To continue:
How the scope would have been packaged into three launchers of approximately Ares V-size.
Two of the launchers examined. Note that this was from before the Ares V was kinda-sorta settled upon; these were CaLV concepts (Cargo Launch Vehicles).
A “map” of individual mirror segments. Hubble Space Telescope was one of the last great “monolithic” mirrors in astronomy; since then all the rage has been for adaptive multi-segment mirrors. This is done today in no small part to make a mirror that can be warped on a split-second timescale to adjust for atmospheric blurriness; but for the 30-meter scope it would be done largely to make the thing actually buildable. A large number of small segments are a lot easier to build than a small number of large segments… and vastly easier to launch. Over time the mirrors will get slowly sandblasted by micro (and sometimes not so micro) meteoroids; damaged segments could be relatively easily swapped out. Given that the goal was to have an observatory with a one-century lifespan, this would be a valuable feature.
Personally, I think it’s a good idea to devote as much effort as possible to scopes that see in the visible spectrum. Yes, Chandra and Spitzer (X-Ray and IR, respectively) turn in good science… but the public doesn’t care. If one of both of them went offline tomorrow, the public would go “meh.” But people care about Hubble, because it turns in gorgeous imagery of the universe as humans could actually see it (assuming, of course, that humans could tweak the brightness, contrast and hue functions of their eyeballs). Similarly, look at the Galileo drop-probe into Jupiter, and the Cassini Huygens drop-probe to Titan. Huygens had a few tiny, pathetic little webcams on it. And the public actually paid attention, watching the images (and, later, video) of Huygens coming in to a splat on the muddy surface of Titan. But the Jupiter probe? Nobody cared, because there was nothing to see. Bah.
