Commercial Space to Smash the Astronomy 'Funding Wall'?
http://www.seeker.com/could-commercial-space-solve-the-astronomy-funding-wall-1964677465.html
There's been much coverage of the more than $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope that will launch in 2018, to probe planetary atmospheres and to look
back at the universe's beginnings. What will come next? Looking a bit ahead, the astronomy organization AURA suggests a "High Definition Space Telescope"
to launch in 2035, an observatory double Webb's size. But how this would be paid for comes under scrutiny in a new report.
Harvard astrophysicist Martin Elvis' new paper in Space Policy to try to solve what he calls the astronomy "funding wall." Our hunger for greater telescopes
in X-ray emissions alone, he argues, has made the cost of this mission type increase 20 times in the past generation. (Yes, that's after adjusting for
inflation.) Moreover, space missions often go over their budget before launch.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1608/1608.01004.pdf
