Military spacecraft are almost always ahead of scientific ones, and a 100m foldable dish might be an engineering marvel, but it's a bit different from a 100m te

Military spacecraft are almost always ahead of scientific ones, and a 100m foldable dish might be an engineering marvel, but it's a bit different from a 100m telescope. An actual telescope needs to guarantee that your data are correct within certain tolerance, and not just good enough to get a good SNR from another spacecraft. Besides, as another poster noted, VLBAs need extremely precise positioning which is just another rabbit hole. Spektr-R orbit determination was really tricky for its baseline of 300000+ km.