Hubble - the future

[Saturnalia]

I've been having some random thoughts and decided to share them

I think most would agree that the future of deep space viewing will be with space telescopes - we now have Hubble, Herschel and Kepler up there beaming back some inspiring (and very important) images.

We also have Mr Branson's Virgin Galactic space flight program getting nearer to reality for the lucky (read astronomically rich) few.

I think it would be a great idea for various space agencies and Universities etc. to work on telescope technology so, in theory, every launch of a Virgin space flight could carry a new (maybe smaller) space telescope into orbit.

If we had twenty or thirty (or hundreds) of these cruising around our solar system, the image gathering possibilities would be immense and let's face it, if you think of the universe as an ever-expanding sphere, there's an enormous amount of space that is not being studied.

Hubble is a 94.5" (2.4m) Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrain scope but what if we could build some smaller versions, say around 1.5m (60") or so...please keep in mind this thread is purely for a discussion on this idea - I'm not an optical expert or a space travel guru...!

Anyone else...?