Difficult to tell the economic / geographic context from a short article like this, but they mention the possibility of relocating the project. If possible that's a win / win, no? Sounds like it may just be the case that the dark sky aspect of this wasn't taken into consideration.
Exactly, this sounds like when europeans and americans go to africa to keep the local people from using their resources under the guise of protecting wildlife. There's plenty of local sources about it but a documentary that does a great job for a foreign audience and really made me think is 'Black Mambas' https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18351318/
If us Europeans and Americans want to look at the sky undisturbed, why don't we build telescopes at home? We can expropriate or block businesses in however big of a radius we want. Or we can buy up all the land around the site we are using in a foreign country instead of keeping the development of the land of the local people. It feels like exploitation.
It's easy to make this about science vs business and I hate light pollution just as the next guy, but it feels gross to shame the local population for wanting to do what we've done with our land already when we can do it at home as well, or pay them to be worth their while to not develop around the site. They should not have to keep their country pristine just because we want to be "pure" with other people's home when we're not with our own. Or pay them enough if it's so important (it is).
The word "local" is strange. There are almost no real "local" people as to local to that region. As to the other Chilean people, they can go to any other major Chilean city and build whatever they want there instead of building it right at Atacama. Nobody is stopping that.
Gee, mapping every object in the observable universe (and possibly saving us from catastrophic meteor strikes) or pumping out a few more tons of ammonia?
99.9% of asteroid discoveries are done by ground based telescopes. The world is still a long way away from having many (and large) space based telescopes for this purpose due to the economics and sheer complexity involved.
That is because most of our telescopes in 2025 are ground-based, not because they're better at it.
And we're not very far from having many telescopes in space at all. Every year the cost of payload to orbit is getting cheaper. Blue Origin is launching their New Glenn rocket today and SpaceX is having their 7th flight test of Starship in a few days. Starship specifically will drastically reduce the cost of a kg to orbit if it pans out, and this is looking more and more likely.
A significantly reduced launch cost in turn drastically reduces the complexity and cost profile of the actual satellite telescopes.
A constellation of low (relative) cost telescopes can definitely compete with a huge terrestrial telescope. Genuinely doubt it will take us a decade to get one.
Someone just needs to take a page from SpaceX's Starlink playbook and mass-produce telescope satellites. Or someone should pay SpaceX to do it.