The James Webb Space Telescope was a decade late and $10 billion over budget, but it has finally launched. Now that the telescope is in space, what's next for astrophysics done from beyond Earth's surface? Here are five future missions to get excited about.Related: How the James Webb Space Telescope works in pictures
. It's so big that it can't even fit into a single rocket fairing without a really complicated, origami-like folding of its mirror segments.
LUVOIR is only in the design phase and is competing with other observatories for priority funding. But if it goes through, the mega space telescope will launch sometime in the 2030s. is a pretty hot topic in astronomy. The discovery of an Earth 2.0 would be a gold mine, helping us understand how common life is in the universe, and maybe even heralding a discovery that we're not alone.
The Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission hopes to do just that. Although it, too, is competing for funding, proponents hope to launch HabEx in 2035. What makes HabEx shine is its star shade, a massive flying disc that would block the light of individual stars, allowing the telescope to directly image exoplanets.The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna is a space-based gravitational wave observatory.
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