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by
Marc Boucher
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!”
Marc Boucher is an entrepreneur, writer, editor, podcaster and publisher who has worked in space media for more than 25 years. In 1999 he co-founded SpaceRef with Keith Cowing. The new media company grew into a network that included NASA Watch and The Astrobiology Web. After selling SpaceRef, he joined Multiverse Media, which later merged with SpaceNews. There he helped steer the combined company toward more multimedia, a subscription paywall and intelligence products, and pushed for a mobile app. He is also the founder of SpaceQ Media, Canada’s space news and market intelligence publication.
Marc started his first Internet content business in 1992 and hasn’t looked back. When he’s not working, he loves exploring Canada and the world and expanding his photography skills.
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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.
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.
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.