>>12403332>or will someone decide to ignore NASA and do something on their ownAnd who do you think has the money to do that exactly? NASA gets the vast majority of government funding for astronomy in the US, what the NSF gives out to non-NASA-astronomy is about a fifth of that. Then only a small fraction goes to actual researchers, the majority goes to funding infrastructure. NSF is so broke they couldn't cough up 200 million to buy a stake in TMT. There is no commercial market for this either.
>Maybe they'll conclude that having a dozen smaller less sophisticated space telescopes will still be better than one mega complicated telescope that never gets off the ground.What people want is not the problem. The problem is cash.
