[fastball]

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.

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Still, space based telescopes will probably not be able to compete with ground based (mega)projects for at least a decade, if not many

Operations and maintenance costs will still be much higher even if the hardware and deployment would become equally affordable

[fastball]

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.