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Comment Re:It's always about what you want to pay for.... (Score 1) 273

Is the NSF really necessary? There might be a better way to organize science, but for the past 50 years or so virtually every US PhD granted in the hard sciences or advanced engineering has been funded using grants from NSF, DOE, ARPA, DARPA, NIH and other federal sources. Without this federal funding (or some stable and well planned replacement) there will be no new scientists.

Comment Re:Gold As An Insulator? (Score 1) 14

The only thermal conductivity in space is due to thermal (blackbody) radiation. Gold has higher relfectivity than aluminum for the emission wavelengths of a 300K (room temperature) mirror, so it will have lower emissivity and cool less A clean copper surface is actually better but would oxidize and be far worse by the time it was launched.

Comment Re:Didnâ(TM)t we just spend 10B on JWST (Score 1) 22

I'm not really defending this proposal as there are some terrestrial projects (SKA and CHIME for example) that will get some of the same science for way less money. However it is very different than JWST. The wavelengths this would observe at are 10,000 times longer than JWST can see. The two instruments look at very different phenomena.

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