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Your point being?

Hubble in certain circumstances can see narrow and far. If you express this as a cone, you can extrapolate a volume.

It might be very useful to have something that can search wide and maybe not as far; nearer Earth dangers perhaps. Express that as a wider cone and extrapolate volume.

This is true. The telescope is much more than just the primary mirror.

Roman has two science instruments, a wide-field imager (“WFI”) and a coronagraph (“CGI”) and they were both built by NASA for this purpose (optics, electronics, detectors, deformable mirrors).

The WFI optics includes filters and a prism and grism for spectroscopy, and of course the very large CCD arrays.

The coronagraph is a rather special tech demo and allows imaging of exoplanets (Jupiter-like) while blocking the light of the host star. (https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/coron...). It’s a precursor to HWO which is mentioned down-thread.

From what I can gather it is much more than just the primary mirror but the entire platform sans classified parts, which were replaced with NASA's optics and sensors.

Hubble was the result of an open competition between a variety of companies and technologies. But the winners were the people who built the KH-11 spy satellite, who could offer the cheapest and best proved options because of their experience with KEENAN.

Both KH-11 and Hubble had similar sized mirrors, but that wasn't because of design reuse, it was because that was the biggest primary mirror you could fit in the Space Shuttle cargo bay (1). In actual fact no KH-11 went into space on a Shuttle, but the plan up until the Challenger disaster had been for the STS to carry all US satellites into space, including the KH-11, which was designed around that cargo bay.

1: The space shuttle cargo bay was sized the way it was for NRO payloads, but it seems clear that the USAF wasn't thinking about KEEENAN when they requested that size- a design like that would be better if it was wider and didn't need to be nearly as long. My suspicion is, when NASA asked them what size they wanted for the bay, they took the last design they had- the just cancelled KH-10 Manned Orbiting Laboratory, and used that.

No, Hubble didn't reuse any components from spy satellites. However, the chosen mirror diameter was decided by the size of the mirrors being produced for the Keyhole programme, as it meant NASA would be able to reuse Perkin-Elmer's existing fabrication facility.

Adversity forces a scientific budget and for jobs to be created in related research areas. For some reason we don’t find it important to maintain that level of funding when there’s no adversity.

Musks company provides not only the most cost effective but also the most reliable access to space that is currently unparalleled by any other company.

We should thank the government for spending tax money efficiently.

You should blame the legacy aerospace companies whom purposely inflate contracts and take forever to do things for there being a lack of competition, not Musk.

> the president giving no bid contacts to incompetent donors

Are you talking about SLS?

Oh maybe you'd say that is "Senate Launch System", it's complicated, job program, 50 states sharing, and so on?

I always thought this was a ridiculous part of the movie but it truly stuck with me more anything.

It watches the stars for evidence of guilt.

Like Obamacare?

Not unusual, and there are likely a number of contributing factors.

Falcon launches to the ISS typically have an instantaneous launch window (roughly, when the plane of the ISS's orbit sweeps over the launch site). If they miss it, they try again about a day later.

Falcon (both Heavy and its little sibling Falcon 9) uses subcooled densified propellants which limit how long it can sit waiting for launch while fueled before the LOX warms and expands too much.

A short window means they only have to compute and verify and program one trajectory.

There's some discussion about a similar launch ~10 years ago (in that case going to L1) https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/2vb5kv/1second_laun...

It is important to point out, since you did not note the timezone with that quote, that the launch is actually scheduled for NET 07:26am EDT or 11:26:00 UTC.

You can get live countdowns and updates at https://www.spacex.com/launches which will link to first-party livestream coverage during the launch.

No need to go through third-party and advertising-laden dot-com sites.

The Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are intolerant to countdown holds late in the sequence. In particular, after propellant has been loaded, there must be no delay in launch. Any countdown holds will necessarily turn into a scrub for the day, as the propellant must be completely unloaded and the process restarted to prepare for launch. With the instantaneous window, it'll either be "go/no-go" at 07:26am EDT, or they'll go-around to another opportunity on Monday morning, around 07:22am.

That's like Hubble funding cuts back in the '70s.

The NASA budget was $5M as a placeholder, but Noel Hinners cut it to zero to light a fire under the community, instead of a bogus pretend-its-still-happening number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Quest_f...

my brain is not what it used to be due to long-covid so it's very possible I made a mistake

but 500 megabits per second to me is 500mbps?

ie. my cablemodem is 100mbps which is 100 megabits per second?

and that would [make Roman] 5.4 Terrabytes aka 5.4TB per day

but the transmitter is not at full speed full power 24/7

so it is 1.5TB per day in documentation that I do not have handy but vaguely remember

to repeat the more amazing part is that is from a MILLION MILES away, wow

(JWST "only" does 23mbps, 23 megabits per second)