Engineering Abundance for Exploring the Cosmos

Most of humanity’s tools for exploring the cosmos are still built as one-off machines. They are constrained by exquisite physics, but also by the engineering and industrial systems we use to turn scientific ambition into flight hardware: slow development cycles, limited production volume, fragile supply chains, and design practices that do not scale. This talk will argue that we are approaching a different regime, enabled by advances in optical design, detectors, precision pointing and control, spacecraft platforms, launch, and manufacturing. The opportunity is not simply to make existing missions cheaper, but to change the underlying economics of precision scientific instruments in space. Greater abundance would not just lower cost; it would open new classes of scientific questions by making long-baseline monitoring, parallel experimentation, rapid iteration, and broader access to frontier instruments possible. Cosmic Frontier Labs is building that future, starting with high-performance space telescopes and working toward a world where abundance changes not only what we can observe, but what questions we are able to ask.