That's OK. There are other private companies doing things now.
watersb · 2h ago
Sincerely hope that's sarcasm.
I'm not aware of other private companies doing significant astronomy.
Some defense contractors have built incredible spacecraft, including space telescopes and planetary probes.
But those missions are exclusively run by NASA. The ability to receive the data is entirely a NASA thing. When NASA goes away, those telescopes are dead. Gone.
In general, observatories on the ground in the United States are not funded through NASA; the National Science Foundation funds a great deal of it.
(For private funding of ground-based astronomy, I know of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the SETI Institute's [Paul] Allen Telescope Array. But astronomers using that data mostly get paid by Federal research grants.)
I'm not aware of other private companies doing significant astronomy.
Some defense contractors have built incredible spacecraft, including space telescopes and planetary probes.
But those missions are exclusively run by NASA. The ability to receive the data is entirely a NASA thing. When NASA goes away, those telescopes are dead. Gone.
In general, observatories on the ground in the United States are not funded through NASA; the National Science Foundation funds a great deal of it.
(For private funding of ground-based astronomy, I know of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the SETI Institute's [Paul] Allen Telescope Array. But astronomers using that data mostly get paid by Federal research grants.)