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How much are you willing to wager that filtering out moving dots with intensity comparable to or somewhat below the statistical noise in an instrument is easy?

Furthermore, for transit-hunting experiments, a slight dip in a star's brightness once per year or once per decade is the entire signal. Even if the satellite doesn't produce a moving dot, surely it cannot be transparent and non-refractive.



Space-based astronomy is the future, and lowered launch costs should contribute towards that.


Lowered launch costs can't compare with the expedience of ground-based experiments.

Some things work really well in space, some do not. Low-cost launch will revolutionize some experiments, but not all.

Building radio experiments like SKA, big telescopes like TMT, or starting up innovative low-budget instruments like Dragonfly is still impossible with low-cost launch. In the latter case, until a graduate student with a screwdriver can make daily adjustments to an on-orbit instrument, we will lose the earliest-stage R&D capability.

Finally, it is essential for our future generations to see a dark and unfettered sky with the human eyeball. That perpetual perspective, for 7,500,000,000 people, is inaccessible with launch vehicles.




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