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This is awesome! We always seem to get tremendous bang for our buck in building ever larger and more precise tools.

Question though, is there a realistic timeline or project for building a similar telescope as this, but in Space?

The James Webb (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope) is going to be launched in 2018. At 6.5m, it's in the same class as the 8.4m LSST.

If you put something like this in space, and pointed it down, would it be a useful espionage tool (more useful than the spy satellites the US and its allies already have)?

I don't know the technical details of this project, but it's well known that Hubble's basic design matches the spy satellites being manufactured at the same time. They changed the size of the mirror so they could source the part from the same manufacturing resources as the spy satellite program.

Another fun bit of trivia is that at one time the NRO (folks who operate the spy satellites) offered two they had in storage to NASA.

So in general I'd say it's a safe bet most of this technology is dual use. It's likely the secret squirrel folks are ahead of what open science projects can use however, given the resources available.

I suspect at this kind of resolution bandwidth getting the images down from space might be a big limitation.

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