From the OWL article:

"The modular approach can break the time-honoured Time versus Diameter law of approximately 1 year per 1-m of diameter, which by itself would practically prohibit the construction of any Telescope much larger than about 10-20 m."

This, coupled with the almost $1.5 trillion pice tag, blew my mind. But, I guess I should have expected something that can see ‘back in time’ to be expensive and take a really long time to build.

All of these projects are on the surface; I wonder why there haven’t been more efforts to put a better telescope into orbit.