Well let's figure out a way to assemble them in space.

Hubble is thirty years old, and is being used now as a reference. I don't understand all this negativity. Had we had this mindset, Hubble would not have been there

Part of the negativity is who benefits from the problem versus who has to pay to fix it. If SpaceX were causing a problem for astronomers while also for free launching radically better space-based tools, it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. But instead SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money, while the harms are falling on other people.

> SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money

and SpaceX customers hope to pocket a lot of use for that money. So taking that point literally - tiny astronomer's society is against the whole Earth load of Spacelink customers, and of course those customers' needs on average trump astronomers' ones.

I'm exaggerating, of course.

You're also confusing money with value. If we only go by market price, air pollution should be fine, since lots more people buy electrical power than die from coal plant particulates. But market price only captures a relatively narrow slice of value, and it's heavily biased in favor of people with money.

> SpaceX hopes to pocket a lot of money

True but to their credit SpaceX's launch prices are substantially lower than pre-existing options and they have been a leader in a step change in competitive launch options coming to market.

So? I don't understand how that's material to my point.

Hubble's mirror is 8 feet in diameter, and you aren't going to be assembling something as high precision as that in space, at least not from a few components. If we had the manufacturing capability to make it from scratch in space, maybe, but that's a much larger enterprise.

There is a question of whether 100 a foot diameter telescopes can work as well or better than one 8 foot one. Or 500. If it's about photons hitting the lens, do enough lenses in an area and post-processing make up for the fact that they aren't connected?

There are several large terrestrial telescopes that use assemblies of a number of coordinated smaller mirrors.

This looks like something reasonably doable on Earth orbit with the current launch capabilities.

Well let's make the manufacturing capability to do so. It's as if the "manufacturing capability" is some limited rare earth metal. What is the actual limited resource other that ingenuity and engineering?

You can’t manufacture complicated objects in space

We shouldn't have been able to land on the moon using whiteboard engineering and calculator level computers, but we did

That won't magically make it feasible to manufacture such precise objects in space anytime soon.

In fact, in space we can make something which we can't do on Earth - weightlessness being the critical enabling factor.

With capabilities to launch as cheap as Spaceship promises, we can develop space manufacturing rather soon.

Why shouldn't we have been able to land on the moon?

Because, as you've said, we can't manufacture complex objects in space.

Is the ISS not comparable in size?