Schmidt Sciences, the philanthropic organisation founded by Wendy Schmidt and former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, has unveiled plans for Lazuli — described as the first full-scale privately funded space telescope, with a mirror larger than Hubble’s and a launch targeted before the end of the decade.
Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt pose during a ceremony at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on November 01, 2025. Through their Schmidt Sciences philanthropic organization, the couple is funding several astronomical projects, including the Lazuli space telescope.
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What Lazuli is
Announced at a special session of the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in January 2026, the Lazuli Space Observatory is intended to be the first full-scale observatory privately funded in space, according to Stuart Feldman, an astronomer, computer scientist and president of Schmidt Sciences. Reported launch targets cluster around 2028–2029.
As envisioned, the telescope would carry a three-metre primary mirror — larger than the 2.4-metre mirror on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Its three instruments — a planet-finding coronagraph, a high-resolution wide-field camera and a light-splitting spectrograph — are designed to study the atmospheres of distant worlds, analyse the light from exploding stars, and probe questions such as the nature of dark energy, the force driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. The design also emphasises agility, allowing the telescope to reorient quickly between targets.
Part of a larger system
Lazuli is one component of the broader Schmidt Observatory System, which Feldman characterises as ambitious and high-risk. The other projects are ground-based and modular, assembling many smaller, relatively low-cost components into large, capable arrays: the Deep Synoptic Array would observe at radio wavelengths, the Argus Array in visible light, and a third scalable array would collect spectra of targets such as exoplanets and supernovae. The stated aim is for each project to be producing science by 2029, with funding and deadlines already attached and a commitment to make the resulting data widely and rapidly available to the global research community.
Why private money, and why now
Large-scale philanthropic funding for pure space science reflects a longer pattern in which private patrons back work that public agencies find too risky or politically sensitive, notes Jordan Bimm, a science historian at the University of Chicago. He argues that foundations and other non-state actors are increasingly not only funding research but helping set its agenda — a role historically played by government. Schmidt Sciences representatives, including astrophysics-and-space director Arpita Roy, have said the initiative would proceed regardless of the current climate around federal science funding, while acknowledging that the volatility of public support is hard to ignore.
Limitations and what to watch
The plans remain announcements rather than achievements. Ambitious space telescopes routinely face delays, cost growth and technical setbacks, so the 2028–2029 timeline should be treated as a target, not a guarantee, and reported dates already vary across sources. Private funding also raises governance questions that observers such as Bimm have flagged: whoever pays can influence what gets studied, how, and who ultimately benefits from the data. Specifications and schedules described here come largely from the organisation’s own announcement and independent reporting on it, and should be re-checked against project updates as the observatories move from design toward construction.
