What about an array of space telescopes creating a kind of "virtual lens"? Putting aside the engineering scale and cost of such a project, would something like that even be possible? Or would that be pure science fiction?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interfero... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
However, there’s no free lunch. By using arrays of telescopes instead of a single filled dish/mirror, they are missing a lot of information. Imagine a telescope the size of the earth, but you only use light from a few dozen spots on the surface and let the rest fall through. This is why they had to do all that complicated image reconstruction processing to create the image shown in the papers.