Perhaps a deal could be worked out where the satellite companies also have to launch Atacama-scale telescopes, where Musk et al have to pay for the difference in cost between Atacama and orbit.
Once you get it there, you need to assemble it and keep it running. Maintenance is a real doozy— building a telescope on Earth is expensive. Building a telescope in space is even harder, since it won't be regularly serviced and you have to overengineer it. A typical space telescope still costs an order of magnitude more than a recordbreakingly expensive earth-based one.
Starship is also a lot cheaper per kilogram of payload; at scale, as low as $20/kg. Cheap launch also makes your satellites cheaper to build, since it's less of a disaster if you have to replace them.
Musk has already floated the idea of building a second-generation Starship with an 18-meter fairing.[2]
[0] https://www.spacex.com/starship
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_optical_reflec...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-the-next...
With radically cheaper launches, it's becoming quite possible - not now, but somewhat soon - to actually service telescopes, with conditions superior to those under which the Hubble was serviced by Shuttle teams.
With radically cheaper launches, it's not necessary to ensure the 'scope runs 24/7 for decades without regular maintenance. It can even be replaced regularly; including by bringing it to Earth, servicing it and sending back.
Launch prices are going to drop, but so is the necessity to be extremely reliable for the space equipment, for the same two reasons: 1) it's comparatively easy to get to it for a service and 2) it's comparatively easy to just send a replacement if needed.
With space manufacturing advancements still ahead of us - we didn't really experimented with making telescopes in orbit - it's not clear if space telescopes won't outperform terran ones. Space telescopes are going to have advantages like "atmosphere doesn't block part of the spectrum" and "there is no need to make a big structure capable withstanding 1g gravity".
It's still crucially important to be able to do terran-based astronomy, and that's a problem, but there is no doubt that the astronomy revolution which started with Hubble still has major advancements to have in the near future.
All of these things are only gone be possible once launch prices are cheaper and Starlink (or something like it) is a major part of how that can happen.
If you send a technician out to the Earth-Sun L2 point (where JWST will be) so that she can throw some grease on a gear or spray WD-40 on a reaction wheel, she'll be 4 times further from Earth than any human has ever gone. Although there may be some synergy with future Lunar/Martian missions, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to figure out how to do that safely. I think L2 is the safest Lagrange point w.r.t radiation, but it's still potentially deadly.
>"there is no need to make a big structure capable withstanding 1g gravity".
While the overall structure may not need to withstand 1g continuously, you still need to design it to as much as 6 Gs of acceleration during launch (as well as significant lateral acceleration, and occasional shocks in the dozens or hundreds of gs).