Astrophysics
We can liberate astrophysics and astronomy from a legacy model constrained by high launch costs and decadal government megaprojects. By leveraging reduced launch expenses, modular assembly techniques, and advances in commercial components, we can revolutionize telescope design and space missions to transform our understanding of the universe—uncovering new astrophysical phenomena and advancing fundamental physics. Moreover, exploring novel methods for detecting high-frequency gravitational waves may reveal unprecedented cosmic insights, especially as scaling up particle accelerators offers diminishing returns in probing new physics.
R&D Gaps (4)
The current model for building space telescopes is cost-prohibitive and slow, often requiring decades of development. New approaches that exploit reduced launch costs and modular assembly are needed to accelerate telescope construction and reduce costs, and there needs to be the organizational struc...
Detecting gravitational waves allows us to observe cosmic events like black hole mergers and neutron star collisions that are invisible through traditional telescopes. Current gravitational wave detectors are primarily sensitive to audio-band signals. Some phenomena, including speculative ones such ...
Space telescopes offer vastly superior sensitivity to ground-based systems, but enhancing their resolution requires spacecraft with sub-micron precision.
Angular resolution of telescopes is limited by the size of the primary optic. Coherent aperture synthesis (interferometry) gets around this by ...