I am pretty uninformed in this space, but would a swarm of smaller mirrors configured into a synthetic aperture work to make a larger scope? This could leverage mass manufacturing techniques to lower cost, be fault tolerant, etc?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis

For multiple individual telescopes to provide more telescope time, yes, but for multiple mirrors to act as one in the visible spectrum, it would be extremely difficult as they need to be aligned to a fraction of a wavelength. Maybe if they are mechanically attached to each other once in orbit it could work. See: ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomical interferometers.

For all practical purposes, the parent comment is describing at a gross level the design of the Webb : ) (not much cost savings in that direction...)

There's already several companies doing that kinda thing for telescopes that point back down at earth. For telescopes that point away from earth I don't think anyone wants to do it because there's not much $$ in it.

I've seen at least a few startups try similar kinda things ("let's launch a constellation of cheap satellites and rent time on them out!") and they flopped hard. My favorite tried marketing as a "cryptocurrency in space" thing (LMFAO)

I wanted to do a certificate authority in space that you could connect to as it passed overhead and get certs and signatures from it.

This wouldn't be a profitable enterprise.

What would you be looking for exactly tho? What are the advantages - what could be studied in this way? One million dollars is really low for space ready equipment no?

Access.

I spent about 100 hours on a shitty 11" Celestron last year learning all sorts of things about space and optics and image processing. I'm hooked even though the results are terrible. I can rent time on some big scopes in high places, but the results are still subject to all of the artifacts and attenuation of the atmosphere.

Putting up a large number of reasonably capable space telescopes could be a tremendous boon to space education and even science. Look at atmospheric transmittance charts, there are entire areas of the spectrum that we can't even see from the ground. Having all of that research piled up behind billion dollar hardware pipelines doesn't foster a lot of attention or momentum.

Access for learning and education isn't going to ever pay for engineering and launch costs. Plus, if you're really interested in actual science, there's 30 years of Hubble images available to work through. Crowd-sourced science would be a lot more useful filtering through that back catalogue than coming up with anything new to look for that's visible by something with much less power than Hubble.

Stable Diffusion for amateur space-telescope astronomy.

Generally, not for cubesats though, but irrelevant to disposable mirrors

a bunch of them together might be "crowdsourced" weather satellites.

Hasn't our recent history argued against "disposable" hard enough?

Disposable on Earth means sitting in a landfill. Disposable in space means burning up in the atmosphere. Ironically by not using disposable equipment you can end up cluttering the space even more because we still need to make advances.

With current space infrastructure, disposable is the only way to go while maintaining progress. As long as the hardware is optimized to fully burn up on re-entry it's acceptable at current scales.

For example, Starlink can keep unit costs low and focus on getting at least some functionality going while simultaneously working on next generation satellites. Since the satellites are somewhat disposable (expected to have an operating life of ~5 years), this approach doesn't lock them into a specific generation of satellites.

Eventually, we'll have enough hardware up there that it'll start being important to try to refurb/recycle, but that is not practical at scale right now, given that we're only starting to seriously explore things like mission extension vehicles, active debris removal, orbital refueling and satellite servicing.

Depends on the application. Starlink satellites are disposable (demisable). Not to say they shouldn't have stationkeeping to prolong the mission lifespan, just that there's no contingency servicing/maintenance plan if something goes wrong. They just return to dust.

When it's millions or billions of items? Sure.