Man can never travel over 50 mph. It would rip him apart.
OWL is about one-upping the Americans - not good science, scientific programs, facilities or institutions. The trend is towards cheaper scopes as their useful life gets shorter and shorter. Better to build one quickly to solve problems for say 7 to 10 years and incrementally better technology in the processes. Keck, wonder that is, will be obsolete by the end of the decade - maybe a little longer if they can squeeze a little more out of adaptive optics. It is close to obsolete now. We probably spent too much money on this facility.
The European Southern Observatory, the people proposing OWL, is a case and point. Their Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is actually a aggregation of 4 8.5 meter scopes in an active optics, imferometer arrangement, was planned 20 years ago, It will be that largest of its kind in the world and 1) they are having real troubles with the technology, and 2) it is already obsolete. Hubble in fact obsoleted it, and the CELT with good adaptive optics, and if it is designed to add large scopes later, most certainly will. The VLTI at the ESO was supposed to be finished this year and it is still not completely online and when one inquires about it one just get the ring-aroung from the ESO on real completion dates.
If you forget wavelength the J. Webb space telescope will even obsolete the ESA's Herschel space telescope, which is perhaps the only original project the ESA has ever thought up. Thus between the recent Spitzer and the JWSP the Herschel will have a leader role for only three years. Hardly worth the years of planning and the budgets. The ESO sank millions into the VLT as a flagship program to one up the Americans. They really backed the wrong horse. If built OWL will eat up their entire astronomy budget for more that a decade. To put that in perspective, the annual Federal non-DOD research budget for all astronomy in the US is roughly 170 mil, which by far the largest in the world. To build OWL would pretty much mean that all other EU funded astronomy work would cease. They would also have to finish and maintain the the VLT and their end of ALMA (they are last with there recieves at ALMA, BTW)
They may think that once again that the US will step in and help them like we have at cern, nasa and ITER. Now if the negotioations for Iter are any indication, the era of the US playing patsy for "joint" projects may be drawing to a close. Sinking a billion dollars into a telescope that has a useful life of less than 10 years does not make sense from scientific point of view. Once again the Euros grab onto some science project and try to augment the last technical solution. And they have no experience even in the sort of optics that Keck uses. We are going through a revolution in instruments that is really unprecedented in history: OWL is the answer to the worng question.
There are immense problems with something this large, the heat of the earth and gravity itself pose huge problems. So back to my original statement: the Euros will not be able to afford it and they will not be able to do it. Meanwhile we will plod ahead making incremental changes justas we have always done. CELT, or something very like it will be a huge success, it will be expanded and you will see a environment much like the Hubble/Keck/VLA triad only it will be J. Webb Space Telescope/ALMA/CELT. After these the next generation it will all move off-world. Through it all the Euros will be solving yesterdays problem and left once again holding the bag. That is because they are not interested in science but in poking us in the eye.
This is like their Aurura (sp?) project which proposes to go to Mars on a budget that is around an dorder of magnitude less than our entire NASA/DOD budget. It is loony. Thet should stick with CERN and see if they can get a result out of "large science" there. The Euros are in a time warp.