Webb’s main problem was that it tried to do too many new things all at once, every one of them being mission critical. Each time they had a problem, they slowed everything down, which meant that they ran into problems in a serial fashion rather than in parallel, causing delay after delay. A less ambitious telescope should be able to stay closer to budget and schedule.

Ray Van Dune noted: “The Starship seems to be a ubiquitous solution to many problems don’t it?”

The lift capability is why Congress wanted SLS. However, Starship was designed for business, so SpaceX made sure that it would launch regularly and that it was flexible in its payloads and uses. One Starship could launch people and cargo to space, then after some refueling take them all to Mars. Starship’s mission was clear. SLS’s was not.

Landing people and cargo on the Moon requires few changes to the design to land them on Mars.

It wasn’t so much a lack of imagination on NASA’s part as it was a lack of courage to build upon the lessons learned by operating the Space Shuttle. Congress directed the design of Constellation and SLS, and they failed to allow it to be flexible to accommodate multiple missions. They didn’t even give it a primary mission. Cost and availability (launch cadence) were not factors in Congress’s design, but were high priorities for SpaceX. This is a good reason why we should never again let Congress pretend to be rocket scientists; they just aren’t capable of doing the job.

Max wrote: “L2 is nearly balanced between the gravitational force of the earth and sun.”

It is also a balance with angular momentum. An orbit is a balance between gravity and angular momentum, and a Lagrange point (which is more accurately a family of orbits rather than a single point) balances angular momentum with gravity from two bodies. It is a three-body orbital solution, even though we don’t (yet) have the math to calculate other types of three body orbits as easily as we calculate two-body orbits. (The upcoming LUCY mission is intended to investigate asteroids in the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 orbits.)

MDN wrote: “WRT space telescopes we should endeavor to follow the Starlink model. Launch lots of smaller, simpler, telescopes in big batches that work together.”

This may be a better idea than MDN realizes. Having separate telescopes working together give a large baseline, which can be used to get the resolution of an equally large diameter telescope. The light collection ability is much less, but it is additive with the number of telescopes in the array. It is how the Very Large Array radio telescopes in New Mexico works. It is an alternative to the large aperture telescopes that MadRocketSci mentioned and is the concept that Max mentioned. Put some telescopes in Earth orbit and you can get resolution similar to an Earth-sized telescope.

To make a synthetic aperture, you need the ability to coordinate the location of the receiving elements to within some fraction of the wavelength of the observed light, and to produce relative inteference. RF synthetic apertures rely on our electronics being faster than the wave we’re manipulating. Optical synthetic apertures will have to rely on very fiddly interferometers between all pairs of elements, because optical light is 100s THz – far faster than any signal processing elements we can build.

There was a proposed optical synthetic aperture mission back in the 90s, when it looked like such a project might still be possible. Terrestrial Planet Finder was intended to use a very long baseline between elements to resolve planets orbiting other stars and collect direct light from their atmospheres. It was a beautiful idea: Even then the proposed space telescops weren’t tiny, and the optics were very complicated.

So it’s not quite a simple thing to merely decree that “the future is small”. Nature has its own ideas about how things have to work.

Launching large mirrors into space is also difficult – the mirrors need to be very close to wavelength-level perfect in shape, and any defects corrected by other equally precisely located optics down the line.

The future is swarms, not big battleship class platforms like JWST.

L2 is nearly balanced between the gravitational force of the earth and sun. The moon has a disturbance influence. Fortunately the craft will be 1,000,000 miles out. The moon is 1/4 that distance.
It will still require a course correction to maintain balance every 23 days.
https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html
I thought this position was chosen to be in earths shadow allowing the craft to be very cold. The James Webb telescope is solar powered, and Must Circle L2 to remain in the sunlight. The diameter of the circle is nearly the same as our moon’s orbital diameter.
It will take a month to get into position, another five months of testing and calibration before the science work begins.

https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/about/orbit.html#:~:text=A%20Solar%20Orbit%20The%20James%20Webb%20Space%20Telescope,is%20called%20the%20second%20Lagrange%20point%20or%20L2.

Andi: The location is one of the Lagrange points where the orbital gravitational fields of the Earth and Sun (or possibly the Earth and Moon, I forget which) are balanced. Webb will circle in what they call a halo orbit around the point. It will require still periodic adjustments, but little fuel to keep it there.

How does it stay there?

My theory is that they simply lacked the imagination to conceive of anything beyond that! But how the hell do you build bases or far side telescopes with Apollo Mk II’s?! Answer: you don’t!

Even so, the TMT lawlessness is shameful.

Bob: That is where the Ariane 5 launches from.