January 6, 2026
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The First-Ever Private Space Telescope Could Launch before Decade’s End
Bigger than Hubble and launching as soon as 2029, the Lazuli Space Observatory would be the first-ever full-scale private space telescope
Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt pose during a gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 01, 2025. Via their Schmidt Sciences philanthropic organization, the couple is funding multiple astronomical projects, including the Lazuli space telescope.
Kevin Winter/WireImage/Getty Images
PHOENIX, Az.—A first-of-its-kind space telescope could soon launch into orbit and potentially chart a new path forward for astronomy.
Announced today at a special session of the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS’s) annual winter meeting, the Lazuli Space Observatory is a project of Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic organization built by investor Wendy Schmidt and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. “This is the first full-scale observatory that is privately funded in space,” says Stuart Feldman, an astronomer, computer scientist and president of Schmidt Sciences, who spoke to Scientific American before the announcement.
“For 20 years, Eric and I have pursued philanthropy to seek new frontiers,” Wendy Schmidt said in a statement. “With the Schmidt Observatory System [which includes Lazuli], we’re enabling multiple approaches to understanding the vast universe where we find ourselves stewards of a living planet.”
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As envisioned, the telescope will boast a three-meter mirror—larger than that of NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope. Its three instruments—a planet-finding coronagraph, a high-resolution wide-field camera and a light-splitting spectrograph—will study the atmospheres of distant worlds, dissect the light from exploding stars and tackle mysteries such as the nature of dark energy, the enigmatic force that drives the universe’s accelerating expansion. Lazuli will be agile as well; it will be able to rapidly swivel to stare at things that go bump in the cosmic night.
With a price tag rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the telescope could launch before the decade is out. And if it is successful, the feat could signal a new way to achieve big things in the space sciences. “There’s a lot of good potential here, and it’s encouraging to see these new pathways opening for doing astrophysics,” says astronomer Heidi Hammel, vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
Lazuli is just one of several large projects comprising the Schmidt Observatory System—initiatives that Feldman characterizes as “risky but exciting.” The others are all ground-based and share a common design element in that they’re modular, using hundreds of small and relatively low-cost components to create much larger and more capable arrays. One, the Deep Synoptic Array, will study the sky at radio wavelengths, while its counterpart, the Argus Array, will observe in visible light. A third smaller-but-scalable array will gather spectra of cosmic targets such as exoplanets and supernovae. The goal, Feldman says, is for each of these projects to be doing science by 2029.
“They all have time lines; they all have funding. And by astronomic standards, these things are happening in the blink of an eye,” Feldman says. “We want the data to be rapidly available—and it will be available broadly. It’s intended as a gift to the global astrophysics community.”
Such lavish private funding for pure space science may seem strange, but historically astronomy and astrophysics have been primarily the province of philanthropy. Edwin Hubble worked at a privately funded observatory when his measurements of intergalactic distances revealed the expansion of the universe. Percival Lowell built his own mountaintop perch to search for signs of life on Mars. Even Galileo had his private patrons, after whom he initially tried to name four of Jupiter’s moons. Following World War II, however, this model changed. For the past 80 years or so, support for the space sciences has been dominated by governments via taxpayer-funded institutions such as NASA and the National Science Foundation. Private foundations, in turn, “started funding projects that wouldn’t fly with the federal agencies because they were too risky or politically controversial,” says science historian Jordan Bimm of the University of Chicago.
But at least in the U.S., governmental support for the sciences has become wobblier and more uncertain than ever, heralding what may be a return to a greater reliance on private funding.
“We are absolutely in a moment of flux and inflection,” Bimm says. “We’re seeing nonstate actors like foundations getting into this realm of not just funding interesting stuff but laying out an agenda. That used to be the role of the U.S. government.”
The Schmidt Sciences team says that while the current turmoil surrounding federal science funding was not directly linked to the group’s initiatives, it was hard to ignore. “I’d like to think we would be operating at this scale regardless, but the current situation certainly makes us take our mandate much more seriously,” says Arpita Roy, director of astrophysics and space for Schmidt Sciences.
As rumors of the Schmidt announcement rippled through the AAS meeting, astronomers expressed excitement about the new initiatives — and some concerns.
Some researchers have questions about who would have access to the facilities and data. And some wondered whether a large influx of private money might spur further cuts to taxpayer funding. The Schmidt Sciences team is adamant it is not trying to compete with governments. “We’re not replacing NSF or NASA or the European agencies. We’re trying to fill in areas that they really aren’t designed for and invest in that,” Feldman says.
In other words, multibillion-dollar projects such as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and Habitable Worlds Observatory or large, ground-based observatories are still the purview of the public sector. Bimm says it remains to be seen how such private investments work out. “If you want to do space, you’ve gotta get money from somewhere. But the flip side of that is: that source of money also dictates what we learn,” Bimm says. “Who’s providing the funding can determine what we choose to learn about, how we choose to learn about it and maybe even who benefits in the end.”
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