Why can’t we build a handful of Hubbles and incrementally upgrade the hardware and launch them? I’d love to see how much science we could get done if there was a half dozen Hubble-class telescopes in orbit, of increasing utility.

If one goes tits up, it isn’t the end of the world. No need to spend billions of dollars and have heroics to save one instrument with six others up there. I refuse to believe nobody has thought of this.

Is the Hubble really so big that we couldn’t toss a new one into a Delta 5 or, god forbid, an Arianne or whatever Russia’s workhorse lifter is?

The analogy is better than that. The other does not necessarily go hungry and die. He could go hungry and get better at his technique (or uses a different one).

Moreover, the analogy is imperfect in that in Nature, either the osprey or the eagle gets the fish, and the other one goes hungry. In science, both groups get to make a tasty meal from the same data. Both groups will get citations. And by competing, both will wind up shaking down possible shortcomings in the other’s work. The cost is perhaps some lack of thoroughness when you’re rushing to eat your fish before someone else does, and a higher stress level when you’re all amped up about whether Group B is going to get their paper onto arXiv a whole two days before yours.

Astronomy is much more open about such things than Physics, since there has been a strong recent history of data being made public for all to work on. The community has largely decided that the benefits above outweigh the costs. Thus, there is nothing unexpected or improper about the eagle-group.

It’s still a funny Nature story, though!