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#773: What Would You Do With $1 Billion For Astronomy?
We are powerless fans of space exploration. But what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality? Someone asked us what we’d do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes? But what if we had more? 100 Billion! A trillion! All the monies! You keep asking, and this week we answer you! Come hear what Fraser and Pamela would do if they were given complete control over $1billion that had to be used for astronomy.
Show Notes- What if we had $100B or even $1 trillion to explore the cosmos?
- Ground-based observatories: big science at surprisingly low cost
- Pamela’s dream: VLT North or Vera Rubin North in the Canary Islands
- Funding the Breakthrough Starshot interstellar mission
- Fixing the grant system: fully funding 50–100 researchers for a decade
- A $100M lunar interferometer mission to study stellar surfaces
- Affordable rover missions and rideshares to the Moon and Mars
- Solar sails: low-cost missions for asteroids and deep space exploration
- The value of small missions as testbeds for future breakthroughs
- Investing in next-generation planet hunters: “super PLATO / mini Kepler”
- Follow-up to Gaia using infrared to map hidden stars and brown dwarfs
- Ultimate wish list:
- Radio telescope on Moon’s far side
- New orbital Great Observatories
- Successor to Chandra for high-energy universe
- Nulling interferometers to find Earth-like worlds
- Solar gravitational lens telescope for megapixel exoplanet imaging
- Importance of Mars Sample Return for life detection
- Fleets of robotic telescopes for public education and research
Fraser Cain:
Astronomy Cast, Episode 773 What Would We Do With a Billion Dollars? Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly, facts-based journey through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today.
With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a Senior Scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest. Hey Pamela, so this is me talking from the past to us, because at the time that now everyone is listening to this, I am still traveling and we have no idea how I’m doing.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
You have gone to the land of UTC plus seven?
Fraser Cain:
Yes, I am in the future.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Leaving me behind?
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I’m working on my tan, I am walking in the jungle. Who knows what’s happening?
I hope it went well. And you? Who knows how you’re doing?
So there’s no point asking how we’re doing, because we would just be projecting into the future to try and imagine. So we’ll move on. We are powerless fans of space exploration, but what if some fool gave us the authority and funding to make our space dreams a reality?
Someone asked us what we do with a billion dollars. What missions? Which telescopes?
But what if we had more? A hundred billion, a trillion, all the monies. Okay, so it’s funny, when you had originally pitched this episode, I, in my mind, was ten billion dollars.
I thought you’d said ten million dollars. I’m like, okay, yeah, ten million, you know, that’s something to sink my teeth into. And you’re like, okay, so remember, it’s like one billion dollars.
I’m like, what? Yeah, yeah. That’s not any money.
Right. I can’t, I could barely eat lunch on a billion dollars. So fine.
So let’s kind of give people a sense of what you can buy for a billion dollars. What are some missions that would cost roughly a billion dollars?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So I don’t know about missions, but the one that made me happy was the VLT is about nine hundred million to build. And I would love to replicate the VLT, the Very Large Telescope, in the Northern Hemisphere, have another one of these four massive mirrors with satellite mirrors that can do interferometry, that have all these amazing different instruments on board. And let’s just be prepared to do equal science at the highest resolutions possible.
Fraser Cain:
So the construction of Vera Rubin was about five hundred and seventy million. So you could buy a North, a Vera Rubin North for that budget. The Extremely Large Telescope was a little over a billion euros.
So I don’t know what that is in U.S. dollars, maybe 1.3. So kind of in that. So you can build a second Extremely Large Telescope. So ground-based observatories are surprisingly affordable.
And it’s not surprising to me that that your instinct was to go after a ground-based observatory because I had the exact same instinct, which is that like Vera Rubin North, please, right? Or Extremely Large Telescope North. And this was in the works, right?
The 30 meter telescope was going to be built in Hawaii as a counter to the Southern Hemisphere’s telescope. And so the future of that is uncertain. Maybe it’ll end up in the Canary Islands.
So I would probably build either the Extremely Large Telescope North or the Vera Rubin North and put them on the Canary Islands.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so that hopefully we can figure out how to do some savings. And I was like, so what could we do with like 100 million left over?
Fraser Cain:
We could fully fund Breakthrough Starshot. That’s the amount of money that they were intending to spend on Breakthrough Starshot. Yeah, it was $100 million.
That’s how much Yuri Milner had set aside. And then in the end, they only actually gave a handful of million. And so never actually funded Breakthrough Starshot.
But that was the plan. Now, that wouldn’t get you to another star system, but it would allow a lot of people to do interesting work for a decade on interstellar spacecraft.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Speaking of people doing interesting work, one of the things I looked up is, again, we are not going to consider like endowments or anything like that. We are earmarking money to go to specific things. And so…
Fraser Cain:
So not just general outreach, development of quantum, quantum, quantumness.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, one thing I considered is right now, researchers have, for every grant we get, in general, you are limited to two months of salary per grant, which means for someone like me, you need at least, if you’re super lucky, six grants to be full-time employed. Most of the time, you have to have even more than that, because you get two weeks here, you get two months there, and it works out to… You’re never really full-time employed is what it actually works out to.
But the dream for all of us is to be able to just focus on thinking, experimenting, doing research, and not having to spend all this time just constantly asking for money that you’re probably never going to get. So you could, for $100 million, fund 50 to 100 people, depending on what stage in their career they’re at, for 10 years. And by just saying, okay, we’re going to take a bunch of people at different stages in their career, doing completely different types of science, and we’re just going to say, go.
We are funding you.
Fraser Cain:
So you gave a really wonderful and elaborate explanation of what you would do if you were going to break the rules of how we would set up this.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I said we’re not going to endow. So I’m saying we’re giving them 10 years- That sounds like an endowment. Endowment lasts forever and requires you to only spend 3% to 5% of the amount of money to do the process.
Fraser Cain:
A 10-year endowment, okay. So what about space? Because it gets really hard to spend money in space.
So I’ll give you sort of the example that I want, which is that I would like an interferometer on the moon. And so when you look at the budget of, say, the Blue Ghost Lander, these NASA lunar COTS missions are in the $70 million-ish range. So for $100 million, I think you could do this mission that I did an interview about this, that you would land on the moon with an optical telescope, and then there would be a rover that would be attached to the telescope.
It would drive out about 100 meters away from the telescope, and then it would have a telescope on board. And it would point up in the sky, and then you would be able to resolve features on the surfaces of stars, because the interferometer allows you to see bright objects, but with a very large baseline. And so we could resolve the surface of Betelgeuse.
We could resolve the surface features of other stars. We could separate binary stars into their separate pieces. So I think that’s $100 million.
And so then that got me thinking, like, okay, so if you could have lunar landers that would do really interesting things, things that would really push things forward, at $100 million a pop, you could do a lot of really interesting missions, you know?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So to give some perspective, the Viper rover, which is extraordinarily complex, was developed across two different programs, actually, and over a decade. It’s estimated that its total cost will come in around $500 to $800 million, depending on what all you include in the costing. And that’s as complicated as it gets.
So yeah, we should totally be able to do, like… Do you remember the little, tiny first rover that they put on Mars that found the blueberries?
Fraser Cain:
I’m trying to remember what it was called. Well, the blueberries were found by Spirit and Opportunity. I think it was Spirit.
I thought they were found…
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Are you thinking… The ones that had the yoga bear?
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, you’re thinking of the little rover that was attached to the Mars Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Oh, yeah.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, I think the rover was actually called Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
No? No, it was…
Fraser Cain:
No, the mission was Pathfinder.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Sojourner.
Fraser Cain:
Sojourner, that’s it.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And its job was just to test, can you drive around on Mars? It didn’t find anything but rocks.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, so Pathfinder and Sojourner, Pathfinder with Sojourner. That size Tonka truck version, RC robot version of a rover, that’s nowadays something that we can consider doing. And the chipsets are so powerful and so small.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, so there was a 10 kilogram rover on the Japanese Hakuto-R mission. And that’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about. And so it was designed to land on the moon and then and roam around under solar power and explore.
And so we could put… You could do a fancier version, maybe you’re at 120 million, 150 million for your lander on the moon, and you’ve got rovers and telescopes and all kinds of stuff.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And there’s other things that you can start doing, like ride shares of tiny things. One of the things we’d love to be able to do is really understand the weather across the surface of Mars. And there’s this absolutely giggle worthy program being worked on in the Netherlands called Tumbleweed Rover.
It’s just this giant ball of infrastructure with sails and it rolls all over the place. And according to wind tunnel tests, Martian gravity and wind, they should be able to go up like 30 degree inclines with this thing.
Fraser Cain:
That’d be cool.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And so you can start imagining you can ride share tumbling rovers to Mars. You can use the lawn dart approach that was explored for Venus by the Russians about a decade ago, except start looking at Mars because there’s things to ride share with to Mars. And as you go over, you just deploy all these literally lawn dart type things with little tiny antennas.
So they keep their orientation thanks to center of mass, hit the ground, dive into the ground, leave the antenna sticking out and just monitor the weather.
Fraser Cain:
So this idea of ride shares, I 100% agree with you. So one mission that I was really excited about was the NEA Scout, the Near Earth Asteroid Scout mission. And this was going to be a solar sail, was on the Artemis 1 mission.
It was in the ring, the docking ring between the upper and lower stages. And unfortunately, because that rocket didn’t launch, a lot of the batteries died on the missions that were inside of it. But the idea was great.
It was $25 million to build a solar sail mission that would have gone to an asteroid. Like people say, oh, like NASA wastes money. That was amazing for the budget.
And so imagine, like for me, the theme is really about that there are a bunch of really exciting and interesting technologies. Solar sails are probably at the very top of the list that we just do not have enough practice with. And so I would want to see a real emphasis on solar sail type missions because then they’ll have an application across many different spacecraft.
You could just put a solar sail on the deep space gateway to keep its orientation. You could put a solar sail as just a backup on other missions that might’ve been able to save missions. All right.
I’m going to give you sort of another sort of direction that I would want to go with my billion dollars. And that is, you know, that NASA’s test mission was actually relatively inexpensive. And this is a planet hunting mission that’s found hundreds, we’ll probably find thousands of planets by the time it’s done.
It was, its budget was like 400 million. And then the upcoming European Space Agency’s PLATO mission, which is going to be a much fancier version with like 24 separate cameras. It’s in the 500 million euro range.
So 600-ish million dollars, so there’s some room to spare. And I would love to see a fancier version of PLATO because we lost Kepler before we could get that discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star. But is there a kind of a mid-range, super PLATO, mini Kepler that would get us that detection of the Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. You and I, I love the fact that we looked in completely different directions because like that’s the kind of thing where I’d love to see a return of small PI-led missions. And one of the awesome things that we get to see the plans for is the NIAC stuff where they’re testing all sorts of like absolutely wild ideas.
And we’re at a point where solar panels are so powerful now, or they generate so much power nowadays, where chipsets are so small and so capable nowadays, where CCDs and CMOS chips, depending on which technology you’re going with, are so sensitive. We can do things that we never even dreamed of. And there are technologies waiting to be tested and combined.
Like if I were allowed to find engineers and play to my heart’s delight, one of the things I haven’t seen, and maybe you have because you see a lot more of these than I do. I would love to see something that is brought up to speed using solar sails on the inner solar system and then has an ion drive that continues to accelerate them as they hit the higher speeds. So you can imagine you’re sending outer solar system tiny things out there, just big enough to be able to send back a good signal, come up to speed with the solar sail, drop the solar sail, send the ion drive into activity, keep accelerating, keep going, and just do the thing that Don did with a kickstart to get you going.
Fraser Cain:
Your recommendation about NASA NIAC, I am a gigantic fan of NIAC. I report on pretty much every single story that they, everything that they fund and their total budget. I mean, they give you just a couple of hundred thousand dollars per project for the phase one, more like 700,000 for phase two, maybe a million, a little bit over a million for phase three, that every year, NASA’s NIAC’s total budget is, I don’t know, $10 million?
Like almost nothing compared to the rest of the, of the NASA financing. And yet they are the ideas of the future that are being considered. I would, can you imagine if you just expanded and expanded it so that you were, they had a really great pipeline that you were essentially, so it’s this idea of, of removing the risk that you don’t want to take on a new technology if you think it’s going to add too much technical risk to your mission.
And so, um, we need a way to de-risk really great ideas in a practical way to demonstrate that they work in space and that then these missions can then be considered down the road and they won’t increase the budget. When you think about a lot of the risks that were included in James Webb, they ballooned its budget. If they knew ahead of time which technologies were safe to work in space, which ones would be easy to use and so on, probably would have brought their costs down.
So, so I would love to see some kind of fancy NIAC that does, does a sort of ideas of the future and de-risking great ideas to bring down or bring up their technological readiness level for future missions.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And one of the things that’s getting reflected in what both of us are suggesting is due to budget constraints, we’re seeing both NASA and the National Science Foundation quite often ask what major things need supported. So we see the National Science Foundation and I think it’s the Department of Energy funding Vera Rubin Observatory and a bunch of these big cameras. We see NASA funding James Webb Space Telescope and TESS and Europa Clipper and flagship projects that you can never imagine a small university doing, whereas ESCAPADE is one of the few smaller missions that has been funded.
It’s coming out of the University of California, Berkeley. It has blue and gold, two separate things that will be heading off to Mars. But there’s very few of these smaller missions still getting done because resources are scarce.
And if you can fund something huge like Rubin, it revolutionizes the entire field. These smaller projects are test beds. They’re ideas that their children will revolutionize the entire field.
They’re just saying, hey, this is possible.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We’re currently killing the future by not investing in it. I’d like to have a future, please.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. Yeah. All right.
So another of my favorite missions is the Gaia mission. Oh, my favorite.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And it came in at about 600 million, so a little less than a billion dollars. And we learned so much about the Milky Way, about the cosmos from Gaia. And there’s another mission on the books that people are proposing, essentially a follow on to Gaia.
It would be an infrared version of Gaia. And so it would have that same level of astrometry to to measure the positions of all of the stars. But it would be looking more into the infrared.
So we’d be looking for the cooler objects, the red dwarfs, the brown dwarfs, maybe large exoplanets and looking for the motion of them. Because we still don’t have a great census of where all of the red dwarfs, brown dwarfs are, even though they’re the most common stars in the universe. So we’re still learning about that.
And so, you know, for my billion dollars, I could buy Gaia, too.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And Gaia, it is my favorite space mission so far. What they did with its technology. Go find a video, humans.
It had a light train like nothing else that has ever existed. And I can only hope we learn from that technology and build more things, building on what was learned.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s always makes me so sad when engineers come up with this absolutely brilliant idea.
With Gaia, the spacecraft had this CCD array and it had a telescope and it would slowly turn at the rate that it was depositing light onto the pixels on its camera system. And reading out those pixels. And then reading all those pixels.
Yeah. And it was perfectly tuned to make these measurements. It was a it’s a beautiful telescope.
And it’s so sad that it’s no longer operating.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And we could use something similar to that that also just worked brighter. One of the really stupid things in astronomy is we don’t actually know where Betelgeuse is.
It is, depending on the paper, between 410 light years and 640 light years. And we can measure the sucker’s angular size on the sky. And if we just knew where it was, we could like, there’s so much amazing physics we could do.
But it was too bright for Gaia. All right.
Fraser Cain:
So I think, you know, you get a sense, I think, from both of us that that there are these that there’s these scrappy ideas that are, you know, that there could be more funding to them, new forms of propulsion system, new ideas and so on. So let’s go the other way now. Let’s let’s if we had all the monies in the world, what would what would you want to see out there?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
If we had all the monies in the world, we definitely need a radio telescope on the far side of the moon. That that is a must, please.
Fraser Cain:
And, you know, a radio telescope on the far side of the moon gives us the ability to detect the hydrogen line from the dark ages of the universe. We essentially are able to scan this time when those first stars were forming and get that get a real sense of how the universe came together, which right now, you know, is outside the reach of James Webb.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it would be amazing if we could just start doing things like, can we please have an on orbit eight meter optical? Can we please have a bigger, more sensitive.
Fraser Cain:
Like LUVAR, we want 15, we want 20.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
OK, fine. But there was the great observatories that were built in the 80s and 90s. And Chandra’s still hanging out there doing its best.
And someday Chandra is going to stop. I want I want to have something on deck that is even better, more powerful, that takes us out into the high energy universe. I want a successor to Fermi out there ready to go.
I want to have the survey scope that has all the abilities that Swift has that it’s leveraging for gamma ray bursts to instead just be like, and now we are going to simultaneously observe this in optical infrared, gamma and X-ray, because why not?
Fraser Cain:
Yep. Yeah, so if money was like for me, if money was no object, I mean, the thing you mentioned, the 80 meter telescope, like we want to know whether there are Earth-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars within the habitable zone.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
We need that.
Fraser Cain:
We want to find Earth 2.0. And you need a coronagraph, you need a whopping big telescope with a whopping big coronagraph or multiple spacecraft flying in formation to perform a nulling interferometer. So, you know, originally it was the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which I think we mourn once a year. Yeah, at least.
You know, we put flowers on its grave and feel sad about it. And the successor to that is the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets, which is being developed by the European Space Agency. It’s going to be expensive.
You know, maybe not web expensive, but in that kind of range. My other one is Mars Sample Return Mission, because Perseverance collected all of these samples that very likely the answer to, is there life on Mars, is in one of those samples waiting on the surface of Mars. We just have to bring them home.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And at a certain point, we have to improve education. And there’s this amazing opportunity coming with the Rumen Observatory. It’s going to be spotting so many transient objects, things that flicker, flare and move in the night, that they have four different data repositories to handle the output.
And this is where you start being like, OK, we are just going to build fleets of robotic telescopes. And there are here in the United States, 125,000 libraries between town libraries, university libraries and school libraries. And so 300 million people, 125,000 libraries, that’s basically one library per 3,000 people on the planet.
So let’s start assigning each of those libraries a telescope that school kids can use for science fair projects, that people with spare time can use to follow up objects and just increase public engagement in science in a way that is shared resources and scalable in a reasonable way.
Fraser Cain:
I feel like you’re not really spending all the monies. That’s not very much monies.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that’s the thing, we’re not even spending that much money right now.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, yeah. So the one that is like the most ridiculous, probably in the hundred billion dollar range or more, would be the solar gravitational lens telescope.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah, this is Fraser’s thing that he brings up every year. And I just find it so remarkably ridiculous. Go ahead, explain this ridiculousness.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, well, it just is that you send the spacecraft out to 500 AU from the sun, where the gravity of the sun forms a natural gravitational lens, gives you a telescope, the natural multiplier to your telescope. Yeah. And so you would be able to see a megapixel image of an Earth-sized world orbiting around a sun-like star, like literally see the mountains, forests, oceans, clouds, etc.
With a relatively modest telescope, you just have to get out there. And so.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. And you have to get out there and stop.
Fraser Cain:
No, you don’t have to stop.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, you need to enter orbit.
Fraser Cain:
No, no, you’re going to keep moving. You just keep moving. As long as you stay in the cone, you can, as long as you head down the cone that’s created, lining up the planet with the star, you could be at 10,000 AU and it’s still fine.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. But the signal attenuation is a bit much.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, this is like the engineering challenges of getting a signal. But I mean, we’re getting signals from the Voyagers. So getting a signal, like it’s several, I think the Voyagers are like 100 AU.
So this is five times farther than the Voyagers.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
25 times less signal.
Fraser Cain:
Yes, it’s harder. That’s why it’s a, did I not get to spend a hundred billion dollars or what? Fair.
A trillion dollars, whatever. But, but if we could, then we would, you know, and we had the targets, we had the candidates. So you’d need some other telescope, like the habitable planet finder first, then you would like, at night you would see their cities.
It’s crazy. What we could see. So we just need the solar gravitational lens telescope, please.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes. For science.
Fraser Cain:
Yep. All right. That’s so, so if you’re ready to fund our ideas, let us know.
We’re ready to take over. Would we be co NASA?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
Chiefs?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Sure.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah, we’d do that. That sounds good.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks everyone. Thanks, Pamela.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Thank you, Fraser. And thank you so much to all of our $10 and up patrons out there. You allow us to keep the humans that make this show go going.
So specifically from Avivah, Rich and Ali, I would like to thank the following humans. This show is made possible by our community on patreon.com slash astronomy cast. This week, we’d like to thank the following $10 and up patrons.
Alex Cohen, Andrew Palestra, Arctic Fox, Bore Andro-Lovesville, Benjamin Davies, Boogie Nett, Brian Kilby, Kami Rassian, Cooper, David, Davias Rosetta, Don Mundus, Elliot Walker, Father Prax, Frank Stewart, Gerhard Schweitzer, Gordon Dewis, Hal McKinney, James Signovich, Jean-Baptiste Lemontier, Jim McGean, Joanne Mulvey, John M, J.P. Sullivan, Katie Byrne, Kimberly Rake, Larry Dzot, Lou Zeeland, Mark Phillips, Matt Rucker, Michael Prashada, Michelle Cullen, Name, Olga, Paul Jarman, Philip Grant, R.J. Basque, Ron Thorson, Sam Brooks and his mom, Scott Bieber, Subhana, Stephen Coffey, The Big Squish Squash, Tiffany Rogers, Tricor, Wanderer M101, and Zach Kukindel. Thank you all so very much.
Fraser Cain:
All right. Thanks, Pamela. We’ll see you next week.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Bye-bye.
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