Yerkes Observatory, a 40-inch marvel of brass and glass housed inside a dome that attracted scientists from all over the world, was the world’s largest refracting telescope when it opened in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, in 1897.
Charles Yerkes, a businessman whose wealth came from constructing portions of the future London Underground, provided the funds. At the time, cutting-edge science was funded by wealthy patrons. The mirror on the telescope was neither a publicity stunt nor a compromise. It was made possible by a private checkbook and was the best instrument anyone had ever created.
Then, as the scope and expense of contemporary astronomy grew beyond what any one person could afford, government funding took over. NASA and the US Congress had to pool their financial resources to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 at a cost of about $1.5 billion. Years of international negotiations led to the eventual $10 billion cost of the James Webb Space Telescope. For many years, it was implicitly assumed that taxpayers were necessary to see farther into the cosmos.
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Subject | Billionaire-funded astronomical observatories — particularly the Schmidt Observatory System |
| Key Funder | Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO, 2001–2011) and Wendy Schmidt — through Schmidt Sciences |
| Main Space Telescope | Lazuli Space Observatory — 3.1-meter primary mirror (larger than Hubble’s 2.4-meter) |
| Instruments | Wide-field camera, broadband integral-field spectrograph, coronagraph |
| Estimated Cost | ~10% of a NASA flagship mission (~hundreds of millions of dollars vs. $10B for JWST) |
| Planned Launch | As early as mid-2028 to 2029 |
| Launch Site | Space Launch Complex 16, Cape Canaveral, Florida (Relativity Space facility) |
| Ground-Based Observatories | Argus Array (1,200+ optical telescopes), Deep Synoptic Array (1,650 radio dishes), LFAST |
| Unique Capability | Rapid response to transient events (novae, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts) in under 4 hours or 90 minutes |
| Nobel Laureate Involved | Saul Perlmutter (2011 Nobel Physics, UC Berkeley) — discovery of accelerating universe expansion |
| Data Policy | Open science — data and software shared broadly by default |
| Other Private Funder | Alex Gerko (billionaire, British founder of XTX Markets) — funding additional telescope work |
| Historical Parallel | Yerkes Observatory (1897) — funded by tycoon Charles Yerkes |
| Reference Website | Schmidt Sciences — Observatory System |
This assumption is currently being put to the test in a fairly straightforward manner. Schmidt Sciences, which is supported by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, announced four new observatories at the 247th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix in January.
Three are ground-based: the Deep Synoptic Array, which consists of 1,650 tiny radio dishes intended to produce real-time radio images of the sky; the Large Fiber Array Spectroscopic Telescope; and the Argus Array, a network of more than 1,200 small optical telescopes that collectively approach the performance of an eight-meter instrument. The fourth is Lazuli, a space telescope with a camera, spectrograph, and coronagraph on board that is intended to orbit in a highly elliptical path above Earth. Its 3.1-meter primary mirror is larger than Hubble’s 2.4-meter mirror.
During the announcement in Phoenix, Pete Klupar, the executive director of the Lazuli project and a former director of engineering at NASA’s Ames Research Center, presented the goal in an unusually direct manner. “We’re going to build a philanthropic, three-meter, off-axis telescope with capabilities that are approaching Hubble,” he stated, “and we’re going to do it in three years, and we’re going to do it for a ridiculously low price.”
He confirmed that the cost would be about 10% of a NASA flagship astrophysics mission, which puts it somewhere in the hundreds of millions rather than the billions, but he did not reveal the precise amount. The team intends to accomplish this in part by assembling the instrument in Florida near the launch site, accepting greater risk in exchange for speed, and utilizing off-the-shelf components with existing flight heritage (about 80% of the spacecraft). The spacecraft would take off from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 16, which is now utilized by Relativity Space, a business that Eric Schmidt invested in and eventually became CEO of.
Lazuli has a strong scientific case and is intended to supplement rather than replace the work being done by government observatories. When the full-sky survey at Chile’s Vera C. Rubin Observatory gets underway, it will produce an incredible amount of alerts regarding transient events, such as novae, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and short-lived phenomena that appear and fade over hours or days. Hubble needs to be scheduled for days in order to react to an alert.
Lazuli is being developed with a response time of less than four hours, possibly as fast as ninety minutes. That difference is not insignificant for an astrophysicist attempting to record the spectra of a fast-moving transient before it fades; rather, it represents the difference between data and no data. Among those working on the project is Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley who shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the universe’s accelerating expansion. He called it “the beginning of a very exciting period of physics and cosmology coming together” and proposed that Lazuli could help resolve the Hubble Tension, the persistent disagreement between various methods of measuring the speed at which the universe is expanding.
Additionally, the Financial Times revealed in March 2026 that Alex Gerko, the British billionaire who founded XTX Markets, is independently funding telescope development targeted at cosmological mysteries. In other words, the pattern is beginning to resemble a trend rather than a single eccentric donor.
There’s something genuinely intriguing about the timing as you watch this develop. The Trump administration’s wider cuts to science funding are putting pressure on NASA’s budget and raising serious concerns about the future of government-funded big science.
It appears that the same factors endangering established programs are hastening private philanthropists’ determination that it is worthwhile to close the gap. This is not unprecedented; in the past, private funding for large observatories was the norm before science became too costly for the average person and then gradually increased in price until some people could afford it once more. Lazuli would be the first privately funded space telescope in history if it launches on time and operates as intended. That’s a footnote that could be very important, depending on how the next ten years play out.
