>>11782623This.
Lets say conservatively that Starship can launch a telescope with a single element primary mirror with a 7 meter diameter.
Lets very pessimistically estimate Starship's real world launch cost at $50 million.
Let's assume SpaceX is the one that sells NASA on the telescope design, and SpaceX builds it in-house with lessons learned from Falcon 9, Starship, and Starlink fabrication efforts.
Let's assume even then that a single one of these telescopes costs about $50 million. I'll also say for simplicity's sake that these SpaceX telescopes are launched with enough propellant to push themselves out to the same Lagrange point JWST is gonna use, which should be very doable given that Starship will launch between 100 and 150 tons to LEO and the telescope shouldn't mass more than 30 tons dry.
Anyway, each telescope comes with a total price tag of ~$100 million. Since JWST has cost upwards of $10,000 million at this point, that means for the same price tag we could instead have a literal fleet of 100 space telescopes that each have a primary mirror ~125% the size and all the same far infrared observation capabilities as JWST.
That's a total of 125 times the data collection rate, all with higher resolution and/or shorter observation times required. This is obviously a vastly more capable science tool, before you even consider the possibility of using the entire array at once as a single virtual telescope for observing nearby exoplanets directly via interferometry.
They are LITERALLY ROBBING YOU of your money and DELAYING great discoveries in space in order to support the JWST program.
It's not going to work anyway, too many single points of failure, so really they're taking >10 billion dollars to deliver nothing at all.
The future is not densely packed folding mirror folding sunshield telescopes, it is mass produced arrays of cheaply-launched static mirror telescopes.
