Remember when Keck and Gemini were the big new things? Radical designs and considered innovative if not downright risky. Now they just work and people take them for granted.

The success of the giant ground based telescopes also seems to me to be important. I suspect that a lot of the steam has been taken out of the radical plans for giant space-based telescopes. While they may get built someday, the expense of building them and the difficulty in maintaining them has got to be a barrier.

As bigjohn756 hints at, after Hale, the big telescope field ground to a halt for 50-60 years. Well, there was that big Soviet instrument, but apparently that never worked right. I suppose you could say that radio astronomy developed in that timeframe too, but it’s not the same. You can’t look through a viewfinder on a radio telescope, not even in theory.

Seriously now let’s hope they dont mix metric and imperial units like NASA does.

There is much more merit though to the local Hawaiian opposition and the story is very old and the friction as always easily avoidable in hindsight and very hard to repair. Colonial arrogance and cultural insensitivity. Those lessons prove so much harder to learn than any mystery the Universe can throw at us.