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Commercialization

ARKYD the People's Space Telescope Gets Funded

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
June 20, 2013
Filed under ,

ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone, Planetary Resources
Marc’s note: After appearing to stall late last week, the Planetary Resources Kickstarter campaign to raise $1 million for the E/PO ARKYD telescope has achieved its initial goal and was pushed over the top overnight.
Now with 10 days left they will try and reach their stretch goal of $2 million which they’ll “invest the additional funds to enhance the ARKYD space telescope technology to enable it to search for alien planets!

SpaceRef co-founder, entrepreneur, writer, podcaster, nature lover and deep thinker.

3 responses to “ARKYD the People's Space Telescope Gets Funded”

  1. Steve Whitfield says:
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    What I like about this crowfunding system is that you get public feedback and a sense of how a project will be received, and followed, before spending a pile of money. It therefore has some value as a risk assessment tool.

    • Paul451 says:
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      I think there’s also some value in emphasising the fundamental cultural change of being able to buy your own space telescope. “People on Kickstarter buy space telescope” implies University of Somewhere astronomy/geo/etc department can also buy their own space telescope just as they might buy other lab equipment, if it suits their purpose. It allows small innovative programs without needing to get time on the big-glass. It also allows slow programs, which don’t need lens-diameter, but need long observation times that can’t be justified for an high-demand billion dollar facility.

      It’s the same thing I hope will happen when SpaceX gets reusable crew launch, and Bigelow sells private space stations. It means a super-rich person can buy a private space station for less money than he would pay for a big yacht. (Ie, $50-100m). And spend less money taking his family there a couple of times a year than he spends maintaining his private jet.

      “What will you be doing for summer?”
      “Oh, I’m thinking of flying the kids up to our space station.”

      It signals a fundamental change in how we think about space travel.

  2. djschultz3 says:
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    A 20 centimeter telescope would have a diffraction limit of about 0.6 arcseconds. It makes little or no sense to put such a telescope in space when it could achieve similar results on the summit of Mauna Kea, where astronomical seeing is typically about 0.5 to 0.7 arcseconds. A robotic telescope on Mauna Kea would be substantially cheaper and could be repaired when something goes wrong.

    A small telescope in space could be useful for ultraviolet astronomy, or for research programs requiring very precise photometry, but the telescope is not being marketed to the public for such uses. They are selling it as a way for the public to take “beautiful pictures”, without explaining that the pictures will not be any better than a ground based telescope of similar size at a good mountaintop location.