It costs a lot more to run a telescope in space! For the JWST, the annual cost is, $175.2M/yr. Calculated from the $861M that NASA budgeted for its first 5 years of operations.

As always, the most expensive costs aren't the hardware; it's the people!

The second highest operational cost is probably Deep Space Network time. Each contact can be calculated using this formula, (1057 * 1 * (0.9+(7/10)) * (1 + 4) [note: this is in 2017 dollars, I've inflation adjusted the amount], each contact is for 4 hours/day and must be done every day, that's $9,286.5/day for DSN time, inflation adjusted. Or, $3,389,572.5/yr for network time alone. I am sure that there are additional costs that make it even higher.

You can see the formula here, https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/21005/what-makes-t...

Ignoring development costs, that is approximately the cost to launch one SOFIA telescope to LEO (19T x 1000 kg/T x $2500/kg = $48M) with change. So I think space based telescopes definitely win out.

Exactly what I thought when I saw the dimensions and tonnage. Honestly they could probably just refurbish this equipment, add some telemetry and station keeping jets and load it onto a Falcon 9. That’d be a great first if it was a refurbished telescope deployed by a refurbished rocket.

Launches are not the most expensive part of a space telescope. Even for something like Hubble, which cost almost 10x more to launch than a Falcon 9 payload today, the launch cost was a single digit percentage of the overall budget.