself isn't, in this case, a groundbreaking state-of-the-art super-expensive instrument. It's a reasonably nice 'scope by amateur astronomy standards, and the viewing from space is great --- but the main point of this project is education/outreach. For a million bucks, you can build a lot more capable telescope on earth (including a dark site location); but that might not have the awesomeness factor to eighth-graders as controlling a space telescope for their class project. If you want a space telescope with groundbreaking scientific capabilities that you can't get (at any price) from Earth, you might need $1e9 dollars; but $1e6 (plus a whole lot of free mission/design support that would get counted in the budget of a $1e9 project) seems reasonable for putting an "advanced amateur" telescope in space.
They say "public access," not "free access" --- this'll be a pay-to-play "tourist attraction," with some time handed out free* (*paid by donations/grants, or the taxpayer as a tax write-off) for education/outreach. It'll be available "to the public" in the sense that anyone in the public can plop down a couple hundred bucks per snapshot from it (as opposed to needing to write a grant through a research institution). So you won't be getting any "Galactic Street View" time slots on this telescope unless you're willing to pay, which will limit the demand to the available supply.
Ultraviolet light with wavelengths blueward of about 300 nanometers does not get through the atmosphere. If we want to see it, we have to go to space. And the ultraviolet is where some of the most exciting astronomy is happening right now.