Future Large-Aperture Ultraviolet/Optical/Infrared Space Observatory

Since the beginning of modern astronomical science in the early 1900s, astronomers have yearned to escape the turbulence and absorption of Earth's atmosphere by placing observatories in space. One of the first papers to lay out the advantages of space astronomy was by Lyman Spitzer in 1946, "Astronomical Advantages of an Extra-Terrestrial Observatory," though later in life he minimized the influence of this work. Since that time, and especially gaining momentum in the 1960s after the launch of Sputnik, astronomers, technologists, and engineers continued to advance, organizing scientific conferences, advocating for necessary technologies, and assessing sophisticated designs for increasingly ambitious space observations at ultraviolet, visual, and infrared (UVOIR) wavelengths. These community-wide endeavors, combined with the explosion in technological capability enabled by the Apollo era, led to rapid advancement in space observatory performance that culminated in the spectacularly successful Hubble Space Telescope (HST), launched in 1990 and still returning surpassing scientific results.