Really great idea! But one still has to buy a telescope and send it to this guy, I think it would be cool if one could just rent everything at once. For non-serious people that have a lot of money that they would like to put to use looking at the stars. Or maybe a time-share like concept.
Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.
Renting, controlling and taking the pics yourself is still a step more involved than just googling a picture of something. Comes down to how each person individually feels about how much that involvement is worth.
> Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.
Yes.. this is an interesting philosophical question about the hobby.
If you just rent some time one someone else's telescope on some location you don't visit, to take some photos.. how different is that from simply looking at the photos on astrophotography websites, which will be better than anything you can do anyway (unless you spend insane amounts of time and money)? So what's the point?
I enjoy astrophotography but I don't have a good location nor great equipment. But my line in the sand is that anything I print out and frame on the wall has to be taken by me controlling my telescope while sitting next to it. Only that way it feels the effort is mine and the photo is mine, so I can feel proud of it. Even though the quality is far inferior to what I could download from the web. But I have a few really nice photos and I feel good about them.
The real gain is that you get to choose where and when to point the telescope. If you don't care this makes no sense. However if you get interested in anything other than the most common objects odds are nobody has good long term pictures of it. Even if you are a professional getting time on a big telescope when you want it is a problem.
I don’t think the telescope has to be sitting next to you. Actual astronomers take pictures remotely all the time. They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope when it’s their turn to take pictures with it, they put coordinates into a website. Even most ground–based observatories are often operated remotely. Many of them are visited by astronomers too, but more and more that’s an optional step.
Many astronomers work at yet another remove from operations. They don’t even take the pictures themselves! They collect data from other people’s observations instead! A lot of modern observatories collect so much data that there’s not enough people to look at everything in detail. Whole–sky observatories that take hundreds of photos to image the whole sky every night, satellite missions like GAIA that observed a billion stars to determine their position and velocities, etc, etc.
> They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope
Right, but that's actual groundbreaking work, capturing image data that has never been captured before. The value there is in the work itself.
It's a different game for hobby astrophotography. Unless your budget is enormous, you're not going to every capture a photo that isn't already 10x better somewhere in https://app.astrobin.com/search
So what's the point then? I find it can be difficult to answer that question. There really isn't any point, other than the fun of the hobby. Why do I frame a photo of the Orion nebula that I took, which objectively is pretty much junk compared to everything in astrobin.com? Only because it has value to me because I took, but it doesn't really have any other value.
iTelescope does exactly what you’re outlining. There used to be a few others but I think they have mostly died out. I assume the economics don’t really work out.
I'm sure it's a lot of work for him, mostly maintenance and cleaning. Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him-- that can't be trivial and probably means he doesn't break even on a given telescope for a few months at least. Plus whatever it costs him to recruit new customers.
I bet he makes a good living on his labor and whatever capital he has tied up in the land, but it doesn't sound like an easy business.
> Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him
As a backyard astrophotographer, this hardware and software is pretty much standard even if you don’t send your equipment to a remote site and is part of the kit you send to the remote site.
While you can still manually point your telescope if you wanted, I don’t think many who are in the hobby still do this. Most people will use so-called ‘GoTo’ mounts. You basically tell it where to point and it will automatically do so and keep tracking that location (to compensate for the rotation of our planet).
It’s a little bit more involved than I’m describing it but not much.
I think it's literally just the pier, power and an ethernet connection provided and you use the software of the mount and image sensor combo you own through their internet.
He's got 10 barns with retractable roofs to maintain, plus he offers maintenance of the scopes themselves. On top of that, it sounds like a full time business he's running. But yeah, a very nice business.
You’d be amazed what even a small smart telescope can see even in Bortle 9 urban skies.
I have one of the mentioned SeeStar smart telescopes, and have been quite successful in taking photos of both galaxies and nebulas from the rooftop of my apartment building in the middle of a city.
Sure, it takes time. Sure, it would be faster/better under darker skies. But it’s not impossible!
Astrophotography is a hobby like any other. People enjoy capturing their own images of the universe.
Most hobbies with gear have setup costs and it's not unusual for that to be in the several thousand dollar range, and maintenance costs. $100-400/month for a hobby isn't all that much and it gives you exclusive access to your own scope in ideal skies that you can operate from your home.
I'm putting one of the modern "Smart Scopes" on my Christmas list this year.
I had a friend with a 10" Meade with which not much happened. Just a bear to lug around and set up and mess with, not even including trying bumble through getting astrophotography started.
But the new-ish Smart Scopes looks fun and accessible, so gonna see if I can get one of those to play with.
I've had an 8" Celestron SCT since I spent my Bar Mitzvah money on it shortly after I got hooked on astronomy by Haley's comet. There were no smart scopes then and the Miami skies didn't lend themselves to astrophotography. Still, I tried.
I still have that scope. It's on a wedge mount with motorized but manual tracking. Even an 8" is a pain to drag out and you really have to be dedicated because it turns out most folks don't have the patience to spend much time outside looking through a 1.25" eye piece. So when you drag it out, expect to be spending alone time with you and the sky.
Still, I'm glad I have it. It's good for looking at the moon and planets, and the sun with correct filter. I still drag it out now and again. I'll never take the sorts of photos you can find easily on the internet. So I prefer to look at the universe with my own eyes. That's still exciting.
To get into Astrophotographg you probably need to spend £2-3k for some equipment, if you are based somewhere like the north of England this translates to a handful of clear nights per year. Sending your equipment here gives you an order of magnitude more clear nights.
I wouldn’t do this as I like the fact my photos are taken in my back yard but each to their own
I saw an interview with the owner, one point he brought up in addition to atmospheric clarity is that many people need a long travel time to get away from light pollution, reducing available nights even further.
Back in the crypto craze I spent a fair amount of time trying to work out a Blockchain where mining a block requires spotting a supernova before anyone else and verifying a block requires checking that the supernova is there, but I never quite got the game theory to work out.
It's a hobby, there doesn't need to be much in the way of novel "data" for it to be rewarding. Though considering this guy found a nebula I wouldn't be surprised if there was some. The universe is big (citation needed) and good hobbyist telescopes are quite powerful; you have a lot of sky to explore and could easily be getting the best images ever of any particular patch of it.
You misunderstand the issue. It’s a significant problem for some kinds of observations and largely irrelevant to others.
Satellites don’t include light sources and there’s nothing to illuminate them when in earth’s shadow. In order to interfere with light based astronomy they need to be outside of earths shadow and someone needs to be actively taking a picture of that chunk of sky. As these satellites orbit close to earth almost the entire sky is clear near solar midnight.
Major ground based telescopes can also add a shutter to block light detection for the fraction of a second a satellite would interfere. Basically at increasing magnification you’re looking at an ever smaller percentage of the sky which means the odds of a satellite, even one of millions, being in the shot for a given second is low. It’s still an issue, but being 99.X% as effective is good enough not to be a major concern.
Where it’s a concern is whole sky observation where you can’t easily add a shutter and losing a significant portion of the sky every night is a real problem. Amateur astronomy has the same basic options, but will often run into avoidable issues.
In most amateur imaging you can trade time for quality. By stacking enough images, satellite trails get averaged out of the final image.
Very high end amateurs get pissy about it because they paid a lot of money for high end equipment to minimize imaging times, but for the rest of us it’s not a huge impediment as we already needed lots of subframes to get high SNR anyways.
Averaging isn't the only option. It's possible to use other image-processing techniques which look at outlier values. This is way outside my area of expertise, but I believe sigma clipping is one of the standard go-tos, see:
This applies not only to satellite tracks, but meteors, cosmic rays, and other artefacts introduced into image capture. The techniques should be generally applicable, though for those who are specifically exploring transitory phenomena, this introduces additional challenges.
That’s an option. However, these satellites provide a predictable path so you don’t needed to detect them from image data. Which means you can even prevent them from showing up on long analog film exposures.
In balance, shorter exposures, stacking, and track-removal is technically easier.
Long exposures made sense when photgraphic plates were a scarce resource, and replacing them risked disturbing the observation.
Stacking is premised on the idea that individual exposures are cheap, and that noise tends to affect a small number of those exposures, in small regions. The same predictability of satellite tracks you name means that they can be removed through image processing rather than brute force (avoiding sky regions, physical masking, interrupting exposures during overflights, etc.).
And the other phenomena I mention (meteors, cosmic rays) are not predictable, and also degrade deep-space images.
Image processing is a great way to get clean pictures but takes you further from direct observation. You could if extremely unlucky remove a supernova from your image not just meteors and cosmic rays.
A supernova peaks over the course of days, and fades slowly over months to years. They also remain static relative to the background stars, as do all astronomical phenomena outside our Solar System, even over the span of a day.[1]
Even a very-rapidly-peaking kilonova (neutron-neutron star collision) though they peak quite rapidly (short gamma-ray bursts, or SGBs, last about two seconds) have durable remnants lasting weeks.
The transient phenomena discussed here occur largely at the scale of a few seconds at most, often far less, and most move across a significant span of sky within that time.
More likely is that a meteor impact on the Moon (or other Solar System body) might be missed, but those are sufficiently small targets that interference such as we're discussing would not be a significant noise source. Space-based observation of, e.g., comet collisions with Jupiter or Saturn would eliminate LEO satellite noise entirely, though cosmic ray interference would remain a concern.
________________________________
Notes:
1. An object moving at 0.99c at the distance of the nearest star, 4 light years, would cover slightly less than 0.04 degrees per day. Much of the Universe is at somewhat greater distance than even this.
Lasers would probably be more practical. Maybe a whole array of lasers w. telescopes? At (say) 500 km, a 20 cm aperture would have a spot size of maybe 50 cm. So let's take that telescope array, hook a kW laser to each one, and roast some LEO satellites?
(Note: this is not an actual suggestion this be done.)
I know you are joking on this one, as I was on mine. But with people being arrested for shining pet toy lasers at objects, best everyone stay clear of this one.
I’m working on a DaaS startup (drone as a service) so maybe I’ll locate next to you and your customers can blow drones out of the sky and mine will keep having to replace theirs.
If you have to yeet space trash to a gravitational well, Jupiter is probably the more attractive option. Lower delta-V, still a large well, and so long as you get reasonably close, orbital decay should solve the problem eventually.
For de-orbiting LEO satellites, electrodynamic tethers is probably the most viable active method:
"Study on electrodynamic tether system for space debris removal"
It’s worth noting that the latest trillionaire lowered launch costs by ~10×. It has never been cheaper to launch a telescope into space. I’m surprised that no universities have launched their own space observatories. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, but all they ever seem to spend it on is more administrators. They could launch a dozen space telescopes without making a dent.
Really great idea! But one still has to buy a telescope and send it to this guy, I think it would be cool if one could just rent everything at once. For non-serious people that have a lot of money that they would like to put to use looking at the stars. Or maybe a time-share like concept.
Nothing stopping you from buying a few scopes, sending them to him, then subletting access. :-)
Astronomy arbitrage!?
Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.
Renting, controlling and taking the pics yourself is still a step more involved than just googling a picture of something. Comes down to how each person individually feels about how much that involvement is worth.
> Maybe they could just like look at photos someone else has taken? If you are using someone else’s equipment, at a location you’ve never been too, it feels like you may as well just look at bubbles images of things.
Yes.. this is an interesting philosophical question about the hobby.
If you just rent some time one someone else's telescope on some location you don't visit, to take some photos.. how different is that from simply looking at the photos on astrophotography websites, which will be better than anything you can do anyway (unless you spend insane amounts of time and money)? So what's the point?
I enjoy astrophotography but I don't have a good location nor great equipment. But my line in the sand is that anything I print out and frame on the wall has to be taken by me controlling my telescope while sitting next to it. Only that way it feels the effort is mine and the photo is mine, so I can feel proud of it. Even though the quality is far inferior to what I could download from the web. But I have a few really nice photos and I feel good about them.
The real gain is that you get to choose where and when to point the telescope. If you don't care this makes no sense. However if you get interested in anything other than the most common objects odds are nobody has good long term pictures of it. Even if you are a professional getting time on a big telescope when you want it is a problem.
I don’t think the telescope has to be sitting next to you. Actual astronomers take pictures remotely all the time. They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope when it’s their turn to take pictures with it, they put coordinates into a website. Even most ground–based observatories are often operated remotely. Many of them are visited by astronomers too, but more and more that’s an optional step.
Many astronomers work at yet another remove from operations. They don’t even take the pictures themselves! They collect data from other people’s observations instead! A lot of modern observatories collect so much data that there’s not enough people to look at everything in detail. Whole–sky observatories that take hundreds of photos to image the whole sky every night, satellite missions like GAIA that observed a billion stars to determine their position and velocities, etc, etc.
> They don’t ride a shuttle up to the Hubble Telescope
Right, but that's actual groundbreaking work, capturing image data that has never been captured before. The value there is in the work itself.
It's a different game for hobby astrophotography. Unless your budget is enormous, you're not going to every capture a photo that isn't already 10x better somewhere in https://app.astrobin.com/search
So what's the point then? I find it can be difficult to answer that question. There really isn't any point, other than the fun of the hobby. Why do I frame a photo of the Orion nebula that I took, which objectively is pretty much junk compared to everything in astrobin.com? Only because it has value to me because I took, but it doesn't really have any other value.
You mean AaaS (Astronomy as a Service)
It does exist: https://www.slooh.com
iTelescope does exactly what you’re outlining. There used to be a few others but I think they have mostly died out. I assume the economics don’t really work out.
> from as little as 99 USD a month
> 550 telescopes
So about ~55 to 60k USD a month to just have some telescopes on your land? Nice little earner.
I'm sure it's a lot of work for him, mostly maintenance and cleaning. Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him-- that can't be trivial and probably means he doesn't break even on a given telescope for a few months at least. Plus whatever it costs him to recruit new customers.
I bet he makes a good living on his labor and whatever capital he has tied up in the land, but it doesn't sound like an easy business.
> Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him
As a backyard astrophotographer, this hardware and software is pretty much standard even if you don’t send your equipment to a remote site and is part of the kit you send to the remote site.
While you can still manually point your telescope if you wanted, I don’t think many who are in the hobby still do this. Most people will use so-called ‘GoTo’ mounts. You basically tell it where to point and it will automatically do so and keep tracking that location (to compensate for the rotation of our planet).
It’s a little bit more involved than I’m describing it but not much.
I think it's literally just the pier, power and an ethernet connection provided and you use the software of the mount and image sensor combo you own through their internet.
Customer support. Don't forget customer support.
He's got 10 barns with retractable roofs to maintain, plus he offers maintenance of the scopes themselves. On top of that, it sounds like a full time business he's running. But yeah, a very nice business.
Far from unique! There were and are telescope hosters in the Atacama Desert, which is as good as it can possibly be for the amateurs.
Previous discussions on remote telescopes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45271108
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44741078
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48533872
We need more of this. Thanks for making the world more awesome!
mostly unrelated, but over the last few weeks I've gone down a rabbit hole having claude write scripts to label videos I shoot through night vision.
If you want to see my progress (mostly gated by the sky): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOgT48pM4GctL_nuv37vc...
I want to get it pointing out overflights and satellites by name, but I'm not there yet.
I would never have thought of this, but it is really cool. Living in the city with light pollution, we can see a dozen or so on the best nights.
What an ingenious business idea.
You’d be amazed what even a small smart telescope can see even in Bortle 9 urban skies.
I have one of the mentioned SeeStar smart telescopes, and have been quite successful in taking photos of both galaxies and nebulas from the rooftop of my apartment building in the middle of a city.
Sure, it takes time. Sure, it would be faster/better under darker skies. But it’s not impossible!
Modern stacking algo negate this entirely for amateur photographers
What do people do with this astronomical data?
Why do they pay for this?
Astrophotography is a hobby like any other. People enjoy capturing their own images of the universe.
Most hobbies with gear have setup costs and it's not unusual for that to be in the several thousand dollar range, and maintenance costs. $100-400/month for a hobby isn't all that much and it gives you exclusive access to your own scope in ideal skies that you can operate from your home.
Cool, makes sense.
I'm putting one of the modern "Smart Scopes" on my Christmas list this year.
I had a friend with a 10" Meade with which not much happened. Just a bear to lug around and set up and mess with, not even including trying bumble through getting astrophotography started.
But the new-ish Smart Scopes looks fun and accessible, so gonna see if I can get one of those to play with.
I've had an 8" Celestron SCT since I spent my Bar Mitzvah money on it shortly after I got hooked on astronomy by Haley's comet. There were no smart scopes then and the Miami skies didn't lend themselves to astrophotography. Still, I tried.
I still have that scope. It's on a wedge mount with motorized but manual tracking. Even an 8" is a pain to drag out and you really have to be dedicated because it turns out most folks don't have the patience to spend much time outside looking through a 1.25" eye piece. So when you drag it out, expect to be spending alone time with you and the sky.
Still, I'm glad I have it. It's good for looking at the moon and planets, and the sun with correct filter. I still drag it out now and again. I'll never take the sorts of photos you can find easily on the internet. So I prefer to look at the universe with my own eyes. That's still exciting.
To get into Astrophotographg you probably need to spend £2-3k for some equipment, if you are based somewhere like the north of England this translates to a handful of clear nights per year. Sending your equipment here gives you an order of magnitude more clear nights.
I wouldn’t do this as I like the fact my photos are taken in my back yard but each to their own
I saw an interview with the owner, one point he brought up in addition to atmospheric clarity is that many people need a long travel time to get away from light pollution, reducing available nights even further.
Back in the crypto craze I spent a fair amount of time trying to work out a Blockchain where mining a block requires spotting a supernova before anyone else and verifying a block requires checking that the supernova is there, but I never quite got the game theory to work out.
Why do people get into birdwatching?
It's a hobby, there doesn't need to be much in the way of novel "data" for it to be rewarding. Though considering this guy found a nebula I wouldn't be surprised if there was some. The universe is big (citation needed) and good hobbyist telescopes are quite powerful; you have a lot of sky to explore and could easily be getting the best images ever of any particular patch of it.
Colter Mccorkindale’s comment is the best part.
“Sooo....the stars at night really are big and bright, deep in the heart of Texas?”
Not, in fact, optical interferometry :(
sadly won't be possible for anything serious next decade as each space trillionaire and country launches their own 10,000+ constellations
sky will be constantly twinkling, will be weird
we'll have to switch to space telescopes above LEO
https://satellitemap.space
You misunderstand the issue. It’s a significant problem for some kinds of observations and largely irrelevant to others.
Satellites don’t include light sources and there’s nothing to illuminate them when in earth’s shadow. In order to interfere with light based astronomy they need to be outside of earths shadow and someone needs to be actively taking a picture of that chunk of sky. As these satellites orbit close to earth almost the entire sky is clear near solar midnight.
Major ground based telescopes can also add a shutter to block light detection for the fraction of a second a satellite would interfere. Basically at increasing magnification you’re looking at an ever smaller percentage of the sky which means the odds of a satellite, even one of millions, being in the shot for a given second is low. It’s still an issue, but being 99.X% as effective is good enough not to be a major concern.
Where it’s a concern is whole sky observation where you can’t easily add a shutter and losing a significant portion of the sky every night is a real problem. Amateur astronomy has the same basic options, but will often run into avoidable issues.
In most amateur imaging you can trade time for quality. By stacking enough images, satellite trails get averaged out of the final image.
Very high end amateurs get pissy about it because they paid a lot of money for high end equipment to minimize imaging times, but for the rest of us it’s not a huge impediment as we already needed lots of subframes to get high SNR anyways.
Averaging isn't the only option. It's possible to use other image-processing techniques which look at outlier values. This is way outside my area of expertise, but I believe sigma clipping is one of the standard go-tos, see:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Sigma...>.
More generally, you're clipping outliers:
<https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Clipp...>.
This applies not only to satellite tracks, but meteors, cosmic rays, and other artefacts introduced into image capture. The techniques should be generally applicable, though for those who are specifically exploring transitory phenomena, this introduces additional challenges.
That’s an option. However, these satellites provide a predictable path so you don’t needed to detect them from image data. Which means you can even prevent them from showing up on long analog film exposures.
In balance, shorter exposures, stacking, and track-removal is technically easier.
Long exposures made sense when photgraphic plates were a scarce resource, and replacing them risked disturbing the observation.
Stacking is premised on the idea that individual exposures are cheap, and that noise tends to affect a small number of those exposures, in small regions. The same predictability of satellite tracks you name means that they can be removed through image processing rather than brute force (avoiding sky regions, physical masking, interrupting exposures during overflights, etc.).
And the other phenomena I mention (meteors, cosmic rays) are not predictable, and also degrade deep-space images.
Image processing is a great way to get clean pictures but takes you further from direct observation. You could if extremely unlucky remove a supernova from your image not just meteors and cosmic rays.
Extremely unlikely.
A supernova peaks over the course of days, and fades slowly over months to years. They also remain static relative to the background stars, as do all astronomical phenomena outside our Solar System, even over the span of a day.[1]
Even a very-rapidly-peaking kilonova (neutron-neutron star collision) though they peak quite rapidly (short gamma-ray bursts, or SGBs, last about two seconds) have durable remnants lasting weeks.
The transient phenomena discussed here occur largely at the scale of a few seconds at most, often far less, and most move across a significant span of sky within that time.
More likely is that a meteor impact on the Moon (or other Solar System body) might be missed, but those are sufficiently small targets that interference such as we're discussing would not be a significant noise source. Space-based observation of, e.g., comet collisions with Jupiter or Saturn would eliminate LEO satellite noise entirely, though cosmic ray interference would remain a concern.
________________________________
Notes:
1. An object moving at 0.99c at the distance of the nearest star, 4 light years, would cover slightly less than 0.04 degrees per day. Much of the Universe is at somewhat greater distance than even this.
It’s not likely but it could definitely happen.
> A supernova peaks over the course of days
People do long exposures over hours and sometimes multiple days.
An algorithm assuming a static image could discard a relatively slow increase in brightness that shows up on say 10% of your samples.
So again not likely, but definitely something someone would prefer shows up despite being inconsistent.
I’m seeking funding to open up a rail gun ranch where you can sit in your lawn chair and blow satellites out of the sky.
Lasers would probably be more practical. Maybe a whole array of lasers w. telescopes? At (say) 500 km, a 20 cm aperture would have a spot size of maybe 50 cm. So let's take that telescope array, hook a kW laser to each one, and roast some LEO satellites?
(Note: this is not an actual suggestion this be done.)
I know you are joking on this one, as I was on mine. But with people being arrested for shining pet toy lasers at objects, best everyone stay clear of this one.
It's more a thought experiment on perhaps how easily this could be done.
I’m working on a DaaS startup (drone as a service) so maybe I’ll locate next to you and your customers can blow drones out of the sky and mine will keep having to replace theirs.
I like where you are going with this. Can you offer “hardened” drones for the advanced players?
Probably legal in Texas? If it's directly over "your land?"
If your application says it is meant to hunt feral hogs, then they will allow it.
This may be a good plan B pivot! Join now and get a free lawn chair!
Feral hogs IN SPAAAAACE!
Kessler‘s farm?
I'm thinking of "space roombas" that glide around and bump all the sats in LEO into the atmosphere like a game of pool
Only problem is they are toxic as they burn up and create a lot of pollution
* https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
(too bad gravity is impossible to overcome cheaply or do the opposite and yeet into sun)
If you have to yeet space trash to a gravitational well, Jupiter is probably the more attractive option. Lower delta-V, still a large well, and so long as you get reasonably close, orbital decay should solve the problem eventually.
For de-orbiting LEO satellites, electrodynamic tethers is probably the most viable active method:
"Study on electrodynamic tether system for space debris removal"
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00945...>
It’s worth noting that the latest trillionaire lowered launch costs by ~10×. It has never been cheaper to launch a telescope into space. I’m surprised that no universities have launched their own space observatories. Harvard has a $50 billion endowment, but all they ever seem to spend it on is more administrators. They could launch a dozen space telescopes without making a dent.