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Perhaps Lockheed should make a telescope that’s so big, it spans 45 States?

How spread out can the receivers in a Very Very Large Array be? My understanding is that with radiotelescopy they can be widely dispersed, but I'm far from an expert.

Really, you just need manufacturing/contractors in many places. This part built in Pennsylvania, that one in Michigan.

VLBI arrays [1] are networks of radio telescopes that combine data from multiple instruments spread out over a continent or the whole planet. A network like this emulates a continent-size or a planet-size radio telescope and produces radioastronomy's highest resolution images.

The most sensitive VLBI array is the European VLBI network [2] which spans the sort of scales you have in mind.

A VLBI array can also incorporate space-based nodes, see e.g. [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-long-baseline_interferome...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_VLBI_Network

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA

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