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.
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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.”
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.