I'm not really buying the "daily rocket from SF to Hong Kong" idea and I don't have an obvious idea of how the world would be directly improved.
JWST is cool, as is starlink or whatever, but what do we plan to put in orbit that would "change the world for the better like very few things we’ll see this century" ?
Nuclear fusion, better batteries, better PVs, cancer cures, tailor-made vaccines, phage therapy, quantum computing, genomics, robotics, AIs.. all seem to have a more likely direct impact as this century's innovations.
What you might not be aware of is that the folding contraption that you deride so much is probably the simplest and most reliable part of the telescope.
What is particularly perplexing is that people hate on the mission and worship the launch vehicle.
The reason for that is the folding contraption. And the sunscreen. And the very delicate instruments. And the requirement to be extremely lightweight.
All those things combined is what led to the decades long development timeline, and the incredible cost. If you instead have 150 metric ton of payload capacity to orbit, you don't care that you could shave 100 grams of one component. Not even several metric tons of extra weight would be an issue, when you have so much spare capacity you could just add an extra 10-20 metric ton of fuel to compensate.
Starship allows a paradigm shift in spacecraft design where weight is no longer your most important target. Nor your second or even third. Instead you can use off the shelf components that might be twice the weight, but 1/10th the cost.
If JWST was designed today with Starship just around the corner, the final cost would have been a lot lower. Yes, the cost would probably still have been much higher than the launch cost, but it would probably have been a lot closer $1-2 billion than the $10 billion it costed in the end.
People really don’t understand that launch costs are only a small part of reducing launch compexity, which is the side effect of larger payloads.
A lot of payloads aren’t even worth launching because of the high cost, but the payload that are worth launching are going to drop in complexity as putting them into orbit without stage deployment or super lightweight materials or any of the other massively limiting compromises we totally take for granted are going to effectively be history — that is exciting!
Even better than that would be to create and grind the mirror directly in space, but this would require orbital manufacturing abilities. And this means big infrastructures, so big launches.
Or maybe we need to send a telescope a few hundred AU away from the sun tp make a solar gravitational telescope! Once again, big rocket required.
JWST is a fine telescope, but the bottlenecks we face going forward require better launching capacity.
Plus if we have learned anything from startups consider that we will be able to afford to experiment when launch costs drop 99 percent or whatever…