Planetary Resources To Build Crowdfunded Public Space Telescope 60
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."
Re:Billion (Score:5, Insightful)
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.