To comment on this a little more, it would be way out of our budget to abandon our telescopes on earth and do it all from space.

Still thinking inside the box, and the gravity well.

The cost effective solution is to move manufacturing to micro-G environments. The Moon might do as a good baby step, followed by robots in the belt.

What a great idea! Can you point at a concrete explanation of how it is affordable with astronomy's budget?

One word: mining. The moon has literal tons of helium-3 that, if brought back to Earth, would tank the market. yes it's a bit capital intensive too get started but the payoff is huge! Just need to borrow the particle physicist's budget for a second.

"Just need to borrow the particle physicist's budget for a second."

I don't think thats enough and I also don't think the market for Helium-3 is that lucrative, since comercial fusion is for some reasons still not in sight.

Apollo took 9 years and about $25 billion to get there, so we can treat that as an upper limit. However, the Capstop cubesat just reached the moon[0] for $30 million[1], the roughly $5 Billion for the LHC should be enough to get us to the moon these days. And we can bring back aluminum and titanium until commercial fusion arrives.

[0] https://www.space.com/nasa-capstone-cubesat-arrives-moon

[1] https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/06/28/capstone-cubesat-launc....

Not for astronomy only; one customer among many.

SpaceX and trailing competitors are trying to make it cheap enough to get stuff out of the gravity well (including people and our more advanced products) that more permanent installations other places can get started. Elon says Mars a lot, probably because it's popular with the public. It's still expensive to send things up a gravity well, even if it's less expensive. The moon is shallow by comparison, and the asteroid belt far away but barely a dip. It would be safest to send robots first, bootstrap an installation that can manufacture local propulsion of any sort, O2, water, maybe even refine useful building materials, metal, or other resources. Anything so less is sent up.

Hopefully among all those things would also be materials to make large mirrors (optical and other portions of the EM spectrum), in less gravity, where it's cheaper to move them to useful areas of space, or even just truck them to spots around the surface of the moon.

Yes. Space manufacturing is the way. Launching everything from down here is madness, constructing telescopes in high lands down here is madness too, those are local minimas. We should be laser 3D printing bunch of self replicating cylinder objects out of Lunar regolith. I don't know why we're not doing it if it weren't for the sole possibility that US Space Force don't have intercept capability for such tubes gone rogue.