David Kipping

There's two things.

I mean, it's the launch cost itself, which is hopefully going to mean per kilogram is going to dramatically reduce the cost.

Even if it's a factor of 10 higher than what Elon originally promised, this is going to be a revolution for the cost to launch.

That means you could do all sorts of things.

You could launch...

large telescopes which could be basically like JWST, but you don't even have to fold them up.

JWST had this whole issue with its design that it's six and a half meters across, and so there's no fuselage which is that large at the time.

Ares IV wasn't large enough for that, and so they had to fold it up into this kind of complicated origami.

A large part of the cost was

figuring out how to fold it up, testing that it unfolded correctly, repeated testing, and there was something like 130 fail points or something during this unfolding mechanism.

And so all of us were holding our breath during that process.

But if you have the ability to just launch arbitrarily large masses,

at least comparatively compared to JWST, and very large mirrors into space, you can more or less repurpose ground-based mirrors.

The Hubble Space Telescope mirror and the JWST mirrors are designed to be extremely lightweight, and that increased their cost significantly.

They have this kind of honeycomb design on the back to try and minimize the weight.

If you don't really care about weight because it's so cheap, then you could just literally grab many of the existing ground-based mirrors across telescopes across the world, four-meter, five-meter mirrors, and just pretty much attach them to a chassis and have your own space-based telescope.

I think the Breakthrough Foundation, for instance, is an entity that

has been interested in doing this sort of thing.

That raises the prospects of having not just one JWST.

JWST is a fantastic resource, but it's split between all of us.