[Animats]

That's a much simpler project. It's deployment, not construction. Two metric tons of mesh have to be soft landed at the bottom of the crater. Then mobile robots pull it open into a large dish.[1] There's a cheaper approach where the mesh is pulled open by weights shot out from the central lander. Cost estimates are in the US$1 billion to US$10 billion range, most of which is shipping cost to Luna Farside.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/d4pivfipd9rpb19fm87lq/LCRT_NI...

[yinser]

If you don't see the contradiction in JPL having an active research project to put a radio telescope on the moon and your original statement then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

[Animats]

From the article: "FarView would comprise a hundred thousand metal antennas made on-site by autonomous robots. It would cover a Baltimore-size swath of the moon." That's way beyond anything possible today. What JPL proposes is just packing up a big thing tightly and unpacking it at the destination. Space projects have been doing that for decades.

When someone assembles a solar farm in the desert with no humans on site, we can talk about doing something like that on Luna.