this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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Honestly, Hubble is old, very old. It was based on a spy satellite that the US developed in the 70s, we built 5 of them. There were essentially 5 hubbles looking down at the earth and only 1 looking up.
But those spy satellites were retired years ago, they're 4 generations old now. Since then, we've gradually launched 14 other spy sats to replace them.
All that is to say, why are we still content with our 1 ancient Hubble telescope? Clearly there is a budget for more. If the military can point 19 satellites down at the earth, surely we should be able to point 5 upward, right?
Yeah, the Hubble is struggling up there in LEO, but this isn't a hubble problem, it's a US prioritization problem. You get what you pay for, and apparently we're only willing to pay for war.
You've heard of JWST right?
I was also going to reference the Chandra XRay telescope, but holy shit, I had no idea it was almost 27 years old
I have models of both Hubble and Chandra telescopes hanging in my room. ๐
It's a great telescope, it made a whole slew of discoveries possible. But yeah, digital imaging has improved a lot over the last 27 years, do you remember what digital cameras were like in 1998?
What we have is great, and what we've managed to do with it is astonishing. But... I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by not updating these space observatories more frequently and by not building enough of them for all of the observations we want to make. Because we could, but we aren't.