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Search engines are your friend: TMT.

Amazing technology.

and only if, it's completed before the (larger) Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, and the (larger still) European Extremely Large Telescope in Chile.

And even if it is completed before TMT and E-ELT, as soon as either of them is completed, it'll lose the title.

Did I mention both TMT and E-ELT are also targeting completion by the end of the decade? Yup.

So, good luck, GMT!

(And it goes without saying that non-optical radio telescopes, which use dishes instead of mirrors, have long been much larger. And that even submillimeter telescopes, which also use dishes, are working on staying larger, with the 25-meter CCAT planned for Chile later this decade.)

My town is home to the base facilities for eight of the Mauna Kea Observatories, and we're looking at the Thirty Meter Telescope in the near future as well. Needless to say, there are pretty much always job openings for engineers, technicians, and PhDs. The catch? We're on an island, and some people get tired of that.

So Science Education/Public Outreach (SE/PO) is a part of life here. Pushing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) as good ways to make a better-than-average living is a part of life here. The scientists take over the local mall one day every spring. In late January, we take over the University for a "science day" in honor of Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Ellison Onizuka, for kids in grades 3-8, and NASA sends an astronaut each year. And around late February or early March, there's Journey Through The Universe.

I'm actually about to head to a nearby school to spend an hour talking about science careers to a classroom of 7th-graders, so I'm getting a real kick out of this article showing up right now. The other 9 classes I'm visiting over next Monday, Tuesday and Thursday are a bit younger - grades 1-3. The idea, though, is that from Kindergarten on, kids here are meeting real live people who work in science at observatories or other "famous science places" every year and are being encouraged to stay in school, take classes about STEM, look at college majors in STEM, and become qualified for those good jobs, so that we can hire people who are from here and would love to stay here.

Last year, I was told about one of the first success stories - a guy who was in 7th grade when they started visiting classes, and as a result of what he heard over the years, had picked a STEM major at the local university, and was now going to accompany a scientist to classes as a "community ambassador" sort of person.

Complete bullshit.

Your cost estimates are accurate, but the rest of your argument is total shit. Adaptive optics, WHEN it works (which is rarely, and with difficulty), can approach the angular resolution of HST in a VERY SMALL field of view. You cannot get 0.05 arcsec, diffraction limited images over a wide field of view, that is possible with HST.

"Designing a mirror to withstand a launch vehicle" is a problem that has been solved. And the only two current, viable telescope proposals for telescopes larger than 10m are the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). OWL is not a concept that is being taken very seriously...ESO certainly hasn't put its money where its mouth is.

Your final point, about not many lines in that part of the spectrum, belies a complete lack of understanding of what you are talking about. The UV (accessible with STIS, and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, which will fly on SM4 in late '08) are so full of lines that they overlap all over the place. See, for example, Morton (2003), ApJS, 149, 205, for a comprehensive list. At low redshift, lines of HI, OI, OVI, CIV, NV, CII, SiII, SII, FeII, NI...all are in the UV, in the STIS band. Furthermore, space is the ONLY place these wavelengths can be observed, because of the atmosphere is opaque to wavelengths shorter than about 3300 angstroms.

Pssh... there is development in progress on a 30m telescope:

http://www.tmt.org/

This article is so full of mistakes it's not even funny! To clarify, www.amec.com is a British company, on the same scale as Bechtel or Fleur in the US.

The hertzberg institute is a canadian research institute, not american. The telescope is being build as a partnership between Hertzberg and Caltech. Read more here: http://www.tmt.org/

The name of the telescope is the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), as is made clear here on AMEC's page. The main public page for the project is here. In addition to AMEC, the company mentioned in the article, TMT is also a collaboration of the University of California, CalTech, and many others.