> I do know there is a lot of significant astronomy done by space telescope and that the importance of space astronomy is only growing.
Former astronomer here. I would argue that the importance of space astronomy is actually decreasing. Satellite telescopes are most important at wavelengths that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs like IR, UV, and X-ray. At visible wavelengths satellite telescopes have been much less important over the past couple of decades due to the development of adaptive optics.
The main reason to put a visible wavelength telescope in space is that you avoid the smearing out of the source by the atmosphere. Adaptive optics solves this problem by correcting for the distortions induced by the atmosphere and bringing images to resolutions that are comparable to (though still not quite as good as) what you can achieve in space.
Since space telescopes no longer have the advantage of much greater resolution, there's much less of a compelling reason to use them for most research problems. (Some questions, of course, can only be tackled by using the highest resolution available.) On every other dimension space-based telescopes are inferior to ground-based telescopes. They are more expensive by many orders of magnitude, much, much smaller, and they cannot be changed once they're up (at least not easily). By contrast a ground based observatory can get substantially better over the course of a year by installing better detectors.
Adaptive optics have zero issues if you’re looking to make a cool picture, but they do introduce bias which is an issue for scientific instruments. That’s largely offset by more and larger telescopes for the same price, but it is very much a tradeoff based in launch costs which are falling.
IMO, over the next 30 years space based telescopes are going to play an ever larger role.
Former astronomer here. I would argue that the importance of space astronomy is actually decreasing. Satellite telescopes are most important at wavelengths that the Earth's atmosphere absorbs like IR, UV, and X-ray. At visible wavelengths satellite telescopes have been much less important over the past couple of decades due to the development of adaptive optics.
The main reason to put a visible wavelength telescope in space is that you avoid the smearing out of the source by the atmosphere. Adaptive optics solves this problem by correcting for the distortions induced by the atmosphere and bringing images to resolutions that are comparable to (though still not quite as good as) what you can achieve in space.
Since space telescopes no longer have the advantage of much greater resolution, there's much less of a compelling reason to use them for most research problems. (Some questions, of course, can only be tackled by using the highest resolution available.) On every other dimension space-based telescopes are inferior to ground-based telescopes. They are more expensive by many orders of magnitude, much, much smaller, and they cannot be changed once they're up (at least not easily). By contrast a ground based observatory can get substantially better over the course of a year by installing better detectors.